The residents of Gaza are not waiting on the Goldstone Report to take action. The Defense Ministry and the Tel Aviv Prosecution have reportedly received some 1,500 notices of future civil lawsuits against the IDF over damage caused during Operation Cast Lead. (full article…)

China will oppose discussing the Goldstone report at the United Nations Security Council, Chinese members of parliament told a delegation of visiting Israeli officials in Beijing on Wednesday. (full article…)

While the IDF has expressed objection to the formation of an external inquiry committee to probe Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, a top General Staff official told Ynet on Wednesday that more could be done on the PR front. (full article…)

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission’s mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. (full article…)

For those who criticize the Goldstone report for not addressing Sderot in detail, just remember that it was the Israeli government that denied Goldstone access and would not allow him to investigate Palestinian rocket attacks…

American officials say Washington will likely exercise its veto power if report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza is brought to a Security Council vote. (full article…)

By the Israeli military’s count, 1,166 people were killed in the war: 295 noncombatants, 709 of what it called Hamas terrorist operatives, and 162 men whose affiliations remain undetermined.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 1,417 died: 926 civilians, 236 combatants and 255 police officers.

Israel says about 400 Gazans die of natural causes every month, possibly accounting for the discrepancy in the numbers. (full article…)

Of course the NYT fails to mention that hundreds of sick Palestinians have died after being denied permission to leave Gaza by the Israeli government. The author also does not write that Israel’s manipulation of figures was rejected by Israeli human rights organizations.

The abstaining countries included: Bosnia, Burkina-Faso, Cameron, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Belgium, South Korea, Slovenia and Uruguay. (full article…)

MK Danny Danon attacked the Goldstone report during a speech in Knesset Wednesday and ripped up a synopsis of it. (full article…)

The political echelon in Jerusalem has decided to use the explosion that occurred at the Hezbollah member’s house in Tyre this week to divert international attention from the Gaza war report to be debated in the UN starting Wednesday. Israel is hoping to put the spotlight on Hezbollah’s violation of Resolution 1701 that ended the Second Lebanon War. (full article…)

Israeli defence officials told the Jerusalem Post they were rethinking arms sales to Turkey and would end support for Turkey in its efforts to stop the US Congress voting to declare the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks a genocide. (full article…)

How does Obama’s suppression of Israeli war crimes in the Goldstone Report factor into his silly prize?

In Gaza, posters appeared on walls on Wednesday calling Mr. Abbas a traitor and saying he should be consigned to “the trash heap of history.” Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is the Palestinian Authority’s main rival. (full article…)

…then they would mention that resentment of the Mahmoud Abbas and the Zionist Collaboration Regime is not confined to Hamas, but most sectors of Palestinian society. Reading this in the Times, you would imagine the poster is simply political posturing by Hamas (which certainly exists), but faced with a regime that runs the Israeli occupation by proxy and crumbles to US/Zionist demands almost without exception, Palestinians of all stripes oppose this clown. Imagine that Richard Goldstone cares more about pursuing justice in Gaza than the lousy regime in Ramallah!

Stockholm’s foreign minister urges UN human rights council to discuss report probing Gaza war despite expressed reservations as to its credibility (full article…)

A member of President Mahmoud Abbas’ inner circle says the Palestinian leadership made a mistake by suspending action on a Gaza war crimes report . (full article…)

This entire episode makes we wonder if the U.S. is opening a way for Mohammed Dahlan to push Abbas aside.

After Ehud Barak nearly arrested in London, Minister Ya’alon cancels his trip to Britain ‘in light of legal recommendation.’ However, together with Mazuz, only two lawyers handling some 1,000 foreign lawsuits against politicians and military officers. ‘Situation intolerable,’ said a senior official in Jerusalem (full article…)

In a startling shift, the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council dropped its efforts to forward a report accusing Israel of possible war crimes to the Security Council, under pressure from the United States, diplomats said Thursday. (full article…)

It was misleading for the commission to examine only the 13 months from June 2008 to July 2009, she said. Palestinians in Gaza had fired rockets into Israel for eight years. (full article…)

“A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” Goldstone, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, told the UN Human Rights Council.

“The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence.” (full article…)

“No arrest warrant has been issued, and in any event, he has immunity due to his being a minister in the government,” the bureau said in a statement. “Therefore, his program will continue without disturbance.” (full article…)

Ms. Rice denied a double standard. The report had a lopsided focus on Israel, which is capable of investigating possible war crimes, while Sudan is not, she said. (full article…)

Tel Aviv is, in fact, the most politically liberal city in Israel and offers a sharp contrast to the spirit of religious conservatism that informs Jerusalem. It votes to the left and looks to Europe. Many inhabitants yearn for nothing more than to live the life of a hot Mediterranean city, to be, say, the Barcelona of the Middle East and forget the conflict a dozen miles away. (full article…)

The difference between an Israeli dove and an Israeli hawk is the amount of “anguish” they feel when they kill 1,400 Palestinians in the course of a few days.

They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians. (full article…)

Perhaps next time we set out to wage another vain and miserable war, we will take into account not only the number of fatalities we are likely to sustain, but also the heavy political damage such wars cause.

On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Israel, deservedly, is becoming an outcast and detested country. We must not forget it for a minute. (full article…)

We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable. (full article…)

Strange, the same adjectives have been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Israel is concerned that officers, and even senior government officials and ministers who were involved in approving the operation, would be at risk of being arrested in any country that is a signatory to the treaty recognizing the ICC in The Hague and is therefore obligated to respect its arrest warrants. (full article…)

“The mandate of the Goldstone Commission was one-sided from the outset. The initiative to establish the commission came from the UN Human Rights Council which is known for its routine condemnation of Israel.” (full article…)

“Any comparison of Israel’s fight on terror with recent conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. immediately shows that Israel holds itself to the highest ethical standard.” (full article…)

My Lords, I think it is important and is a reflection of the fact that there are people of good will on all sides of this who, whatever their views about the conflict and its origins or long-term peace, recognise that in today%u2019s world these kinds of crimes, whether they occur in Gaza, northern Sri Lanka, or Darfur, must be subject to international accountability. (full article…)

Israel called the Goldstone Commission Report “nauseating” on Tuesday … (more…)

The United Nations’ investigation into Israel’s recent massacre in Gaza has now concluded. In general I think the release of their 500+ page report is an important step forward in the process of holding Israel accountable for its horrendous actions earlier this year. Judge Richard Goldstone (whom I met at a talk in San Diego years ago) is a principled man; his South African background makes him acutely aware of racial oppression and his prosecution of war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia must have prepared him for his work in the Middle East. Despite Israeli obstruction and opposition every step of the way, Goldstone pushed ahead and attempted to conduct a professionally thorough investigation.

The report concludes in rather strong terms:

From the facts gathered, the Mission found that the following grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention were committed by Israeli forces in Gaza: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. As grave breaches these acts give rise to individual criminal responsibility. The Mission notes that the use of human shields also constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. (par. 1732)

They go on to make some minor criticism of the treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Israeli military as well as the suppression of critical media outlets within Israel.

More importantly, the team rejects Israeli accusations that Hamas members were “hiding” in civilian areas.

The Mission found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks. The Mission also found no evidence that members of Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat in civilian dress. Although in the one incident of an Israeli attack on a mosque it investigated the Mission found that there was no indication that that mosque was used for military purposes or to shield military activities, the Mission cannot exclude that this might have occurred in other cases. (par. 1750)

Although Judge Goldstone has predicted that no prosecutions will take place for Israeli crimes, one hopes that if Israel refuses to investigate the allegations this report makes, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will press ahead with their own investigation. There is a possibility this may happen… which would be a sign of great progress for that body. Although Israel is not a member of the ICC, I think it would be an important step towards greater jurisdiction for the court. Rather than punishing only the petty dictators or génocidaires of various 3rd world countries, the ICC could demonstrate that the leaders of the rich world are not entirely immune from the repercussions of their murderous romps. And Zionists are afraid of this:

Attorney Michael Sefarad, who specializes in human rights international law, was more cautious: “The Goldstone report is highly unusual, since it states Israel’s inquests into the operation were unworthy. The bottom line is that this report brings us one step closer to seeing foreign courts hear war crimes cases involving Israeli officials.” (more…)

On a final note, it should be said that while the report does criticize Palestinian rocket attacks targeting civilian areas, this issue takes a very minor role in the report. Not in this case, but I think too often the United Nations (and the Western media) attempts to apply flimsy standards of parity between Israeli and Palestinian actions. Sure, rocket attacks are war crimes… but there can be no serious comparison between the crimes of the occupant and the crimes of the occupied [Norman Finkelstein discussed the matter with Amy Goodman the other day]. Besides the clear disparity in economic and infrastructural terms, the occupation is the single greatest source of violence relevant to the conflict. Israel’s ongoing economic/military siege and the near-daily invasion of Palestinian land does not excuse rocket attacks, but neither does it put them on equal footing. I understand the need for this universality under international law, but realistically we would never dream of arguing that the participants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising were equally culpable for war crimes as were the Nazis during WWII.

Download the full report here.

PCHR and B’Tselem based their tallies on painstaking field research. (There are some small discrepancies between them. But most can be explained by differences in the definitions used.)

The Israeli government, by contrast, has not revealed the methodology by which – without having any access at all to surviving family members or local officials on the ground – it felt able to compile its much lower tally. (more…)

The prosecutor of the international criminal court is collecting information on alleged war crimes committed by Nato and the Taliban in Afghanistan. (more…)

According to the B’Tselem data, 773 of those killed did not take part in the hostilities, 320 of whom were minors under the age of 18 and 109 were women (above the age of 18). The rest of those killed were 330 armed combatants, 245 Palestinian policemen – most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of the police station – and 38 others whose participation in the hostilities could not be determined. (more…)

Every crime recorded… though when the organization I used to work for (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights) published similar figures within weeks of the massacre, it was shrugged off by the international community. This was the single bloodiest episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, apart from Israel’s 1982 invasion and aerial bombardment of Lebanon.

The first detailed casualty figures from an Israeli human rights organisation since the war ended puts the number of children under 16 killed in the offensive at 252 as opposed to the 89 cited by the military. B’Tselem says its fieldworkers gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 of the children. (more…)

Political, legal assault against Israel is just beginning (more…)

Though Mr Deeb, 40, is not the self-pitying type, the reaction of his colleagues was understandable. For among the many thousands of Gazans bereaved by the war, few lives can have been as shattered as his. Alerted by phone, he had rushed back from work on the afternoon of 6 January to find the family home in Jabalya hit by two Israeli 120mm mortar shells in the same series of attacks that killed up to another 30 civilians outside the UN Al Fakhoura school a mere 100 metres away. The 11 dead included five of his six children, aged between four and 22, his wife, his mother, one of his brothers, two of his nephews, and a niece. (more…)

Former Gaza Division Commander Brig.-Gen Moshe “Chico” Tamir plans to appeal a military court decision on Thursday to demote him to the rank of colonel for permitting his underage son to drive an IDF dune buggy and attempting to cover-up a subsequent accident. (more…)

But for participating in the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians—now that’s a whole different story.

Israel has refused to cooperate with investigation of its conduct during an offensive on Gaza earlier this year, depriving Judge Richard Goldstone and his team access to military sources and victims of ongoing rocket attacks. (more…)

Israel consistently complains that the UN fails to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli civilians while it unduly criticizes the Jewish state—yet now it comes out that Israel is blocking these investigations!

Amer al-Dayah, 28, is the only member of a family of 23 who survived the bombardment of his parents’ house. The dead included his parents, three brothers, three sisters-in-law, two sisters and 12 nieces and nephews. Al-Alami shows some of the photos in the files. One depicts a child’s head in the rubble, eyes wide open, limbs severed. There was nothing left of nine of the victims, and al-Dayah found parts of his mother’s body as far as 100 meters (328 feet) away. “My family was simply gone,” says al-Dayah, a stout man with a boyish face. (more…)

Carrying a white flag, Rawhiyya led a group of women and children out of the compound and into the village in the early hours of 13 January, according to residents and human rights groups.

She was shot in the head with a single bullet, independent testimonies confirm, and took 12 hours to die after a medic who tried to reach her also came under fire from Israeli forces. (more…)

Such investigations, the summary states, should be carried out by an “impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and southern Israel by the [Israeli army] and by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.”

The board of inquiry corroborated the already existing masses of evidence collected by local and international human rights organizations, eyewitness accounts from UN and other humanitarian personnel, and the legal examination by the distinguished (but vilified by Israel and the US) UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk.

And yet none of this death and destruction, not the use of white phosphorus in flagrant violation of international law, not even against the UN (if that is all the secretary-general cares about) merited any further examination. (more…)

Poll: 58% of Israeli Jews back two-state solution (more…)

Oh yeah… and 82% of Israelis think Israel should have killed more Palestinians in Gaza during the slaughter there earlier this year.

As soon as the Israeli troops pulled out of Gaza in mid-to-late January the Khader family went home—to find a pile of rubble. Even their chicken pen had been bulldozed. It had been their sole source of income since Mr Khader, along with thousands of other Gazan men, lost his permit to work in Israel after the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) started in 2000. Now he sits amid the debris and gazes at the green tents with Rotary International logos which an Arab charity has pitched on a muddy, desolate field on Jabaliya’s eastern edge. Before the war, olive and citrus trees grew there. “We used to work in Israel,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “We worked for them, built their houses. And now look what they’ve done to us.” (more…)

“You will perform in a state whose propaganda services will extract every ounce of mileage from your presence. They will use it to whitewash their war crimes.” (more…)

The country’s gates were closed to the UN fact-finding mission headed by Jewish South African Richard Goldstone, as if it were Zimbabwe or North Korea, as if it had much to hide. The president brusquely rebuked the UN’s Ban Ki-moon and suggested he visits Auschwitz, until eventually the secretary general was forced to shrink from supporting his organization’s damning report.

Anyone who dared investigate and report was branded anti-Semitic. (more…)

But in a covering letter attached to his own 27-page summary of the report, leaked last night, the secretary-general bluntly rejected [the UN report's] recommendations for further investigations into whether Israel had breached international law during the offensive, including by its use of white phosphorus. (more…)

A Spanish judge said Monday he will continue to investigate seven current and former Israeli officials over an Air Force bombing in Gaza in 2002 that killed a Hamas militant and 14 civilians.(more…)

“Someone who had a wall knocked down had it rebuilt at the absolute minimum cost,” a Palestinian resident of Khan Younis told Ynet, “but anyone who received compensation for broken windows prefers to close the windows off with nylon instead of installing new ones, in order to use the money received for daily living.” (more…)

A federal appeals court says a former Israeli security chief cannot be sued in the United States for 15 deaths in a Gaza City bombing. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling Thursday in New York. The court said Avraham Dichter was immune under common law from being held responsible for the July 2002 bombing of an apartment complex. Dichter was director of the Israeli Security Agency at the time. A lower court rejected a 2005 lawsuit. It sought class action status for bombing survivors and victims’ families. (more…)

Three months after the end of the war, much of the aid has either rotted or been irreparably damaged as a result of both rain and sunshine, and Egypt’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing.

“To be honest, most of this aid will never make it to Gaza,” a local government official told IPS on condition of anonymity. “A lot of the food here will have to be thrown away.” (more…)

The Ministry of Social Affairs in the Gaza Strip reported that the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip left 1346 children orphaned, 437 dead and 1872 wounded. (more…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

“It [the trial] shouldn’t be limited to the Cambodians,” said Chomsky in an interview that appeared on the weekend. “An international trial that doesn’t take into account Henry Kissinger or other authors of the American bombings and the support of the KR [Khmer Rouge] after they were kicked out of the country, that’s just a farce.”

“The records say that the U.S. wanted to ‘use anything that flies against anything that moves’ [during the bombing of Cambodia], which led to five times the bombing that was reported before, greater than all bombings in all theaters of World War Two, which helped create the Khmer Rouge,” he asserted. (more…)

Israel may have deliberately attacked sewage infrastructure

Israel was very quick to close the case on allegations of “serious misconduct” during its recent massacre in Gaza.

Earlier this month, several Israeli soldiers revealed the permissive atmosphere towards killing Palestinian civilians during Israel’s invasion. Among other shocking revelations, one soldier recounted the intentional shooting of an unarmed woman and her two children. Commenting on the incident, another soldier elaborated:

“What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. (more…)

Concluding that the testimonies were “based on hearsay” and had been “purposely exaggerated,” Israel’s head military prosecutor closed the whirlwind investigation and that is apparently as far as the case will go…

Of course, the investigation was a sham — as Israel’s military investigations almost always are. It ignored scores of evidence that illegal orders were given to Israeli soldiers in Gaza… not to mention the liberty some members of the IDF took to destroy civilian property and scrawl racist remarks on the walls of Palestinian homes. But, no… Zionist brutality is just “hearsay”.

According to the Israeli human rights organization, B’tselem:

The speedy closing of the investigation immediately raises suspicions that the very opening of this investigation was merely the army’s attempt to wipe its hands of all blame for illegal activity during Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

When Israeli soldiers expelled Abir Hijeh, her five children and their neighbors from homes in a Gaza war zone, she said they warned her in broken Arabic: Go south or you might get shot. The group went the wrong way and came under fire from Israeli soldiers. Hijeh was wounded and her 2-year-old daughter was killed. Hijeh’s account of a sniper firing on civilians, along with soldiers’ graffiti and destruction seen by The Associated Press in homes they commandeered, lend support to allegations of Israeli army misconduct during the onslaught in Gaza. (more…)

The tally says 295 civilians lost their lives — about a third of the figure of 926 reported by Gaza’s Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (www.pchrgaza.org), which published a full list of names earlier this month. (more…)

I just flew into Brussels last night after my aborted attempt at getting into Gaza – and today the online community is all abuzz about Israeli war crimes, thanks to a report just published by the U.S. organization, Human Rights Watch.

According to the report:

Israel “deliberately and recklessly” fired white phosphorus shells in densely populated areas of Gaza in an “indiscriminate” way that killed and wounded civilians and is “evidence of war crimes”. (more…)

Fred Abrahams, a senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, says that:

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops … It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.” (more…)

The Israeli military was quick to point out that, ‘This type of humour is unbecoming and should be condemned.’ This isn’t very convincing when you consider the graffiti left by Israeli soldiers who recently occupied houses across the northern Gaza Strip: ‘Death will find you … soon’ scrawled on the bedroom wall of Majeda Abu Hajaj, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as she attempted to lead a group of civilians to safety after they had been ordered out of their homes by the same soldiers. After killing Majeda, and her 64 year old mother, Raya, the soldiers occupied their house and left graffiti in every room. (more…)

This article was written by my friend and former colleague, Louisa Waugh.

Witness reports taken by HRW describe the killing of a bank manager, his wife and two of their children in their car during white phosphorus shelling in the Tel-el-Hawa area of Gaza City on 15 January. According to a Palestinian journalist, Fathi Sabbah, whose own building in the area came under attack, when ambulances came to take the bodies away from the partly melted car, they found “only a few bones” of the four occupants. The report quotes another witness, Muhammad Al Sharif, as saying that a piece of a skull and some teeth lay beside the car. (more…)

“800 terrorists and 300 civilians, who we did not want to harm, were killed in the last operation,” Galant said. “This ratio of almost a quarter [of the individuals] uninvolved [in the fighting] is an achievement unmatched in the history of this kind of combat,” he added. (more…)

Israel includes police officers in this tally (they consider domestic police to be terrorists) and in one particularly appalling attack at the beginning of the recent assault, they killed a large number of police at their graduation ceremony in Gaza.

Remember the Palestinian attack on a couple of Israeli police officers last week? Was it not labelled senseless terrorism? Oh, Israeli police officers are not terrorists… I see.

By the way, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, published a tally of 960 civilians of the 1,434 dead? and that still assumes that we can count police officers as terrorists…

Medics and ambulance drivers said they were targeted when they tried to tend to the wounded. Sixteen of them were killed. According to the World Health Organisation, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 clinics were damaged by Israeli bombs. Two clinics were destroyed. In one incident, paramedics were fired on by a tank using a shell filled with 8,000 lethal metal darts as they were carrying a wounded man to an ambulance. (more…)

‘My impression is that IDF behaved ethically and morally. If there were incidents, they were limited,’ says Gabi Ashkenazi in his first response to soldiers’ testimonies on wrong doings in Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

Limited? 960 of 1,434 dead?

Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday. (more…)

An investigation by a group of former Israeli soldiers has uncovered new evidence of the military’s conduct during the assault on Gaza two months ago. According to the group Breaking the Silence, the witness statements of the 15 soldiers who have come forward to describe their concerns over Operation Cast Lead appear to corroborate claims of random killings and vandalism carried out during the operation made by a separate group of anonymous servicemen during a seminar at a military college. (more…)

For those who have not seen my photographs of a “Breaking the SIlence” tour of Hebron: go here.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR) said Israel attacked 34 medical care facilities and prevented Palestinian medical teams from reaching the wounded during the offensive in December and January. (more…)

“Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue,” was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders a low-level commander wrote before giving his soldiers their daily briefing. (more…)

London will not push through changes in legislation that permits the arrest of Israel Defense Forces officers visiting Britain on war crimes, as previously promised, Jerusalem has learned. (more…)

They taught us to dread zarchan [from the Hebrew root to shine or glow]. They taught us, as medics, that if we treated a phosphorous wound, prepare for the worst. It doesn’t merely burn, they taught us, it burns first through the skin, then through the soft tissue, until it reaches bone. They taught us to take an instrument, or, in its absence, a stick, to dig out the phosphorus crystals from the flesh, or the burning would go on and on. (more…)

“We all put our hands up and yelled, ‘We’re women and children. We’re not the resistance,’ ” recalled Sherine Helw, Fuad’s daughter-in-law.

The soldiers opened fire on Fuad, said Sherine, and he died in front of his family. (more…)

“I do not know of any military that is more moral, fair and sensitive to civilians’ lives than the IDF,” he said. (more…)

They had just gone a little distance when there was an explosion. We were hit. We fell down, and I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then I started hearing again. I heard combat helicopters and gunfire, and I didn’t know where they were firing. Husam, Mahmoud, and I stayed where we were for about an hour, maybe more. Then the daughters of our neighbors came and took us into one of the houses. My father and uncle came there and took us to an ambulance. They told me that Husam had been killed and Mahmoud was wounded. My eyes were hurt, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to see again. (more…)

Israel is a small country living in a permanent state of siege, highly security-conscious and surrounded by forces hostile to it; India is a giant country whose borders are notoriously permeable, an open society known for its lax and easygoing ways. (more…)

Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.

In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala’a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour’s abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday. (more…)

Schools in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations have reopened for the first time since the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants. (more…)

The Obama administration is reluctant to turn over too many rocks in the Bush administration’s conduct in the War on Terror. Obama has pledged to reach a post-partisan nirvana, and Republicans could condemn any investigation of Bush administration abuse of the republic as a partisan witch-hunt. Also, the Obama administration has a conflict of interest in pursuing investigations and prosecutions against Bush administration officials because now that Obama is president, he may not want to entirely discredit Bush’s precedents, which significantly expanded executive powers. (more…)

Through the hole in the wall of his house, Sadala sees a landscape in gray and brown. This is where a neighbourhood had stood, his neighbourhood. Now there is a snake of sand around the bomb crater. It is impossible to tell where the streets once stood. Family houses have turned into piles of debris. People have built refuges using cloth and rubble. They stand alongside dead donkeys and sheep, whose stomachs swell up. No one here has time to remove rotting corpses. (more…)

Zahwa, la veuve d’Atiyeh, raconte en détail, les larmes aux yeux, le drame qu’elle a vécu. “C’était comme un jeu pour les soldats. Ils riaient”, affirme-t-elle. Zeinab, 12 ans, qui a perdu son père, sa mère, deux frères et des cousins. Shiffa, 19 ans a également enterré son père, sa mère, sa tante et son oncle. Almassa, 13 ans, se souvient comment un soldat a tiré sur Messaouda qui avait son bébé de 6 mois dans les bras, et qui est mort. Tous ont perdu plusieurs proches. (more…)

But the devastation of war is everywhere, the terrifying memory of it still raw. Sitting in the ruins of Zeitun, a district almost completely destroyed, Arafat Samouni painfully recounts the events that ended in the death of 30 members of his extended family in one of the war’s most publicised tragedies. Still in shock, he struggles to remember the names of all the dead and how they were related to him. Asked whom he blames, he has no doubt. “The Israelis, of course. They knew this area. They knew there were civilians here.” He refuses to blame Hamas (more…)

In the aftermath of the war, there are scenes of devastation at nearly every turn in Gaza. Whole blocks are pockmarked by bullet holes. The earth craters where tall buildings once stood. Mourning tents line the roadways. (more…)