JERUSALEM—In the wake of its 50-day confrontation with Hamas in Gaza, the Israeli army has formed a new elite unit—made up entirely of lawyers.
The unit, part of the Military Advocate General’s Corps, will deal with charges of war crimes raised by Palestinians and human rights organizations following the deaths of some 2,200 Gazans, most of them civilians, from air and artillery attacks.
Senior officers have expressed confidence that the Israel Defense Forces can prove, through tapes of operational decisions made in the course of the conflict by air, ground, and naval forces, that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians. Some tapes shown on Israel television during the war show pilots being ordered to pull away from their targets because civilians could be seen in the area.
Israel contends that the civilian casualties in Gaza stem entirely from Hamas’ military wing sheltering behind the civilian population. It points to videos taken by foreign journalists, and its own aircraft, of rockets being fired from the heart of residential areas and near United Nations installations where civilians were sheltering, drawing Israeli counter-fire. When Israel ordered Gaza residents to evacuate certain neighborhoods that were about to be shelled or bombed in order to clear the way for a ground assault, Israeli intelligence officers say, Hamas ordered the civilians to remain in place. Many of those who did, were killed in the assault.
The U.N. Human Rights Council, which Israel asserts is heavily biased against Israel, has appointed a three-person committee headed by Canadian jurist, Prof. William Schabas, to investigate the charges of human rights violations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the committee should instead be investigating the human rights situation in Damascus, Baghdad, and Tripoli.
"The report of this committee has already been written," he said, in allusion to allegedly anti-Israel remarks attributed to Prof. Schabas. "They have nothing to look for here." Schabas has said he will pursue the investigation even if the Israeli government refuses to cooperate.
The Israeli army has already begun its own investigation of a number of contentious incidents in the war, including the so-called "Hannibal" event. The army had adopted a policy of laying down heavy fire on an area where an Israeli soldier has been taken prisoner in order to seal it off and prevent his being taken away, even at the risk of killing the soldier himself. In an incident in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, a mortally wounded lieutenant was carried off by Hamas fighters who emerged from a tunnel. The massive barrage laid down around the area reportedly killed some 150 Palestinians, many of them presumably civilians.
Meanwhile, an Israeli legal advocacy group has filed a criminal suit with the International Criminal Court in the Hague against Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal for the public execution of 38 Gazans by Hamas during the war for allegedly spying for Israel.
The group noted that Mashaal has Jordanian citizenship and that Jordan is a member nation of the international court. The court, said the Israeli group, "is required to exercise its authority in any case in which a citizen of a member nation has allegedly committed a war crime."