RAMALLAH: Israel has failed to show it will conduct an impartial investigation of allegations that it committed war crimes during its Gaza offensive last year, an international human rights group said Sunday.
UN investigators leveled the war crimes allegations against Israel in an official report submitted last year. In its response last week, Israel told the UN its current system of internal military probes with legal oversight is sufficient.
However, the New York-based Human Rights Watch rejected that argument, saying internal inquiries by Israel’s military have largely focused on possible wrongdoing by individual soldiers without looking into high-level decisions that led to large numbers of civilian casualties, such as artillery fire into populated areas.
Israeli investigators missed an important piece of evidence in one of the most contested incidents of the war, in which Gaza’s only flour mill was severely damaged by Israeli fire, said Human Rights Watch, which discussed the ongoing investigations with Israeli military lawyers last week.
“Israel claims it is conducting credible and impartial investigations, but it has so far failed to make that case,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. “An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks.”
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor dismissed the group’s findings, saying that the military is investigating “in full transparency everything that needs to be investigated.”
Israeli human rights groups have also called for an independent probe.
A team of UN investigators, headed by veteran war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, said last year that it found evidence that both sides violated the laws of war. The team said Israel used disproportionate force and deliberately targeted civilians, while Hamas indiscriminately fired rockets at Israeli civilians.
Israel launched the three-week campaign after Palestinian fighters in Gaza barraged southern Israel with thousands of rockets since 2002. About 1,400 Gazans, among them hundreds of civilians, were killed in the fighting, along with 13 Israelis.
Last November, the UN General Assembly ordered Israel and Hamas to launch credible investigations or face possible Security Council action.
Israel and Hamas submitted reports about their efforts last week, but UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he could not determine whether the investigations were credible.
Human Rights Watch said it was still reviewing the Hamas response, but rejected the group’s assertion that it didn’t intend to harm Israeli civilians.
The Goldstone report alleged that Israel bombed Gaza’s only flour mill from the air as part of a deliberate attempt to damage the civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Human Rights Watch said UN mine defusing experts visited the mill two days after the strike and found the front half of a 500-pound (220-kilogram) aircraft bomb on the upper floor. Human Rights Watch also released a video, taken by the mill’s owner, and said it appears to show the remains of an aerial bomb.
Israeli security forces made an incursion into a Palestinian city on Sunday to arrest two foreign women belonging to an organization involved in protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier.
Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib said the arrest of Spaniard Ariadna Jove Marti and Australian Bridgette Chappell in the city of Ramallah violated interim peace accords that gave Palestinians self-rule in parts of the West Bank.
Both in their 20s, the women were activists with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), established in 2001 to mobilize international support for Palestinian activism against Israeli occupation.
Ryan Olander, an ISM activist who shared an apartment with the two women, said around 12 members of the Israeli security forces had arrested the pair in the early hours of the morning.
Palestinian and international activists say Israel, apparently concerned about plans for wider demonstrations, has stepped up a campaign of arrests against protest organizers in the last two months.
Also Sunday, Palestinian security officials in the West Bank said they arrested six alleged militants inspired by Al-Qaeda and who hoped to carry out an attack and win acceptance from the terror network.
