Tag: war crimes

Israel concedes error in video claiming to show Hamas tunnels under Gaza hospital

The Israeli military has conceded that a video it released claiming to show Hamas-built tunnels underneath a southern Gaza hospital actually shows different buildings.

On Tuesday, at least nine so-called bunker-busting missiles hit the European Hospital compound in Khan Younis, Gaza’s last cancer and cardiac care hospital.

At least 16 people were killed and more than 70 were injured. The hospital has now had to close due to the damage caused to buildings and water and sewage connections.

Patients have been evacuated, although nearby intensive care units have struggled to accommodate the extra people.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet (ISA) claimed Hamas had constructed a command centre underneath the hospital, and said it believed the group’s military commander Mohammed Sinwar was killed in the attack.

The IDF released a video late on Tuesday highlighting what it said was tunnel infrastructure.

But analysis of satellite imagery shows the buildings highlighted are in a school 150-200 metres away.

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Ex-UK Special Forces break silence on ‘war crimes’ by colleagues

Former members of UK Special Forces have broken years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children.

“They handcuffed a young boy and shot him,” recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. ”He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age.”

Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said.

The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.

The SBS, the Royal Navy’s elite special forces regiment, is also implicated for the first time in the most serious allegations – executions of unarmed and wounded people.

A veteran who served with the SBS said some troops had a “mob mentality”, describing their behaviour on operations as “barbaric”.

“I saw the quietest guys switch, show serious psychopathic traits,” he said. “They were lawless. They felt untouchable.”

Special Forces were deployed to Afghanistan to protect British troops from Taliban fighters and bombmakers. The conflict was a deadly one for members of the UK’s armed forces – 457 lost their lives and thousands more were wounded.

Asked by the BBC about the new eyewitness testimony, the Ministry of Defence said that it was “fully committed” to supporting the ongoing public inquiry into the alleged war crimes and that it urged all veterans with relevant information to come forward. It said that it was “not appropriate for the MoD to comment on allegations” which may be in the inquiry’s scope.

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One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza—But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed

Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:

The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to

the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.

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Dying in ‘Hell’: The fate of Palestinian medics jailed by Israel

The head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital was working at the al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza in December when he and other medics were arrested by the Israeli army for, they said, “national security reasons”.

Four months later, Ofer Prison guards dragged Al-Bursh and dumped him in the prison yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand, according to a statement provided by Israeli human rights organisation, HaMoked.

Recognising him, some of the other prisoners carried Al-Bursh to a nearby room, and he died moments later.

Dr Al-Bursh had become a fixture in the lives of many through the video diaries he posted before his arrest.

His videos showed him with his colleagues, digging mass graves in the al-Shifa yard to bury people because Israel would not let their bodies be taken to a cemetery, operating on the injured and the dying with little or no equipment, and waiting together for the Israeli assault on a hospital where thousands had sought safety.

The assault came in mid-November when, in scenes captured by Dr Al-Bursh, the Israeli army ordered al-Shifa, its patients, staff and approximately 50,000 displaced people sheltering in the compound to vacate.

Dr Al-Bursh made his way to the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza where he worked until that too came under fire in November and he moved to Al-Awda Hospital.

There he was arrested and entered a prison system that Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem describes as “Hell”.

Israel often detains healthcare workers like Dr Al-Bursh, holding them in horrific conditions for “investigation”.

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Israel Bombs Humanitarian Aid Flotilla on Way to Gaza

A ship carrying supplies bound for the Gaza Strip was attacked by Israeli drones in international waters on Friday, according to the activist group that organized the flotilla. The vessel reportedly took at least one direct hit to its hull and sustained damage from fire, forcing its crew to issue an urgent call for help.

Organizers with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) said one of their vessels was attacked by an unidentified drone in the early hours of Friday morning, noting the ship was not far off the coast of Malta when it was hit.

“At 00:23 Maltese time, the Conscience, a Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship, came under direct attack in international waters,” the group said in a press release. “Armed drones attacked the front of an unarmed civilian vessel twice, causing a fire and a substantial breach in the hull. [. . .] The drone strike appears to have deliberately targeted the ship’s generator, leaving the crew without power and placing the vessel at great risk of sinking.”

An FFC spokesperson, Caoimhe Butterly, later told Reuters that the ship was struck en route to Malta, where it was scheduled to pick up other activists, among them climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and retired US Army Colonel Mary Ann Wright. The group said it had arranged the aid shipment “under a media black out to avoid any potential sabotage.”

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A Monstrous Media & Murder in Gaza

Here is yet another example of stunningly craven journalism from The Guardian, entirely illustrative of what is going on across the British establishment media in its coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza for the past 18 months.

We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on.

We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we’ve had eye-witness accounts of the killings.

All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.

The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.

According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves.

(Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)

In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets.

Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.

None of this is surprising. We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot — even children, aid workers and emergency crews.

As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza’s health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff —on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave’s infrastructure.

The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

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Ben Gvir to promote Gaza starvation plan at private Brooklyn ‘welcoming’ brunch

Fascist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is set to appear on April 27 at the home of a Brooklyn businessman and Jewish power broker named Harry Adjmi, according to a private invitation. 

Update: Jeremy Loffredo, a reporter for The Grayzone, was turned away from the Midwood, Brooklyn venue which hosted Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on April 25. He witnessed a heavy security presence outside, with about 100 Shomrim, or volunteer Orthodox Jewish civilian patrolmen on the scene, operating alongside NYPD officers. Loffredo said a small number of Palestine solidarity protesters were confronted by a much larger number of local Zionist supporters of Ben Gvir, who attempted to intimidate them while the civilian patrols obstructed their movements. Among the Zionists outside the venue were members of the Jewish Defense League, the terrorist outfit founded by the late Meir Kahane, who serves as the inspiration of Ben Gvir’s fascist Jewish Power (Otzmah Yehudit) Party in Israel.

The Grayzone has obtained a private invitation to a “welcoming” party for Itamar Ben-Gvir, a messianic settler who has been convicted in a Jerusalem court of abetting a terrorist organization. The party will be held at the home of Harry Adjmi, a Brooklyn-based businessman and influential local Jewish powerbroker who has donated to the campaigns of Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Republican President Donald Trump.

Adjmi confirmed to The Grayzone that he will be hosting Ben Gvir at his home in the Syrian Jewish bastion of Midwood, just off Ocean Avenue.

Hailing from the openly supremacist Jewish Power (Otzmah Yehudit) party, Ben Gvir is the most extreme figure to have ever served as an Israeli minister. A zealous supporter of torture and genocide, he has been filmed celebrating a settler terror attack in which a Palestinian baby was burned to death. Ben Gvir was also videotaped in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron leading a mob of fellow settlers in a violent assault on Palestinian merchants. The Biden administration considered banning him from entering the US in 2022. 

According to the invite to the Brooklyn brunch with Ben Gvir, “RSVP will be required for security.”

Ben-Gvir’s first stop after arriving in the US on April 23 was Mar-a-Lago, the personal residence of President Donald Trump, where he said “senior Republicans… expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid warehouses should be bombed.” 

Throughout the Israeli minister’s speaking tour, which included a stop at Yale University’s Shabtai society, which was co-founded by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, he advanced his plan to “starve Gaza.” 100 students and 30 faculty members reportedly attended his speech.

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Moscow accuses Ukrainian troops of killing civilians seeking food

The Russian Investigative Committee has collected new evidence and gathered accounts of alleged war crimes committed during the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk Region, including killings of civilians looking for food and murders during widespread looting.

The agency highlighted a handful of new cases over the week, sharing the accounts of those who survived the Ukrainian occupation. A woman from the village of Plekhovo testified that Ukrainian troops murdered her son in early September 2024, as he tried to retrieve some food from his house.

“According to the mother’s testimony, the man’s body was found with multiple gunshot wounds and his hands tied,” Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said. The woman also testified that the Ukrainians went on a looting spree immediately after entering the region in early August last year, breaking into homes and garages to steal people’s belongings, as well as their cars.

A similar incident was reported by a resident of Bondarevka, a village near the town of Sudzha. The woman told investigators that Ukrainian forces killed a local man who had gone to get some bread. The civilian was gunned down as he rode his bike in the street, according to the eyewitness.

A resident of Dmitryukov, a small village to the southeast of the city of Sudzha, testified that his father was killed by Ukrainian troops, who demanded his car, threatening to burn the vehicle and his house down. Although the man surrendered his vehicle, the Ukrainians still shot and killed him.

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UN agency runs out of food aid in Gaza after Israeli blockade

The UN World Food Programme says it has depleted all its food stocks in Gaza, where Israel has blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid for seven weeks.

“Today, WFP delivered its last remaining food stocks to hot meals kitchens,” it warned. “These kitchens are expected to fully run out of food in the coming days.”

Israel cut off aid on 2 March and resumed its offensive two weeks later after the collapse of a two-month ceasefire, saying it was putting pressure on Hamas to release its remaining hostages.

The UN says Israel is obliged under international law to ensure supplies for the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza. Israel says it is complying with international law and there is no aid shortage.

At the end of March, all 25 bakeries supported by the WFP in Gaza were forced to close after wheat flour and cooking fuel ran out. Food parcels distributed to families containing two weeks’ rations were also exhausted.

Malnutrition is also rapidly worsening, according to the UN. Last week, one of its humanitarian partners screened 1,300 children in northern Gaza and identified more than 80 cases of acute malnutrition – a two-fold increase from previous weeks.

The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says there are also severe shortages of medicine, medical supplies and equipment for hospitals overwhelmed by casualties from the Israeli bombardment, and that fuel shortages are hampering water production and distribution.

World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “an awful and grim moment” had been reached in Gaza.

“This aid blockade must end. Lives depend on it.”

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Israel’s Ben Gvir Says US Republicans Support His Plan To Bomb Food in Gaza

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is visiting the US and said on Wednesday that during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, he received support from Republican leadership for his plan to bomb food and aid warehouses in Gaza.

“I had the honor and privilege to meet with senior officials of the Republican Party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate,” Ben Gvir wrote on X.

“They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid warehouses should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely,” the minister added.

Ben Gvir has been calling for Israel to bomb humanitarian aid that was allowed into Gaza during the short-lived ceasefire. “The government must also order the bombing of the aid stockpiles that have accumulated in Gaza in enormous quantities during and before the ceasefire,” he said in March after Israel imposed a total blockade on all goods entering Gaza.

The Trump administration has strongly backed Israel’s blockade on aid and the collective punishment of the civilian population in Gaza, a clear war crime under international law.

In another post on Wednesday, Ben Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, vowed that “not a single gram” of food will enter Gaza until Israeli hostages are released, although Israel has refused Hamas’s offer to free all the captives in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

“I see the reports about the debate over who should deliver ‘humanitarian’ aid to Gaza: Well, this is a fundamentally foolish debate, because not a single gram of aid should enter the entire Strip as long as our hostages are held there—not by some external organization, nor by IDF soldiers,” Ben Gvir said.

“This is the situation today, and only by maintaining it will it be possible to bring Hamas to its knees and free our hostages by force,” he added.

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