Last week a Spanish court opened a war crimes investigation into the Shehada bombing incident. Ehud Barak said “Anybody calling the liquidation of a terrorist a ‘crime against humanity’ is living in an upside-down world.” But of course, the investigation is not about the killing of Shehada himself. The investigation is about dropping a one ton bomb on a densely populated area that Israel knew was filled with women and children. It’s about purposely killing Shehada’s family along with him.
Uri Avnery has an expanded piece on the topic. He also explains why the most recent war in Gaza was inherently a criminal act:
The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to “fix a price tag”. “to burn into their consciousness”, “to reinforce deterrence”, and most of all – to get the population to rise up against Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally) any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases, inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on people trying to escape.
This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible. Arguments like “The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian population” and “They used the population as human shields” may be effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start such a war is being considered.
Tags: Shehada, War Crimes