Showing posts with label ICRC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ICRC. Show all posts

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Defense for Children International-Palestine writes:

Rafat Omar Ahmad Khamayseh, 15, was shot by Israeli special forces while leaving his grandfather’s house in Jenin refugee camp around 7:30 p.m. on September 19, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International - Palestine. As he left the house, Rafat saw Israeli special forces exiting three Palestinian licensed cars and surround the home of the father of a Palestinian man wanted for arrest. Rafat fled, yelling, “Special forces! Special forces!” One Israeli soldier chased Rafat and shot him in the abdomen from a distance of 10 meters (33 feet).    

 While nearly all of the reports on the Jenin incident identify Khamayseh as being 22 years old, photos indicate that he probably really was 15.

And that he was not exactly an innocent child.


Yet even if we take DCI-P at their word that all he was doing was warning terrorists that the IDF was there, that makes him legally a militant and a legitimate military target.

The US Department of Defense Law of War Manual (revised July 2023) says that a civilian is considered to be taking a direct part in hostilities when he or she is "acting as a guide or lookout for combatants conducting military operations." 

The ICRC agrees. In its document "Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities Under International Humanitarian Law" it says,  "a person serving as one of several lookouts during an ambush would certainly be taking a direct part in hostilities although his contribution may not be indispensable to the causation of harm."

This is exactly what DCI-P is admitting that Khamayseh was doing. His warning endangered the Israeli forces and therefore he became a combatant and legitimate target, no matter what his age.





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Israel haters were given a huge gift this week courtesy of anti-government protester Shira Eting.

Eting, interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, said, "I was a combat helicopter pilot…. If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions."

The modern antisemites have been having a field day with an attractive and articulate Israeli woman matter of factly saying that Israelis knowingly shoot missiles into homes that kill children. Here we have proof of how monstrous Israelis are - even leftist Israelis!

A number of years ago, I looked at a B'Tselem report on families killed in their homes during 2014's Operation Protective Edge. Even that incomplete report showed that many families were acting as human shields for the terrorists - sometimes the shields were the terrorists' own families, and sometimes the terrorists were sheltering in an innocent family home. 

I did further research and listed over a hundred children who were used as human shields to protect terrorists, often senior terrorists.

This is only what I could find out with open source research. But it proves the point: Israel is not going to bomb a house unless it has excellent intelligence that the house is a legitimate military target. Perhaps a senior terrorists is inside, perhaps a weapons cache is underneath, perhaps a command and control center is in the apartment next door. 

As long as the military advantage outweighs the collateral damage, this is a moral decision and also legal under international law.  While we are not privy to the specific calculus that Israel uses in making those decisions, it employs teams of lawyers to review every airstrike and goes to great lengths - never reported in the media - to ensure that it minimizes mistakes. Israel goes above and beyond the requirements of the Laws of Armed Conflict in its own policy decisions. 

Eting caused more harm to Israel with her out of context quote than the proposed judicial reforms she is protesting could possibly do. But she wasn't wrong in what she said: in the real world, in real wars, decisions must be made that sometimes mean children would die. 

In the case of Gaza, that is entirely the fault of the terrorists who deliberately choose to locate military targets in residential areas. 




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Monday, August 28, 2023

Human Rights Watch issued a new front-page press release today to attack its favorite target, Israel:

The Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.

Last year, 2022, was the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank in 15 years, and 2023 is on track to meet or exceed 2022 levels. Israeli forces had killed at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank as of August 22. Human Rights Watch investigated four fatal shootings of Palestinian children by Israeli forces between November 2022 and March 2023.
We've seen this approach before. HRW describes scores of potential Israeli crimes, but chooses to "investigate" only a small number of them. 

By sheer coincidence, the ones they are "investigating" are the ones that seem the most likely to be innocent victims. 

In other words, HRW knows quite well that the vast majority of "children" killed by Israeli forces are legal combatants - teens who are acting as spotters, or hurling firebombs or IEDs, or even shooting weapons themselves. The majority are child soldiers. They are recruited by terror groups, violating accepted international law.

But HRW doesn't want to say anything bad about Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Their reports are meant to be anti-Israel, so they cherry-pick the specific incidents that seem to imply Israeli malfeasance.

Yet even in this constricted, biased choice of trying to stack the deck against Israel, they rely on lies and don't tell you the whole story.

Their "star" is Mahmoud al-Sadi, 17, who "according to witnesses" was hundreds of meters from any fighting when he was shot and he wasn't holding any weapons. 

To emphasize his alleged innocence, HRW gives a photo montage of al-Sadi being a teenage boy.


They missed this one:


Does it make sense that well-trained soldiers would shoot hundreds of meters away from the fighting for no reason? HRW seems to think so, but Palestinian witnesses are notoriously unreliable (even according to NGOs) and they will say what their leaders want them to say. Very few ever admit that the "innocent child" is not so innocent. 

Other cases that HRW think are a slam dunk are anything but. Even the NGO admits that they were all involved in active fighting.

In the other cases investigated, the security forces killed boys after they had joined other youths confronting Israeli forces with stones, Molotov cocktails, or fireworks. While these projectiles can seriously injure or kill, in these cases, Israeli forces fired repeatedly at chest-level, hitting multiple children, and killed children in situations where they do not appear to have been posing a threat of grievous injury or death, which is the standard for the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers under international norms. That would make these killings unlawful.
HRW admits that the "children" were actively engaged in fighting. 

HRW claims that Israel must adhere to the standards of "law enforcement" in these situations, when the "criminals" are heavily armed fighters whose aim is to destroy Israel. It is true that the line isn't clear between what is legally considered a law enforcement situation and what is governed by the laws of armed conflict (LOAC) but to breezily decide that these situations where armored vehicles and scores of soldiers are needed is "law enforcement" is, at the very least, an oversimplification.

The ICRC says "An armed conflict arises whenever there is fighting between States or protracted armed violence between government authorities and organized armed groups or just between organized armed groups."

Sure sounds more like an armed conflict than a law enforcement operation, especially since Islamic Jihad and Hamas have been bragging that they really control, organize and fund these seemingly local armed groups.

Of course, if the laws of armed conflict apply, then any fighter - no matter what age - is a legitimate target. So HRW doesn't want you to even consider that possibility.

But let's look at the innocent children HRW lists:

Here is video from a proud relative (starting at 0:12) showing Wadia Abu Ramuz shooting fireworks at Israeli troops. 


Mohammed al-Sleem, 17, was a member of the Al Aqsa Brigades and also shot incendiary devices at soldiers. 

We've previously discussed Adam Ayyad, 15. He went into battle intending to die and left a "will" in his pocket saying how happy he was to be about to be martyred.  He was a member of the PFLP and buried wearing a PFLP flag.


These aren't innocent children by any definition. But HRW is trying to hide the truth.

Moreover, the number of children who are admitted members of armed groups prove that there is a real human rights concern here - that of recruiting child soldiers - and HRW has, as far as I can tell, not once said a word against the PFLP, Hamas or Islamic Jihad for that reprehensible practice of using children as bait meant to be killed. 

HRW's dishonesty is clear to all, and they are playing their role to put a respectable face on modern antisemitism to the hilt. and even when they clearly know that dozens of the children killed were members of armed groups, they don't say a word of condemnation.

That's only for Israel. 

(h/t Adin Haykin)





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Friday, June 23, 2023

It is summer, and that means that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are proudly parading photos of their violating the war crime of recruiting child soldiers, calling it "summer camp."

These pictures from an Islamic Jihad "Revenge of the Free" training camp are not ambiguous.






This is a war crime

As the ICRC says,
The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child differentiates between States and non-State armed groups in setting the age-limit for recruitment and use in hostilities. For States, the age limit for direct participation in hostilities and for compulsory recruitment is 18. This means they can accept voluntary enlistment of persons between the ages of 15 and 18. Armed groups, on the other hand, are bound by a stricter prohibition, affecting both voluntary and compulsory recruitment of under-18s.
There are no photos of the kids engaging in sports, playing games or otherwise having fun.  Calling this a "summer camp" is a joke. It is a military training camp for kids. And Islamic Jihad makes this clear in their recruitment video:


Not only that, but Islamic Jihad freely admits that the targets of the weapons the children learn to use are Jews.  Islamic Jihad official Darwish al-Gharabli said, "These camps qualify the generation to carry the banner after this generation, part of which has been martyred; it also establishes a generation that is aligned with the path of jihad and resistance; believing in this option and that Palestine is the central issue and fighting the Jews is an act of worship."

The UN and its agencies, and Defense for Children International Palestine, and other "human rights" NGOs are curiously uninterested in this incitement to violence and these violations of children's human rights and international law

It's just another "Palestine exception" where Palestinians are exempt from the laws and rules for the rest of the world.



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Tuesday, June 13, 2023



Amnesty released a quite predictable report on the mini-war in Gaza last month. 

As is always the case, Amnesty assumed that ay Israeli actions were war crimes before writing a single word and then fit the facts to their predetermined conclusion.

Amnesty International investigated nine Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of civilians and in the damage and destruction of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Three separate attacks on the first night of bombing on 9 May, in which precision-guided bombs targeted three senior Al-Quds Brigades commanders, killed 10 Palestinian civilians, and injured at least 20 others. They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.   
The ICRC says 
The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The legal definition of proportionality demands that the attacker weigh the military advantage of the attack against the expected loss of innocent life. Israel clearly did this: Amnesty admits the targets were senior terrorist commanders, and Amnesty agrees that Israel used precision weapons meant to minimize collateral damage. But even so, it declares the attacks "disproportionate" without a grain of evidence that the military advantage was not great enough. 

Of course, Amnesty doesn't have a clue as to the military advantage of killing senior PIJ terrorists. It doesn't even try to quantify that. But that is the entire point of the principle of proportionality to begin with. 

Amnesty is saying that any civilian deaths, even when the attack is clearly against significant military targets, are war crimes - and that is exactly the opposite of what international law says. 

Ironically, one of the ICRC's main sources for a detailed discussion of proportionality and the difficulty of defining it comes from....the Israeli High Court. Israel has teams of international law experts who approve these kinds of airstrikes. In this case, certainly Israel knew ahead of time - based on huge amounts of intelligence - that civilians were going to be killed, and it determined that this was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of defending itself legally. Amnesty, with next to no information about the military targets, breezily declares them not to be very important. 

As a reminder, the international law standard on what is proportionate allows far, far more dead civilians for far less military advantage.

Amnesty's obsessive hate for Israel and willful ignorance of international law doesn't end there. It describes an airstrike that destroyed a building but didn't hurt anyone:

Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian homes also took a heavy toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip, including on people living with disabilities. 

On 13 May, Israeli forces targeted a four-storey building in the Jabalia refugee camp. The building was home to 42 people from the extended Nabhan family. Five members of the family live with disabilities, including three being wheelchair users.  

Hussam Nabhan, an eyewitness to the attack, told Amnesty International he had received a call he believed to be from an Israeli intelligence officer at around 6pm, saying residents of the building had 15 minutes to evacuate. Hussam told the caller that there were people with disabilities in the building and they needed more time, but the caller just repeated the warning. 

After the strike, 22-year-old Haneen Nabhan was so traumatized she found it hard to talk, saying that her wheelchair had been buried under the rubble of her home so she could no longer move around independently. 

Research by Amnesty International found no evidence that the Nabhan building – and other residential buildings destroyed or damaged during the last two days of the offensive – had been used to store weapons or any other military equipment or that rockets had been launched from their direct vicinity.  

The root cause of this unspeakable violence is Israel’s system of apartheid. This system must be dismantled, the blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately lifted, and those responsible for the crime of apartheid, war crimes and other crimes under international law must be held to account,” said Morayef. 
The bias here is undeniable. According to Amnesty, Israel - for no reason whatsoever - targeted a building filled with disabled people, and ensured that it was empty before attacking. 

This is a blood libel. 

Israel has an extensive methodology for determining valid military targets. Only the most rabid antisemite would claim that Israel went through all the effort - determining a target, warning residents, choosing the appropriate weapons - just to make civilian lives miserable. And only Amnesty International is so self-righteous to assume that their parachuting in and talking to a few residents who are frightened of Hamas is enough of an investigation to determine that the targeted buildings had no military value. 

An expert on the laws of armed conflict states, accurately:
For commission of a war crime, a culpable state of mind is an essential element. Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute requires a showing of either intent to harm civilians or recklessness: ordering an attack with the knowledge that the resulting harm to civilians would be “clearly excessive in relation to the … military advantage anticipated.” The high threshold for proof of a culpable state of mind is no accident. Rather, it is a recognition that a less demanding test would not adequately acknowledge the risk of harm that inevitably flows from the fog of war.
Amnesty is not interpreting international law. It is twisting international law to damn Israel - without any evidence whatsoever that Israeli actions were reckless or meant to intentionally harm civilians. 

We've come to expect such libels from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it is important to call it out each time. Because the pattern of ignoring facts, and blaming Israel for war crimes that all evidence proves otherwise, and of determining the outcome of the faux "investigations" before they even occur - this pattern proves that these NGOs are not interested in the truth, in international law or even in human rights. 

Their entire aim is to demonize Israel. 






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Sunday, February 05, 2023



Since the Jenin "massacre" story started fading from the headlines, CNN has a story about the family whose apartment was used by the IDF as a firing position against the group of Jenin terrorists planning a major attack.

No doubt the family was severely affected by being invaded by IDF troops. But the story says this:
Representatives of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) visited Jenin in the days after the incident and spoke to al-Hayja and his family. "Their children were noticeably traumatized," Adam Bouloukos, director of UNRWA Affairs in the West Bank told CNN. "This kind of invasion violates not only international law but common decency."
The UNRWA official is lying about international law and, as usual, the media doesn't bother to fact check.

The main relevant section of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, Article 53, says:
Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.    

 The occupying forces may ...undertake the total or partial destruction of certain private or public property in the occupied territory when imperative military requirements so demand.

Furthermore, it will be for the Occupying Power to judge the importance of such military requirements. It is therefore to be feared that bad faith in the application of the reservation may render the proposed safeguard valueless; for unscrupulous recourse to the clause concerning military necessity would allow the Occupying Power to circumvent the prohibition set forth in the Convention. The Occupying Power must therefore try to interpret the clause in a reasonable manner: whenever it is felt essential to resort to destruction, the occupying authorities must try to keep a sense of proportion in comparing the military advantages to be gained with the damage done. 

Israel's right to attack military targets under international law is undisputed. It must minimize damage to civilian property as much as possible while protecting its own troops. And, in this case, it did: the only alternative would have been to bomb the targeted building from the air, which would have killed far more civilians. 

What about the IDF forcing the family who lived there to stay sheltered in one room while the bullets were flying? At first glance, it appears to be a violation of Article 31 of the Conventions:
No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.
The ICRC commentary shows that it is not a blanket prohibition, because otherwise it contradicts other articles of the Convention:
[T]here is no question of absolute prohibition, as might be thought at first sight. The prohibition only applies in so far as the other provisions of the Convention do not implicitly or explicitly authorize a resort to coercion. Thus, Article 31 is subject to the unspoken reservation that force is permitted whenever it is necessary to use it in the application of measures taken under the Convention. ....Thus, a party to the conflict would be entitled to use coercion with regard to protected persons in order to compel respect for his right to requisition services Articles 40 , 51 ), to ensure the supply of foodstuffs, etc. to which he is entitled (Article 55, para. 2 , Article 57 ), to carry out the necessary evacuation measures (Article 49, para. 2 ), to remove public officials in occupied territories from their posts (Article 54, para. 2 ) and in regard to everything connected with internment (Articles 79 et sqq.).

Occupying powers can force civilians to do far more than stay in one place for several hours if needed for military purposes. And whie most articles about the Jenin operation try to airbrush the facts, no one has seriously argued that there was no military necessity behind it. 

CNN has every right to report on how Palestinians feel about their homes being invaded. But it does not have the right to report that Israel violated international law in doing so when it didn't.



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Friday, October 21, 2022



It happens again and again. A major institution, whether the UN, Amnesty or HRW, issues a report that asserts what it considers facts, it refers to a footnoted publication, and the footnote proves that they are lying.

Here is an example from the latest UN Commission of Inquiry report. It finds that Israel's "occupation" is unlawful under international law.  It says:

The occupation of territory in wartime is, under international humanitarian law, a temporary situation, which deprives the occupied Power of neither its statehood nor its sovereignty. Occupation as a result of war cannot imply any right whatsoever to dispose of territory.
The footnote to this points to the  International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), commentary of 1958 on article 47 of the Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

The wording of that commentary makes it clear that Israel is not occupying "Palestinian territory" which is the linchpin of the entire argument.

It says:
This provision of the Hague Regulations is not applicable only to the inhabitants of the occupied territory; it also protects the separate existence of the State, its institutions and its laws. ...As was emphasized in the commentary on Article 4, the occupation of territory in wartime is essentially a temporary, de facto situation, which deprives the occupied Power of neither its statehood nor its sovereignty.
What state is Israel occupying? If there was no state there, there is no occupation. The UN report's own footnote betrays that the assumptions behind the entire report itself is false.

The commentary emphasizes that the purpose of the Convention is to protect the people, not the State. Israel agrees with this and its High Court rulings have always upheld the humanitarian aspects of the Geneva Conventions even without the existence of a Palestinian state in the territories it controls. 

However, the text itself makes it clear that there is no occupation if there is no previously existing State that had legal title to the land - and there wasn't one. It sure isn't Jordan, whose annexation of the West Bank was illegal by virtually every yardstick. It cannot be the "State of Palestine" because we are told - by the UN - that the territories have been occupied since 1967 and no one claims that the "State of Palestine" existed before 1988 at the earliest. 

I have yet to find an international law expert say the exact date that "occupied territories" of 1967 became "occupied Palestinian territories." But the UN retroactively says that the territories that Israel won in a defensive war have been "Palestinian" since 1967 - they even have had a "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967."

Israel also has the absolute right to protect its own soldiers and citizens from harm that comes from the territories, under the same Geneva Conventions. As always at the UN and with other modern antisemites, a question of competing rights is being treated as if only one side has human rights, and they assume that Jews simply do not have such rights.

The UN's fast and loose definition of "occupation" is made clear in footnote 10:
For the purposes of the present report, “the territories that Israel occupies” and equivalent terms are a reference to East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan, Gaza and the West Bank outside East Jerusalem. 
Israel doesn't occupy Gaza by any definition of the term that existed in any legal manual or article before Israel's withdrawal from the territory in 2005. Those who claim that Israel occupies Gaza without having a single soldier there have literally made up a new definition of occupation to apply to Israel only. Essentially, the UN is admitting - not for the first time - that it doesn't care about the legal definition of occupation to begin with; it applies the label to Israel without any regard to what it means. 

Which is this entire report in a nutshell. If Israel is not occupying "Palestinian territory" under the legal definition of occupation then there is no "occupation" that can be declared illegal. The UN decided to make the declaration of illegality first, and tried to justify it afterwards, all while pretending to give an impartial legal analysis.






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Tuesday, October 04, 2022



There is a new art exhibit in Gaza.

Sherine Abdel Karim uses technology to simulate the reality of the suffering of the people of the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli siege that has continued for more than 16 years.

Abdel Karim believes that virtual reality is the easiest way to convey the image of Gaza and the suffering of its people as a result of the strict siege on the Strip.

Karim displayed her project in an art exhibition organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza a few days ago.

Here's what the exhibit looked like:



Gazans are suffering so much, they need to use VR technology to show each other how bad their lives are. Perhaps they forget?

In other news, poor besieged Gazans have art museums - and VR.


Palestinian "suffering" is big business.





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Sunday, August 14, 2022

+972 Magazine has an article about how awful and immoral the IDF is.

The Israeli news site Ynet quoted army officials boasting that the ratio between “non-combatants” and combatants killed was “the best of all the operations.” And yet, Israel admits that it killed at least 11 people who had nothing to do with militant activities, including a five-year-old girl. 
Yes, a five year old girl who was near a top Islamic Jihad target was killed.  She was not the target. If there was a way to attack the target without killing the girl, the IDF would have. (Indeed, during Breaking Dawn, Israel did abort attacks on legitimate targets when civilians were around - as long as they could wait and attack the same target later without the civilians.) Since it couldn't attack the legitimate  target without killing the girl, she was unfortunately killed as well. 

These are the laws of armed conflict. The presence of civilians do not make a military target immune from attack. The fact that there was a five year old girl near the Islamic Jihad commander does not, under any interpretation of international law, mean that Israel must not attack the commander.

The laws of armed conflict are designed to protect civilians without impeding military efficiency in any way. Those words come from the International Committee of the Red Cross, no tme.

And it has to be that way, because otherwise terrorist groups can just ensure that they are well embedded with civilians and can then act with impunity.

That appears to be what +972 wants:
Dana — who asked to use a pseudonym, like all the former soldiers interviewed for this article — is a kindergarten teacher who lives in a wood-furnished apartment full of philosophy books in central Tel Aviv. During her military service, she took part in an assassination operation in which a five-year-old boy was killed in Gaza.

“When I served in the Gaza Division, we were following someone from Hamas, because [the army] knew he was hiding rockets,” she said. “They made a decision to eliminate him.”

Dana served as a signal traffic analysis officer in the operations room, where her job was to confirm that the missile had hit the right person. “We sent out a UAV to follow the man to kill him,” she said, “but we saw that he was with his son. A boy who was five or six years old, I think.

“....They killed the Hamas military operative, and the little boy who was next to him.”
Unless they had a way that they could kill the Hamas operative without killing the boy, this is not only a legal but also a moral decision, albeit tragic. It is a decision any army would make. 

But to some, Israel must be held to much higher standards that every other nation. A single civilian killed among a hundred terrorists makes the entire operation immoral, according to them. 

And endangering Israeli civilians as a result because of the resultant attacks that would or could happen by not attacking the terrorists? That is not part of the anti-Israel crowd's moral calculus.

That's not the only way this article demands Israel go beyond international law:
The army also admitted that it shoots unarmed people, according to a female officer who gave an interview to Ynet after the latest onslaught. “The [PIJ] operative came down from the position as he was unarmed, and I opened fire,” she said. “When he fell, I fired more.” 
Legal combatants are any member of the armed forces (outside medical and religious personnel.) These include those who aid the fighting, not only those with literal weapons. A lookout, a messenger between combat forces, a radio operator helping aim mortars - all are considered combatants under international law, even when unarmed. 

It is easy for Israel-hating propagandists to take an incident of collateral damage and frame it as a war crime. It doesn't make it true. From all indications, this operation was as moral as possible in warfare.

That is not good enough for inveterate inciters against Israel. 

(The article mentions some other issues that are morally problematic if true. But they aren't publishing them to force the IDF to improve its policies - they are publishing them to incite more hatred against Israel.) 




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Monday, May 30, 2022

This is the 74th anniversary of the surrender of the Old City of Jerusalem.

This article shows how both the Jordanians and the Swiss acted like the Arabs were supreme humanitarians - because they didn't massacre every man, woman and child and "allowed' them to leave their homes with only a few possessions.



This was ethnic cleansing. 

Not a single Jew remained in the Jordanian administered part of Jerusalem for 19 years. But since Arabs are assumed to be vicious animals, when they act a little less horribly, everyone praises them.

And in another article in the Palestine Post on May 30, 1948:


Of course, within days some 50 synagogues were deliberately destroyed by the humane Transjordanians. 




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Wednesday, September 06, 2017

The New York Times eagerly reported in 2015:

GAZA CITY — A new training regimen for fighters in Hamas’s armed wing employs slide presentations and a whiteboard rather than Kalashnikov rifles and grenades. The young men wear polo shirts instead of fatigues and black masks. They do not chant anti-Israel slogans, but discuss how the Geneva Conventions governing armed conflict dovetail with Islamic principles.

The three-day workshop, conducted last month by the International Committee of the Red Cross, followed numerous human-rights reports accusing both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, of war crimes in their devastating battle last summer, and came as the International Criminal Court prosecutor conducts a preliminary inquiry into that conflict.

The Red Cross developed its program in conjunction with Islamic scholars several years ago, but ramped it up after last summer’s deadly battle. So far this year, it has conducted six sessions for a total of 210 fighters from Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades and two other Gaza armed groups. Another workshop is scheduled for this week.

...Red Cross leaders say they have seen an increasing commitment from Hamas leaders and linemen alike, if only because they now consider their international image a critical component of their struggle.

Mamadou Sow, who heads Red Cross operations in Gaza, said that in April he presented a critique of Hamas’s conduct during the 2014 hostilities to its top political and military leaders, and that they “welcomed it” and “indicated that they are a learning organization.”

“For the first time,” said Jacques de Maio, director of the Red Cross delegation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, “Hamas is actually, in a private, protected space, expressing a readiness to look critically at a number of things that have an impact on their level of respect for international humanitarian law.”

He added, “Whether this will translate into something concrete, time will tell.”
Hamas' actions are predictable, but only to those who understand the honor/shame mentality.

Hamas isn't interested in adhering to international law because it is the right thing to do.Hamas is interested in appearing to adhere to the minimal standards of international law to avoid being shamed.

Which brings us up to yesterday:
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday discussed the fate of two Israeli civilians and the remains of two Israeli soldiers believed to be held by Hamas in a meeting with the leader of the Islamic militant group.
Officials on both sides said the status of the missing Israelis was one of a host of issues discussed in the meeting between ICRC President Peter Maurer and Yehiyeh Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza.
A Hamas official said that Maurer "heard the movement's firm position" Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.
Sinwar has said Hamas will not release any information about the missing Israelis until Israel frees 54 Palestinian prisoners who were re-arrested after being released in a 2011 prisoner swap.
Hamas has successfully learned the lessons taught by the ICRC. It is using the language of international law to insist that its prisons adhere to some sort of standard, but of course it will not allow the Red Cross to visit any actual Israeli prisoners.

The fundamental issue that Hamas has managed to obfuscate is that these "prisoners" are not prisoners - but hostages. The reason Hamas didn't allow Maurer to speak with the Israelis who for whatever reason ended up in Gaza is because it wants to use them as bargaining chips to get Israel to release terrorists and achieve other goals, and even the promise of showing proof of life is something that Hamas sees as something to be bartered..

Hostage-taking, of course, is a grave violation of international law. But Maurer, as far as we can tell, never uttered the word "hostage" to Hamas - but Hamas pretends that these Israelis are prisoners of war, or criminals.

If Maurer would have spoken out loud, ahead of the meeting, about how these Israelis are hostages and hwo the very act of demanding something for their return is illegal under international law, he could have made a difference - because Hamas would have been shamed and it seeks to avoid shame. But instead Maurer treated Hamas with respect (=honor) and Hamas now has less incentive to adhere to international law.

For Hamas and other members of the shame culture, it is all about appearances, not ethics. Maurer's meeting with Sinwar enhanced Hamas' standing in its eyes - photos of the meeting are featured in Hamas' website - but the issues are only meant to be manipulated to Hamas' advantage, not to be taken seriously.

For Hamas to change, it has to be shamed. The ICRC did the opposite, making Sinwar look like a world leader while getting nothing in return.




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Wednesday, April 26, 2017

  • Wednesday, April 26, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon


It is sad that the obvious becomes news.

YNet interviewed Jacques De Maio, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel gives us—unlike the security establishments in many other countries, including Western ones—quick access to senior officials in the IDF, the Prison Service, and other security services. We have useful, productive and professional dialogue with them. We clarified with them the issue of shooting assailants who carry out terror attacks and we reached an unequivocal conclusion that there is no IDF order to shoot suspects to kill, as political officials tried to convince us. The rules of engagement haven't changed, and have actually been made stricter. It is true that individual soldiers have made the wrong decision at times and that there are many instances of outrageous behavior at border crossings—at times in complete violation of orders. We do not hesitate to report that to the IDF and we usually get a professional response. That is why we rejected the accusation, and there were immediately those who claimed we were covering up war crimes committed by the IDF, and that we were serving the Zionists.

The Red Cress was very familiar with the regime in South Africa during Apartheid, and we respond to anyone who makes the argument that Israel is an apartheid state: No, there is no apartheid here. There isn't a regime here that is based on the superiority of one race over another; there is no disenfranchisement of basic human rights based on so-called racial inferiority. What does exist here is a bloody national conflict, the most prominent and tragic feature being that it is decades long, and there is occupation. Not apartheid.
De Maio plays a little fast and loose with this part of the interview:
The most complicated thing is to maintain the Red Cross's fundamental principle: neutrality, not taking a position in a situation where each side believes its position is the most moral and just and demands us, the Red Cross, to affiliate ourselves to it and condemn the other. I am constantly asked how we could treat both the aggressors and those who are defending themselves—terrorists and those who fight against terrorism—with the same level of leniency. And I answer: We offer help to people as human beings who need our help. Almost all of our work is done quietly, without publicity, often in secrecy, and our only goal is to protect people's natural rights. Not to deal with politics. Battling politics and political manipulation takes too much time and resources from us.
Unfortunately, the ICRC's position that Gaza is still legally occupied is nonsensical and the only reason they hold that position is political.





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Monday, June 01, 2015



I mentioned recently that I was reading Tuvia Tenenbom's "Catch the Jew" and that it was great.

Tenenbom, who grew up Haredi in Bnei Brak and left Judaism and Israel, returned to Israel to write this book of his impressions as he met people around the country.. He goes where the wind (and his stomach) takes him, usually playing a German journalist, asking innocent and simple questions from people who aren't used to being questioned at all.

Arabs, upon hearing that he is German, often welcome him as a fellow antisemite. To an extent, so do some of the  never ending stream of Europeans who visit Israel and the territories to spend money against Israel. And that is exactly what they are doing - not trying to help Palestinians but to hurt Israel.

The book is amazing. It beautifully deconstructs the current culture of the Israel-hating crowd, from within and without Israel.

Every page has examples of malicious Europeans, lying Arabs and clueless (or self-hating) Israeli Jews. Here are only a tiny percentage of the many anecdotes that Tenenbom mentions - each of which would be worth an entire blog post or article.:
  • An Al Quds University professor tells Tenenbom that Israel won't allow the university to paint a small spot on the ceiling, and hours later he sees that the Israel is allowing the EU to spend 2.4 million euros to refurbish a Turkish bathhouse in east Jerusalem. 
  • As he walks from the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane, he sees the remains of thousands of Jewish gravestones lining the road, with Hebrew letters still visible.
  • Hanan Ashrawi says that Palestinians have lived there for "hundreds of thousands of years." She also gets upset when Tenenbom asks her why the Christian population has diminished so quickly under PA control. 
  • A PA spokesman, when asked for his definition of Palestinian culture, says "Tolerance and coherence." Tenenbom then asks him why he cannot smoke in public on Ramadan. "It is about respect." Tuvia then tells him that Ashrawi said that twenty years earlier, Christians could smoke on Ramadan in the daylight.
  • A Palestinian woman describes how Israel oppresses her but then mentions that she got free university education in Israel.
  • He relates to a Jewish liberal lady how intolerant the Arabs in Ramallah are, She insists that he is lying. He asks her how many times she's been in Ramallah and the answer is zero.
  • An Israeli leftist professor says she has studied Judaism for years and years. He then asks her a basic Bible question that stumps her.
  • Tenenbom sees multi-million dollar mansions in Hebron, with plaques outside saying that they are being paid for by the EU.
  • Gideon Levy describes how wonderful Palestinians are and how terrible Israeli Jews are. But he admits when questioned that he does not have a single Palestinian friend.
  • The Palestinian Antiquities Minister, when asked, makes it clear that she really wants all Jews to leave Israel even if she can't say it out loud.
  • There is an  EU-funded trip to Yad Vashem hosted by an "ex-Jew" who tells his tourists that Israelis just as bad as the Nazis were - and that Herzl died of syphilis.
  • Jibril Rajoub tells Tanenbom that the reason the EU funds "pro-Palestinian" NGOs is so that they won't get terror attacks like they did in the '70s.. (He backtracks when asked to clarify.)
  • Rabbi Arik Asherman, of "Rabbis for Human Rights," is exposed as being ignorant of the basics of the Torah, lying about his organization being apolitical, and shown to simper as the Arabs he pretends to love mercilessly treat him like dirt.
  • Tenenbom goes to Al Quds University to attend a "human rights competition" but finds out that it is a scam - the EU pays for competitions that are never held. (After this book was published, I saw that one was held the following year.)
  • An ICRC spokeswoman gets caught in a lie when she says she saw Israeli soldiers beat up a diplomat with her own eyes, then admits she wasn't anywhere near the alleged event.(In fact, the diplomat attacked the IDF.)
  • A movie house in Jenin is generously funded by Europeans, but has practically no customers.
  • A highly educated Jewish couple are told by their Arab friends that soon the land will be free of Jews, one of them had been gang-raped by an Arab gang and an old Arab friend had sexually abused their granddaughter. But the husband insisted that they really wanted peace. (After prodding, the wife admitted that they were fools.)
  • After much discouragement, Tenenbom visits.a run-down Bedouin shack in the Negev, and finds that while the outside is ugly, the inside is like paradise.
Tenenbom sees all of this and is amazed, and eventually angry. He exposes diplomats who behave the exact opposite of how diplomats should act, journalists who don't ask the simplest questions, and NGOs who pretend that they care about oppressed people yet would never, ever give a dime to a poor or oppressed Jew (or Egyptian or Yemeni, for that matter.)

The entire situation is quite literally theater, where everyone plays their parts and everyone denies the obvious - because the truth would destroy the illusions that so many people have invested their lives in. Tenenbom's genius is to expose the obvious to the players themselves, who react with anger or denial. Their world is surrounded with like-minded unthinking drones and they cannot abide a truth-teller, often reacting by accusing Tuvia of being a Jew. It is very clear that they would not act the way they act  or say the things they do initially if they knew he was Jewish. (At one point, a Norwegian asks him "Are you a J-" and Tenenbom lets the question hang there for a minute before saying he is German. The man, who had claimed that he is there because of a long tradition of Norwegian care about the poor and downtrodden, then admits that his country collaborated with the Nazis and deported their Jews, who were presumably not poor or downtrodden.)

The author also exposes Jewish charlatans and extremists, but his main target remains the self-delusional (or knowingly deceptive) Leftists and Arabs.

In the end, Tenenbom is pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Israel, given that he has seen so many Jews who have aligned with their enemies. However, he does not seem to realize that his methods of research - while very entertaining - are not a representative sampling of Israelis (nor Arabs.) Most Israeli Jews who are proud of their country and work to make it successful are not the ones who are hanging around in areas Tenenbom frequents. Most Israelis are normal and see quite clearly what kind of neighborhood they are in; but they are not as entertaining as the hypocrites at Haaretz or the latte-drinkers in Tel Aviv, so there was less effort to reach them.

All in all, this book is a must-read.

Sunday, August 03, 2014

I have described how Hamas is violating at least 19 principles of international law in the current fighting.

Now, is Israel?

The criticism most often given of Israel's actions is that it is violating the "principle of distinction." The Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol 1, article 52, states it this way:

1. Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2. Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.
Many countries, when they ratified this article, clarified it to ensure that collateral damage is not covered by the first sentence of paragraph 2. So, for example, Canada wrote:
It is the understanding of the Government of Canada in relation to Article 52 that ...the first sentence of paragraph 2 of the Article is not intended to, nor does it,deal with the question of incidental or collateral damage resulting from an attack directed against a military objective.
Italy, Australia, the UK, France and New Zealand added similar language (CIHL II para. 83-91)

Logic dictates that it cannot be otherwise. If these caveats aren't in place, then anyone can make any military target immune from attack placing a civilian there, or placing the target in a house or church or hospital that is still used as such. So, for example, Australia's Defence Force Manual states:
The presence of noncombatants in or around a military objective does not change its nature as a military objective. Noncombatants in the vicinity of a military objective must share the danger to which the military objective is exposed.
Note that we are not saying that the existence of civilians at a military target can be ignored; that is part of the Proportionality discussion that will be forthcoming. But clearly international law allows the attack on military targets even if there are some civilians there.

Who determines whether something is a military target or not?

It is not reporters, or eyewitnesses, or residents of nearby houses, or human rights organizations. That decision is given to the military commander, based on the best available information at the time.

So, for example, The Military Manual of the Netherlands says that “the definition of ‘military objectives’ implies that it depends on the circumstances of the moment whether an object is a military objective. The definition leaves the necessary freedom of judgement to the commander on the spot."

Sweden's IHL manual states "it is up to the attacker to decide whether the nature, location, purpose or use of the property can admit of its being classified as a military objective and thus as a permissible object of attack. This formulation undeniably gives the military commander great latitude in deciding, but he must also take account of the unintentional damage that may occur. The proportionality rule must always enter into the assessment even though this is not directly stated in the text of Article 52." (para. 335, 338)

The military commander is not only concerned with the safety of the civilians in the area. The commander is also concerned with the safety of his or her own troops. The US Naval Handbook says "Military advantage may involve a variety of considerations, including the security of the attacking force." (para. 339)

Civilian sites can become valid military objectives. So, for example, Australia’s Defence Force Manual lists among military objectives “objects, normally dedicated to civilian purposes, but which are being used for military purposes, e.g. a school house or home which is being used temporarily as a battalion headquarters”. The manual specifies that "For this purpose, 'use' does not necessarily mean occupation. For example, if enemy soldiers use a school building as shelter from attack by direct fire, then they are clearly gaining a military advantage from the school. This means the school becomes a military objective and can be attacked." (para. 687)

Israel's Manual on the Laws of War goes even further to protect civilians: (para 694)
A situation may arise where the target changes its appearance from civilian to military or vice versa. For instance, if anti-aircraft batteries are stationed on a school roof or a sniper is positioned in a mosque’s minaret, the protection imparted to the facility by its being a civilian object will be removed, and the attacking party will be allowed to hit it . . . A reverse situation may also occur in which an originally military objective becomes a civilian object, as for instance, a large military base that is converted to a collection point for the wounded, and is thus rendered immune to attack.

However, attacks may not be indiscriminate.

It is ultimately up to the commander to determine the nature of the specific, fluid situation. Everything hinges on his or her intent - not on the judgment of other observers and not on finding out better information in hindsight. As stated by Rüdiger Wolfrum and Dieter Fleck in The Handbook of International Humanitarian Law, "The prerequisite for a grave breach (of IHL) is intent; the attack must be intentionally directed at the civilian population or individual civilians, and the intent must embrace physical consequences."

In order to find that the commander has committed a war crime, the bar is set quite high. ICRC commentary on art 85 of the Additional Protocol states:

The accused must have acted consciously and with intent, i.e., with his mind on the act and its consequences, and willing the ("criminal intent" or "malice aforethought"); this encompasses the concepts of "wrongful intent" or "recklessness"....

As long as the IDF did not deliberately attack civilians, and the local commander had a military purpose for each target based on the best information available at the time, there is no violation of the principle of distinction.

Clearly, the observers on the ground and around the world who are looking at the results through the distorted lens of TV cameras cannot possibly know what the intent of the IDF commanders are. They don't know the specific intelligence available, the real-time situation on the ground, the danger to IDF troops or Israeli civilians (in the case of targeting rocket launchers,) the topography of the area (when, for example, the IDF needs to take hgh ground in order to protect its troops) - none of that is available to the armchair analysts who breezily and ignorantly say that IDF actions could amount to war crimes. The bar to determine that is incredibly high, and is not decided by people at Human Rights Watch who change international law at will for their purposes.

The argument that Israel is deliberately attacking civilians has another fatal flaw: if the policy was to attack civilians, then is it difficult to explain how thousands of air strikes and thousands more artillery strikes have killed so few. If the objective is civilian, then there would be tens of thousands of civilian victims. One cannot claim that the IDF is both a uniquely bloodthirsty army using precision weapons to target civilians and at the same time maintain that the IDF is so poor at targeting. Anyone claiming that the IDF is deliberately targeting civilians is either grossly ignorant of how wars are waged, or they are willfully slandering the army.


Caveat - I am not a lawyer. I am getting much of this from the IDF initial response to the Goldstone Report, and as of yet I have not seen a single scholarly rebuttal to the legal aspects mentioned in that report. If someone has written such a rebuttal, please let me know.

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