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Israel’s military has closed probes into more than 60 allegations of misconduct during its Gaza campaign last November, including an air strike that killed 12 people, among them five women and five children.
In a report sent to AFP, the army said its Military Advocate General had “reviewed the factual findings, as far as they existed, with respect to approximately 65 incidents, and did not find a basis for opening a criminal investigation in those cases.”
Among the incidents was a November 18 air strike on a family home in Gaza City in which Mohamed al-Dallu, a Hamas policeman described by the army as a terrorist, was killed along with nine other members of his family and two neighbours.
“The regrettable deaths of members of the al-Dallu family were caused as a result of an attack aimed against a senior terrorist operative and several other terrorists responsible for launching many dozens of missile and rocket attacks,” against Israeli population centres, said the report, received on Sunday.
It added that about 15 more incidents were still being probed.
The eight-day offensive against Gaza militants, codenamed “Operation Pillar of Defence” by Israel, cost the lives of 177 Palestinians, including over 100 civilians, and six Israelis, two of them soldiers, according to sources on both sides.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemned the military investigation procedure.
“Given the flaws inherent in this system—which more than five months after the latest Israeli offensive has failed to result in a single war crimes indictment—PCHR believes that Israel’s legal system is used as a smokescreen, to provide an illusion of investigative rigour,” it said in a statement.
New York-based Human Rights Watch slammed the army’s statement, saying there was “no independently-verifiable information to support its claim that Israeli air strikes that killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war were all lawful”.
“Just saying that the fatal consequences of an attack were ‘unintended’ or a ‘mistake’ does not make the attack lawful,” said HRW’s Bill Van Esveld in an e-mail.
Hamas’s spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, whose Islamist movement rules Gaza, said in a statement that the army’s decision to halt investigations into the Dallu family air strike “encourages further killing of Palestinians.”
lPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday Israel would not give in to “subhuman” terrorists, as the Jewish state honoured its slain soldiers and civilians killed in militant attacks.
Netanyahu, at a ceremony at the Mount Herzl national cemetery, cited the case of Israeli toddler Adele Biton, still in critical condition after being hurt in a stone-throwing attack on her mother’s car in the West Bank a month ago.
“The terror of stones thrown in an ambush joins the terror of petrol bombs, the terror of knives, the terror of shots and missiles, explosive devices, car bombs and suicide attacks,” Netanyahu said.
“But we shall not retreat, not surrender, not give in... Terror is not a blow from above, it is the work of humans, or subhumans. We shall defeat them.”
In a Memorial Day ceremony at a military cemetery in Tel Aviv, Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said that peace was nowhere to be seen on Israel’s horizon.
“Terrorist attacks, the firing of rockets at civilian populations and delegitimisation campaigns are the challenges which stand before us in the years to come, they will accompany us for the foreseeable future and they will force us to respond with a firm hand,” Yaalon said.
