New light on Israel's Gaza war crimes

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133596§ionid=351020202



More testimonies shed light on Israeli crimes during its 2009 military offensive on the Gaza Strip and its army's use of Palestinians as human shields.

The testimonies by Gaza residents come in a report compiled by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, known as Adalah, Israeli Ynet news website said.

Revolving mainly around the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners by the Israeli military during the 22-day Gaza war, the report echoes findings by an independent UN fact-finding mission led by retired South African justice Richard Goldstone.

One of the moving testimonies in the recent report said Israeli soldiers used a Palestinian and his minor son as vanguards, forcing them to enter homes, open doors and widows and tear down fences.

"Israeli soldiers cuffed me and three of my brothers and for three days had us walk ahead of them, and made sure we did so at gunpoint. They used us as human shields by ordering us to go into houses ahead of them," said a testimony by another Palestinian. "After we'd go out, they would send in the (bomb-sniffing) dogs and only then would they go inside," he recalled.

Regarding their remand conditions, first in the Gaza Strip and later in Israeli prisons, Palestinian prisoners recounted times when they were kept either out in the open, underground or in over-crowded rooms.

Sleep deprivation, hunger, insufficient access to lavatories and long hours of being handcuffed are among the acts of torture the detained Gazans suffered during field and Shin Bet interrogations, they said.

The report criticized Israel's labeling of the prisoners as "unlawful combatants," an application which effectively deprives detainees of any rights reserved for prisoners of war under International Law.

The clause in the International Law allowed Israel to essentially ignore International Humanitarian Law directives, the PCATI and Adalah said in their report.