UN Report on Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" in Gaza

On the whole, the report is an archive of the incredible brutality of the Israel state. Consider the following cases examined therein:  the seven children, including one baby, killed at the al-Sayam family home; the five children under 12 killed at the home of the al-Farra family; the three children under 12 in the Shuheibar family who were killed.

The UNHRC notes that all of these children were outside and thus visible to the technologically sophisticated Israeli military and that “precision weapons appear to have been used, which indicates that specific objectives were targeted”. In short, the report shows that the Israeli military killed children on purpose.

In the Shujaya neighbourhood, Israel’s army killed 55 civilians in a two-day period and razed the area. The report finds that “the length of the intensive shelling (more than six hours), together with the observation and intelligence means that the [Israeli military] had at its disposal in Gaza, would have allowed those responsible for the attack to receive opportune information as to the dire impact of the shelling on civilians and civilian objects”. In other words, the Israeli army knew how much harm it was inflicting on civilians in Shujaya and did not stop.

Similarly, the Israeli military attacked the roads into and out of Khuzaa and “nobody was allowed to move in or out of the village. It became a zone of active fighting, everything in it was turned into a target”. Furthermore, “the electricity was cut and reports indicate that many water tanks on the rooftops of homes were attacked and destroyed by the [Israeli army].”

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Key talking points employed by pro-Israel propagandists during the war are also debunked in the report. When Israel sent ground troops into Gaza, it claimed it was necessary to do so to protect Israeli civilians from attacks carried out through tunnels from Gaza.

The commission that authored the report, however, “observes that during the period under examination, the tunnels were only used to conduct attacks directed at [Israeli military] positions in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line, which are legitimate military targets”. Whereas apologists for Israel boast that the country’s military notifies civilians of impending attacks, the UNHRC describes many cases in which no such warnings were provided and many Palestinian civilians were killed.

In these senses, the UNHRC’s report is a testament to the Israeli state’s appalling treatment of Palestinians. While aspects of the document are presented in ways that obscure who is to blame for the war and that occlude the enormous disparity in the scale of the pain inflicted, this framing is undercut by the report’s own findings. Fair-minded readers will have no difficulty identifying the oppressor and the oppressed.

  Middle East Eye

Fair-minded readers never have.