Both Israel and Hamas used weapons supplied from abroad to carry out attacks on civilians, Amnesty International said today as it released fresh evidence on the munitions used during the three-week conflict in Gaza and southern Israel and called on the UN to impose a comprehensive arms embargo.
“Israeli forces used white phosphorus and other weapons supplied by the USA to carry out serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes. Their attacks resulted in the death of hundreds of children and other civilians and massive destruction of homes and infrastructure,” said Donatella Rovera who headed Amnesty International’s fact-finding mission to southern Israel and Gaza. “At the same time, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups fired hundreds of rockets that had been smuggled in or made of components from abroad at civilian areas in Israel. Though far less lethal than the weaponry used by Israel, such rocket firing also constitutes a war crime and caused several civilian deaths.”
Even before the three-week conflict, those who armed the two sides will have been aware of the pattern of repeated misuse of weapons by the parties. They must take some responsibility for the violations perpetrated with the weapons they have supplied and should immediately cease further transfers.
“As the major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and of human rights. The Obama Administration should immediately suspend US military aid to Israel,” said Malcolm Smart, Director for the Middle East.
For many years the USA has been the major supplier of conventional arms to Israel. Under a 10-year agreement to 2017, the USA is due to provide $30 billion in military aid to Israel, a 25 percent increase compared to the period preceding the Bush administration.
“To a large extent, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers’ money,” said Malcolm Smart.
In Gaza, as the fighting ended Amnesty International researchers found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli Army – including many that are US-made – littering school playgrounds, in hospitals and in people’s homes. They included artillery and tank shells, mortar fins and remnants from Hellfire and other airborne missiles and large F-16 delivered bombs, as well as still smouldering highly incendiary white phosphorus remains.
They also found remnants of a new type of missile, seemingly launched from unmanned drones, which explodes large numbers of tiny sharp-edged metal cubes, each between 2mm and 4mm square in size. These lethal purpose-made shrapnel had penetrated thick metal doors and were embedded deep in concrete walls, and are clearly designed to maximize injury.
In southern Israel, Amnesty International also saw the remains of “Qassam”, Grad, and other indiscriminate rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against civilian areas. These unsophisticated weapons are either smuggled into Gaza clandestinely or constructed there from components secretly brought in from abroad. They cannot be aimed accurately and stand no comparison with the weaponry deployed by Israel but they have caused several deaths of Israeli civilians, injured others and damage to civilian property.
“We urge the UN Security Council to impose an immediate and comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until effective mechanisms are found to ensure that munitions and other military equipment are not used to commit serious violations of international law,” said Malcolm Smart. “In addition all states should suspend all transfers of military equipment, assistance and munitions to Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until there is no longer a substantial risk of human rights violations. There must be no return to business as usual, with the predictably devastating consequences for civilians in Gaza and Israel.”
Haddad car, brothers of Ahsan and Adi Haddad in background
You remember the Nadeems (I must ring and ask them how Firas’s knee operation went so I can tell you) who tried to escape from the Israel’s attacks on Tela Howa in their car, but it wouldn’t start. Also on January 15, an hour or so afterwards at about 10.15am, their neighbours the Al Haddads tried to escape in their car.
They only got a few yards.
The Kabariti family told me about this, because M’s sister’s family are also neighbours to the Al Haddads. M took me up to hear the story from Mazin, brother to Adi Al Haddad. The Al Hadded family, in the same terror of remaining in their building to die that the Nadeems described, decided the safest way to leave was in their car. Believing they were about to lose everything, they took with them a large sum of money, the price of some family land that had just been sold. Adi, with his wife Ahsan, about 40, son Hatam, aged 20, daughter Ala’a, aged 14, and Mohammed aged 23, drove them from their sidestreet into their normally quiet road. To their right, a few hundred yards away, were the tanks that had targeted the Nadeems. To their left, a few hundred yards away, the main road that had already been hit by F16 planes.
from the car looking to the right: tanks were beside mosque
They got to where their road and the main road intersect. At this point the Israeli army struck the car from both tank and plane, it appears with 2 rockets or shells, and at least one phosphorous bomb. The car spun 15 metres away, and as one of the doors flew open, Mohammed was thrown out, catching only the inital brunt of the phosphorous before the car exploded. Abu Rami il Sharif, who lived in the same block as the Haddads and on the corner of this intersection, was able to reach him. As firing continued from the tanks, Abu Rami knew that he could not reach the car to help anyone else, but he knew also that there was no-one left to help.
Helmi Abu Shaban, living opposite Abu Rami on the other side of the street, ventured out to the car at midday. The phosphorous fire was still burning, and looking inside the car, he could see nothing to show any humans had ever been there. Not even any bones. Just ashes.
I went to see Mohammed in Al Shifa hospital last week. When I got there, Ramattan TV was waiting to interview him, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to tell the story to me also. I just told him quietly that I was sorry, and left. He has lost an eye and has burns all down one side of his body. I understand he has a little brother left him who wasn’t with the family at the time.
Looking to the left: the intersection. A black stain marks the attack. Helmi's on rightMazin Al Haddad shows me pieces of phosphorous bombs
I’m told the bursts of noise that are currently shaking the net cafe a little are probably F16 sonic booms and not rockets, so that’s nice! Last night’s attacks involved seven rockets on the tunnel/border area of Rafah and a strike on an empty police station in Gaza city.
The military said Sunday’s attacks were the beginning of a new wave of raids over Gaza, but did not elaborate… Ehud Olmert, Israel’s out-going prime minister, said that the military would respond to attacks in a “severe and disproportionate” fashion after at least 10 rockets and mortar shells hit southern Israel on Sunday… The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah faction led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera that it carried out the attacks.” – Al Jazeera
Israel of course bills their attacks as a “response” to rockets. (Note it’s not Hamas rockets this time; the armed resistance in Gaza is cross political, Hamas does not actually control it all.) There are several issues with Israel’s line, which I know many of my readers have already figured out.
collective punishment is illegal under international law. Nobody – certainly not a whole civilian population – should be punished for something they didn’t personally do.
as I’m sure you know, Gaza rocket firers could just as easily say their current attacks on Israel (Hamas qassam rockets have resulted in 28 Israeli deaths total between 2001 and Jan 9 2009, according to Wikipedia) are a response to Israeli attacks on Gaza. There have been almost daily attacks from Israel since their Jan 18 “ceasefire”, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights put the Palestinian death toll just from the Dec/Jan attacks at 1,285, saying women and children were more than 43% of this.
if we must look for a “first” violence, I personally believe it is the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. The Occupation in all its forms, including – in the West Bank: checkpoints (where people die while waiting to get to hospital) land theft by the building of illegal settlements (settlers routinely shoot at Palestinians) and the “land grab” Wall – and in Gaza, the crushing seige – kills as surely as any other kind of violence. Violence such as the regular Israeli military incursions into both areas of Palestine, whether officially defined as war, or not.
I have just come from Al Shifa hospital, where we were helping with the paperwork of four children with attack injuries such as internal bleeding, or kidney transplant requirements, who we hope are going to be sent out to France for treatment. Amira (who I told you about before) who lost all her family, is one of them, she has both internal injuries and similar bolts in her crushed leg as Basher in the Nadeem family. She can still find a smile except when dealing with the pain of injections. Two women with injured babies, one with phosphorous burns over half his body and I think the other also with burns, share her room, and Amira’s aunt and the other women visitors have formed the usual atmosphere of community, with shared food and support for each other.
Hassan and Halil: two of the 30 injured medics; 21 were killed
A few days ago EJ and I went to visit Hassan in Khan Younis, you’ll remember he was the one who E and A filmed being shot by a sniper. You can also see a picture of him at work in Jabalia here. World Health Organisation figures are that 21 medical workers were killed in the recent attacks and 30 were wounded. Deliberate targeting by Israel of medical workers, and their refusal to allow the wounded to be collected, are both breaches of the Geneva Convention. After Hassan met us, we stopped off to visit the Khan Younis Red Crescent base – I’d not been there before – and of course had to stop for tea and a chat. The Khan Younis Red Crescent hosted British Journalist James Miller for ten days, the year he was shot by Israel. We met Halil Al Subba, who had his own war wounds from going on a call to Khoza’a during a white phosphorous strike there. This in itself was extremely courageous as Israel had declared it a closed military zone and was giving no permission for the wounded to be collected or anyone to be evacuated.
All he remembers is getting out of the driving seat into thick smoke; he passed out instantly as the masks the medics had were no use at all on the phosphorous. His colleagues got him back to the hospital. He was unconscious for 3 hours, but appeared recovered enough to be sent home after some basic treatment. However when he found he had pain that felt like a knife in his chest, he went back to the hospital where chest xrays showed severe internal burns to his lungs.
A Greek medical delegation said they have never seen anything like his injuries, and other medical people have speculated the phosphorous is mixed with other unidentified chemicals also. One of the current problems is doctors can’t clearly know how to treat injuries when they don’t clearly know the causes. Halil has had antibiotics. But no-one knows what long term effects he may expect. When he found out I work with ISM, he told me that he was one of the medics who brought in Rachel Corrie after she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003.
We were fed a wonderful lunch at Hassan’s family home, meeting his lovely wife, children Fawzi, Annan (his little girl who is named after Kofi Annan) and baby Ali, and his extended family. We also got to see the stove Hassan invented, which he was self-deprecatingly telling us about on the Jabalia ambulance shift when I first met him. Not that I really understand, but it involves a old fridge fuel tank in which he can compress the air using a bike pump, turning the fuel from a liquid into a gas, which then burns much more efficiently for cooking use. Me and EJ were extremely impressed. We don’t have any cooking gas at home either, but we just complain about it!
ISM folks have been asked down to Al Faraheen tomorrow, to help a farmer with his harvest. Farmers in this border area are shot at regularly by Israel and one was killed the other day. So we will press release our international presence and hope to give them a slightly safer day. On Wednesday I want to go visit Wadi Salqa, where villagers face constant shooting from Israel and half of them are too frightened to sleep in their homes at night.
Footage of a house in Al Faraheen village, damaged during the recent Israeli war on the Gaza Strip. Video shows the upper floor of the house shelled and burnt. Remains of the shell casing – marked “155m M825E1” – apparently a projectile for deploying white phosphorous – and a substance suspected to be white phosphorous were filmed and collected by ISM volunteers.
Today I met with my friend Reem. She is 21 and works with Mercycorps, and we met when she came to interview me after I arrived on the initial FreeGaza trip. She was so bright and sparkly then, and I know that is still in her somewhere, but right now she is very fragile. She didn’t realise I was back in the country until last Wednesday, when her family was one of the many fleeing attack to Al Quds hospital, and we collided amidst the chaos. Today she told me about what happened to them.
Tuesday night, we had stayed with my uncle elsewhere, because the attacks were so bad. But Wednesday we went home, because it was home. Also we heard that the bombs Israel was using (phosphorous bombs) set things on fire, and we thought if we were in our home we could put out small fires before they burnt everything. We just didn’t realise how bad it was going to get.
Wednesday night was terrifying. The bombing, the shelling – my mother was shaking and reading prayers. We realised how dangerous it was there on the 5th floor, but we were too scared to go downstairs because there were windows all the way and we were afraid the Israeli soldiers or the planes would see us and shoot. My uncle lives on the ground floor, he has two daughters of 6 and 1 1/2, my grandmother lives with him also. He called us and said, come downstairs, but we said we just can’t. Next thing we knew, he’d come upstairs to get us. He actually went all the way up to the 7th floor by accident, and had to come back down to us to bang on our door. So we took blankets and went downstairs with him. We kept thinking – at 4am it will stop. Maybe at 6am it will stop. Because usually the army withdrew by then. We didn’t realise they were just continuing to move towards us this time.
Some hours later, my aunt looked out the window and saw a tank; it was pointing directly at our windows. That’s it, in a moment the shells will hit us directly, we’re dead, we thought. But something happened and it turned away from us. I called Mercycorps and asked them to call the Red Cross and ask for help. But we realised we had to escape immediately, to try to get to the hospital because maybe it was safe. We couldn’t go back to the 5th floor for our day clothes or our passports or IDs. My brother was so worried because if the soldiers got him with no ID, they would shoot him. But everyone in our building said, we have to go NOW. But some of them knew the snipers had just shot a man and his daughter (Haneen Al Batran and her father).
We went outside, we had small children with us – some of the little ones could barely walk but they had to if there wasn’t anyone to carry them. Then I saw you, and the other Red Crescent people coming; my brother was helping my grandmother but she can’t walk, she fell, and he stopped with her though he was sure he would be shot. Then you went to help them, so me and the rest of the family went on into the hospital. But inside, we waited for 10 mins and my uncle and my brother and my grandmother didn’t arrive, and we were sure they were dead. We checked the basement but we didn’t know it had two sides. I started to cry. Mum was shouting at everyone – did you see them, did you see them?
Then I saw my brother and I shouted “where the hell have you been!”
After some hours they said everyone would evacuate from the hospital and go to the UNWRA school, but we had to walk and Israel only gave permission for two ambulances to go with the hundreds of people. It’s a long way and my grandmother can’t walk. I didn’t know what we could do, if she had to stay we wouldn’t leave her. But then we got a wheelchair for her so we could push her. I was carrying someone else’s child because her parents had their other children, she was afraid not to be with them so she cried all the way; she could see how scared we all were. I realised how empty this area of the city was, everything was burning, it was a city of ghosts. I believed they would drop a bomb on us as we walked. But we arrived to the school.
From the UNWRA school, we went to very distant relatives – my uncle’s wife’s relatives. We had nowhere else to go; we stayed three days. We wanted to go home, but we expected after people had left, the army would shell the whole of Tela Howa. After the army withdrew, my father and brother went to check our home and bring our passports and ID. After the ceasefire we went home. But we can still hear shelling from the sea. We think it’s not really a truce, it’s more just a break.
I lost my friend from the WhyNot project – Christine Al Tork. She was really dear to me, she was one of the sweetest girls, kind of smooth and soft. Her parents only had her and her brother, so they took such care of her, and gave her so many opportunities, she took lots of classes and things…she was literally scared to death. She got asthma and then a heart attack, from fear. It was Friday, the day she died. I began to think it would happen to me too, because I was scared to death too. I was so affected by that, my family tried to be very close to me to help me. I looked on Facebook, her friends made an online group for her, and the photos of her after she died affected me so much; one of her father kissing her goodbye for the last time. I couldn’t believe she would never be back.
Then I heard my friend from college, Bissam – her name means spring – was dead. This shock was even worse. I was as pale as Christine after she died. I couldn’t eat or talk. My uncle wanted to wake me out of my shock. He shouted at me – it’s not the time for this – any of us might die at any moment, but we have to try to survive – show some care for yourself, for your family, wake up! I realised I had to find some strength, so I started to eat.
Some of my relatives live in Tuam. Their building was destroyed; six families lived there. My friend’s home was destroyed by shells. Some other relatives had their home burnt, so did another friend. Then yesterday I went to Mercycorps, and I found out my friend Jihan, who worked at Sharek, is dead. I was listening to everyone’s stories and I wanted to escape from reality but it was chasing me. During the attacks, I was calling all my friends every night to say goodbye, I was saying to all of them, please forgive me for any bad things I did. And they would say, Reem, please shut up!
My friends always used to say I was like a character out of a fairy tale, like Snow White or someone, not really living in the real world. After these days, I guess I am in the real world. I can’t watch the news, because the news was us, my life, my friends. All me and family are thinking about now is leaving Gaza.
Those minutes or hours – I literally couldn’t tell you which – when I went out into the street with the amazing Red Crescent medics to meet all the families like Reem’s, who were fleeing for their lives, were a strangely calm time. One of the guys paired up with me, and would quietly say my name and “come” to direct me where we needed to go, firstly with hands in the air but soon holding children and blankets and old people. I saw men crying, children wanting to run from sheer terror and their parents gripping them tight, women clutching babies buried in blankets. We carried several people on stretchers, stopping to bandage the sniper wound of one man on the way.
Towards the end my Red Crescent comrade B realised that we didn’t have his best friend A. He wasn’t answering his phone, and that his building was closest to where the tanks were. He asked me to come and get him (I have this trick of untying my long hair to be clearly visible as a woman, in case it discourages shooting, though in the circumstances I wasn’t convinced it would help) and after an eerie walk through emptiness, we found ourselves within a hundred yards of the tanks. From the next building we called across and discovered several families remained in it but wanted to leave. First they couldn’t find A, but then they did – and I swear he’d slept through the whole thing, with a tank nearly under his window and deafening shelling going on. And we all got back safe.
In these last days, whenever Red Crescent folks from other places turned up on ambulance runs, the greetings were much closer to reunions. Big hugs and 5 or 6 smacking kisses on each cheek. The subtext: “you’re still alive. It’s a miracle, you’re still alive.” E heard today of a third friend who is dead. She has had a hard time. I have lost no-one personal to me.
I have three hangovers that I’m aware of from these days. One, I hate to sleep alone at my flat; the two nights I did during the attacks, it felt too far from the hospital where my work and my friends were and I was worried I would be cut off from them. It still somehow feels like being in the wrong place. Two, I feel happiest when my 3 best Red Crescent friends are all present and within my sight. Three, in the dark when I see bags of rubbish on the street I think they are bodies. This is because I found, when we went to pick up bodies lying in the dark, that they looked more like crumpled bags of rubbish than the people they had been.
The strength of Gaza people astounds me. Everyone was out today fixing things. Re-laying water pipes, clearing rubble. Putting aside the thoughts of the children who are dead, to smile for the children who are still alive. How is it done? Where do they find the courage? And what will be their reward for getting up and going on, one more time?
I forgot to tell you that today again I woke to the sound of shelling from Israeli ships in the Gaza sea.
Jabalia children on a wagonload of destroyed trees
