While Occupation and blockade are business as usual for Israel, there should be no business with Israel

In Occupied Palestine

Zionism in practice

Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property

24 hours to 8am 26 July 2010

Main source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group (PMG).   

Homes and farms in Rafah district under Israeli fire

Israeli air strikes on Rafah and Central Gaza

Homes invaded and vandalised by Israeli troops

Israeli soldiers abduct 17-year-old youth

Night peace disruption and/or home invasions in 10 towns and villages

3 air strikes – 1 attack – 18 raids including home invasions

5 taken prisoner – 15 detained – 78 restrictions of movement

Air strikes: Central Gaza – dawn, an Israeli F-16 fired a missile into an area in the north of the An Nuseirat refugee camp.

Air strikes: Rafah – dawn, Israeli F-16s fired three missiles in two air strikes on blockade-resistance tunnels south of the city.

Israeli attack – agricultural sabotage: Rafah – evening, Israeli Army positions on the Green Line opened fire on houses and farms in the neighbourhood of An Nahda and the area of Ad-Dihniya.

Home invasions – vandalism: Salfit – 01:40, the Israeli Army raided the town of Az Zawiya, invaded and vandalised the contents of two houses and took a person prisoner.

Home invasions and occupation: Hebron – 13:00, the Israeli Army raided the town of Beit Ummar, disrupted a funeral and occupied the roof of a house near the entrance to the town. 

Abduction: Nablus – 23:10, Israeli troops abducted a 17-year-old youth, Jihad Hamdi Abduljalil Khatatbeh, near the bypass road leading to the settlement of Elon Moreh.

Raid – violations: Jerusalem – 21:30, the Israeli Army raided the town of Al Eizariya, besieged a mosque, detained a number of worshippers and released them after checking their identity cards.

Recent news updates:

IDF report confirming Goldstone’s key findings is suppressed inside Israel

By Max Blumenthal: 25 July 2010

www.maxblumenthal.com/2010/07/idf-report-confirming-goldstones-key-findings-is-suppressed-inside-israel/

" . . . the killing of civilians is justified according to Israeli military regulations if a soldier is able to establish having felt a sense of danger.”

"The report’s real value . . . is as a confirmation of Goldstone’s key findings. Even as the most conservative investigation of IDF conduct during Cast Lead, Mandelblit exposed a consistent pattern of destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure and disregard for civilian life.”

A report quietly submitted by IDF Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit to the United Nations two weeks ago regarding Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead confirms the key findings of the Goldstone Report. The report (full version here), which documents 150 ongoing investigations, has outraged the Israeli Army. “It looks as though they were frightened by Goldstone,” remarked an IDF officer. Another military official expressed anger that after a previous IDF report asserting the legality of shelling civilian areas with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, the Mandelblit report has issued recommendations limiting the munitions' use. “It looks like tying your own hands behind your back. Why should a weapon with which there is no problem be limited?” the official asked.

Mandelblit’s confirmation of the IDF’s use of white phosphorus in Gaza against a UN compound is one of his report’s most remarkable admissions. He has directly contradicted a lie told over and over again to the Israeli public in the immediate aftermath of Cast Lead, and repeated in an April 2009 IDF report, that “no phosphorus munitions were used on built-up areas.” Discussion of white phosphorus use is buried in the body of the report, on page 21 in a section on the UNRWA Field Office Compound:

One of the most widely reported incidents during the Gaza Operation involved the UNRWA field office compound, where three individuals were injured and significant property damage resulted from the use of smoke-screen munitions containing white phosphorus. Additional damage occurred due to the use of high explosive shells in the vicinity of the compound.

Besides the deployment of white phosphorus munitions, the Mandelblit Report acknowledges that the IDF Military Advocate General has launched a criminal investigation into the killing of 26 members of the Al-Samouni family (p. 6); that the army may have used human shields (pp. 9-11); knowingly shelled a UNRWA school filled with children in order to neutralise a single enemy mortar launcher, causing large-scale civilian deaths in the process; knowingly attacked a mosque with “powerful” missiles in order to kill two unknown terrorist “operatives” (p. 17); bombed a police graduation ceremony (p. 19), killing four civilians in the process (according to Goldstone the IDF killed 9 civilians and 99 cops); killed a civilian raising a white flag (p. 22); fired on a horse-drawn carriage carrying wounded civilians, killing a number of people in the process (p. 24); fired flechette-filled tank shells in the immediate vicinity of a “condolence tent,” killing civilians in the process (p. 25); bulldozed the Sawafeary Chicken Co-ops (pp. 27-28) in order to obtain “a clear line of sight” for soldiers in the area; destroyed a cement packaging plant in a vain search for tunnels (p. 29); destroyed a series of factories, claiming it “did not know the structures were used to produce food products” (p. 30); and implicitly acknowledged that it destroyed private property (p. 33).

Although Mandelblit lays the blame for many killings at the feet of IDF commanders, he invokes the Army’s firing policy to justify the killings. So long as soldiers claimed in their testimonies that they may have seen enemy operatives in the area (Mandelblit acknowledges extreme difficulty gathering testimony from Palestinian victims), he was able to claim that the soldiers followed the “Law of Armed Conflict.”

What is the Law of Armed Conflict? It is a set of combat guidelines specially refined for IDF army operations by Israeli military philosopher Asa Kasher. In defining his version of the law, Kasher wrote, “the responsibility for distinguishing between terrorists and non-combatants is not placed upon [Israel’s] shoulders.” He added, “Sending a soldier [to Gaza] to fight terrorists is justified, but why should I force him to endanger himself much more than that so that the terrorist’s neighbour isn’t killed? From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the neighbour is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it’s between the soldier and the terrorist’s neighbour, the priority is the soldier. Any country would do the same.” In other words, the killing of civilians is justified according to Israeli military regulations if a soldier is able to establish having felt a sense of danger.

It is unclear whether Mandelblit’s report will lead to a roll-back of Kasher’s rules of engagement. The report’s recommendations have already been met with fierce resentment from the IDF’s officer corps, so it might be unrealistic to expect that they will ever be put into practice, especially since Israel seems to be gearing up for a potentially bloody campaign in urban areas in Southern Lebanon. The report’s real value, then, is as a confirmation of Goldstone’s key findings. Even as the most conservative investigation of IDF conduct during Cast Lead, Mandelblit exposed a consistent pattern of destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure and disregard for civilian life.

Unfortunately, the devastating findings contained in the report have not reached the Israeli mainstream. Articles about the report are buried deep in Israeli newspapers while according to Yedioth Aharonoth, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has refused to make it available on its Hebrew website (it’s only on the English site). Maariv columnist Ofer Shelakh was one of the few Israeli public figures to address the official silence following Mandeblit’s release. He wrote in a July 23 column about both the IDF’s Mandelblit report and Eiland report on the Gaza flotilla (no link; from a Hebrew only translation from p. 23 of the Maariv weekend supplement):

What is the truth and why suddenly do we reply to the UN in terms different from those offered to Israel’s citizens? The same applies to the legal procedures taken against IDF officers, the trial of the Commander of the Gaza brigade, the investigation of former Giv’ati brigade commander Ylan Malka, of which we hear only from Israeli replies to foreign authorities. It seems that according to the decision-makers in Israel’s Defence system we don’t want to know, we don’t have to know or we agree that all this is merely for foreign consumption, to repel anti-Israel criticism. Israelis prefer to think that the IDF operates brilliantly, that its commanders make no mistakes, and that its firing policy is considerate and moral, and that the problem in “Cast Lead” was the firing policy rather than the decisions of the local commanders.

Maybe this cynical approach to the Israeli public is justified. It is a fact that no public outcry arose after the black picture emerging from [the Eiland Report], but in the IDF, certainly among its medium ranks, many understand the damage this causes to the standards of telling the truth, and of telling the whole truth.

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Behind the Wall

Rich Wiles is a photographic artist who has been living and working in Palestine for some years. His photographic work has been shown around Europe, the US, Australia and in Palestine itself. Since 2006 he has been writing from Occupied Palestine under the title Behind the Wall. Much of this work is based in and around the refugee camps in Palestine, highlighting daily life and memories of refugees who still live in forced exile for over 60 years since Al Nakba (The Catastrophe). www.richwiles.com

Palestinian Resistance

Ali Kazak's newsletter Occupied Palestine: News and Articles This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it contains many news summaries that include both armed and non-violent methods of resistance to the Occupation. The newsletter also contains much other useful reporting.