Israel has rejected claims by Amnesty International that its army committed war crimes in the latest Gaza conflict, alleging that Amnesty “serves as a propaganda tool for Hamas and other terror groups”.
The Israeli Embassy in London condemned Amnesty for its “extreme bias” and for “producing no evidence” to back up allegations in a new report, entitled ‘Families under the Rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes’.
The 47-page dossier focuses on eight attacks by the IDF which Amnesty said caused the deaths of “at least 104 civilians, including 62 children”. The NGO said that “several of the attacks directly and deliberately targeted civilians or civilian objects, which would constitute war crimes.”
Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East director, said: “Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes [and] displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused.”
An Israeli spokesman called the report “a narrow, decontextualised report [which] restricts its capability to advance positive change”.
As well as questioning Amnesty’s evidence, the embassy also pointed out that the report “does not mention the word ‘terror’ in relation to Hamas or other armed Palestinian groups, nor does it mention tunnels built by Hamas to infiltrate Israel and perpetrate terror attacks.”
Despite omitting these points, the report did say: “Palestinian armed groups also committed war crimes, firing thousands of indiscriminate rockets into Israel, killing six civilians including one child.”
The Israeli Embassy also questioned the reliability of the report’s writers, saying that “independent verification of their claims [is] apparently not deemed necessary”. However, Amnesty stated that its staff were refused entry to Gaza.
Professor Gerald Steinberg, who heads the Jerusalem-based research institute NGO Monitor, said: “Amnesty’s claims had no validity when they were first made, without evidence, during the fighting, and they have no more credibility now, despite the façade of ‘research’ and ‘investigations’.”
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