Inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN Gaza schools

The UN has announced the coming start of an investigation into attacks on UN-operated facilities in the Gaza Strip and the use of UN sites to store weapons during Israel’s summer military operation.

Operation Protective Edge, which lasted for 50 days, caused immeasurable damage to the occupied Palestinian Territories. It was the largest offensive by the Jewish state in the West Bank since the year 2000 and received widespread condemnation – including by Western governments who themselves were accused by rights groups of continuing to arm Israel in the first place.

One case in which a UN-run school was hit with shells took the lives of more than a dozen people, wounding scores of others. At the same time, the UN has accused the Palestinian Hamas resistance of using the facilities to store rockets, which it says brought on the shelling.

"I am planning to move forward with an independent board of inquiry to look into the most serious of those cases, as well as instances in which weaponry was found on UN premises," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at a Security Council meeting on the Middle East.

No particular details of the inquiry were given – including its participants, but Ban explained that such investigations are standard procedure when “there is damage to UN property or UN premises.”

Meanwhile, UNICEF estimated in late August that at least 219 non-UN schools had been damaged by Israeli airstrikes, while 22 were completely destroyed, not to mention the psychological toll on children.

A Palestinian boy looks on as he stands at a United Nations-run school sheltering Palestinians displaced by an Israeli ground offensive, that witnesses said was hit by Israeli shelling, in Jebalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip July 30, 2014. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)A Palestinian boy looks on as he stands at a United Nations-run school sheltering Palestinians displaced by an Israeli ground offensive, that witnesses said was hit by Israeli shelling, in Jebalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip July 30, 2014. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)

A separate UN Human Rights Council probe was also launched in August to deal with the issue of war crimes committed by both sides. It was labeled a ‘kangaroo court’ by Israel. The panel chosen by the organization is to report its results in March 2015. The UNHRC’s then-chief Navi Pillay said back in July she believed Israel was deliberately defying international law.

Israel itself opened five criminal investigations into actions by the IDF, which included numerous cases of alleged indiscriminate shelling and disproportionate use of force against civilians. Some rights groups remained uncertain that trust could be placed into Israelis investigating their own.

READ MORE: Israel starts investigating alleged Gaza abuses by its own forces

"I look forward to a thorough investigation by the Israeli Defense Forces of this and other incidents in which UN facilities sustained hits and many innocent people were killed," Ban also said.

The operation that started on July 8 took the lives of over 2,200 people, almost entirely Palestinians. It displaced over 108,000 people. An estimated 20,000 homes were destroyed, as the fallout from Protective Edge threatens to take decades to reverse.

Australian teen ISIS adherent vows to fight US, UK until black flags fly over Buckingham Palace, White House

An Australian teenager has appeared in a video saying the Islamic State will keep fighting until there is an Islamic Caliphate established in Britain and the United States.

A new Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) propaganda video purportedly shows Australian teen Abdullah Elmir standing in front of dozens of IS fighters, brandishing weapons and warning the UK and US that the militants will not give up.

“To the leaders, to [US President] Obama, to [Australian PM] Tony Abbott I say this: these weapons that we have, these soldiers, we will not stop fighting, we will not put down our weapons until we reach your lands, until we take the head of every tyrant, and until the black flag is flying high in every single land,” says Elmir.

"Until we put the black flag on top of Buckingham Palace, until we put the black flag on top of the White House, we will not stop, and we will keep on fighting,” he adds.

The video is the most recent entry in the ‘Message from Mujahid’ propaganda series released by IS.

Read More: British mother rescues wounded jihadi son from Turkish-Syrian border

Elmir is just 17 years old and comes from Australia. Telling his parents that he was going on a fishing trip, he left the country in June. He was accompanied by a 16-year-old boy, who flew with him to Turkey and then crossed the border into Syria to join IS, according to ABC News. The younger boy’s father intercepted them and took him back to Sydney.

Would-be jihadist Elmir may have been “brainwashed,” a family member told the Daily Telegraph. “I don’t know what these kids get into,” the unnamed relative said. “They don’t know how to fight … they should be getting an education and building this country up.”

Elmir is by no means alone as young IS sympathizer. Three American teenage girls from a Denver suburb stole $2,000 from their parents, skipped school on Friday and flew to Germany. The parents reported the girls missing when the school called to say one of the girls had failed to turn up at her class.

Authorities think the three might have been trying to join Islamic State fighters in Syria. They were arrested at Frankfurt Airport over the weekend by the FBI and returned to Colorado to be reunited with their parents, FBI spokeswoman Suzi Payne told the Associated Press.

Read More: Pregnant Austrian teen who ran off to join ISIS says she 'made a mistake'

A US official said the girls – two sisters, ages 17 and 15, and a 16-year-old friend – were headed toward Turkey en route to Syria. Investigators were reviewing evidence, including the girls’ computers, in the hope that they would discover whether there were “like-minded” friends in their social circle, and whether they had any contacts in Syria.

The US Attorney’s Office in Denver declined to comment on the case, and it is unclear whether the girls will face charges, according to the AP.

Read More: Dutch ISIS sympathizing schoolboy suspended for wanting to 'decapitate Jews'

Another Colorado teen, Shannon Conley, pleaded guilty to charges a month ago that she conspired to help militants in Syria. Conley was arrested in April as she boarded a flight she thought would take her to the Middle East. She told agents she wanted to marry a suitor she met online who said he was a Tunisian man fighting with IS in Syria. If Conley is found guilty, she could face five years in federal prison, and a fine of $250,000.

Palestinians reach out to 50+ nations calling for economic boycott of Israeli settlers

A Palestinian man waves his national flag on the sidelines of a march organized by inhabitants of the West Bank village Nabi Saleh to protest against the expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. (AFP Photo/Abbas Momani)

 

 

The Palestinian Authority is ramping up its diplomatic efforts against Israeli settlements in the territories it occupied in the 1967 war. It has called on 50 countries around the world to freeze business dealings and withdraw investments.
In letters to countries in Latin America and Europe, as well as to South Africa, Australia, Japan and South Korea, the Palestinian Authority asked governments to put pressure on local companies and discourage any relations with the Israeli settlements, Muhammad Shtayyeh, a senior Palestinian official, told the Financial Times.
The messages also requested that Israeli companies with connections to the settlements are barred from doing business in those countries. Citizens of those countries should be advised to abandon the settlements, because staying there is illegal, the Palestinian Authority said.
The campaign for an economic boycott was also given a boost by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during his trip to Europe.
"I call on European companies and foreign companies doing business in the settlements to put an end to their activities," he said following his meeting with European Council President Herman van Rompuy this week.
The campaign follows the EU’s decision in June to ban financial assistance to any Israeli organizations operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights from 2014. The decision infuriated Israel and prevented the country from participating in the Horizon 2020 European scientific exchange program.
Also, in recent months, several individual members of the European Union, including the UK and the Netherlands, began to warn their companies against dealing with Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. This month Dutch infrastructure giant Royal HaskoningDHV announced the withdrawal from a wastewater treatment plant project in East Jerusalem, because the location is outside of the pre-1967 border of Israel.
There are currently more than 500,000 Israelis living in the settlements, which continue to be a point of bitter dispute with Palestinians. Many countries consider their existence unlawful and say they are a major stumbling block on the path toward a peaceful Middle East.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been actively encouraging development of the controversial settlements in defiance of foreign criticism, which comes even from Israel’s long-time ally the US

 

American airstrikes in Yemen kill more civilians than terrorists – HRW report

People gather at the site of a drone strike on the road between Yafe and Radfan districts of the southern Yemeni province of Lahj August 11, 2013. (Reuters)

 

 

A new report by Human Rights Watch once again confirms that Hellfire rockets lack selectivity and exterminate women and children more often than they hit Al-Qaeda associates. Last month the UN urged the US to reveal data on civilian drone casualties.
The prominent human rights organization has released a detailed 102-page report on the US drone attacks and airstrikes in Yemen against militants of the Al-Qaeda wing in the country simultaneously with another human rights organization Amnesty International issuing a report on US drone strikes in Pakistan.
Basically, the HRW report has maintained an already widely-known fact that civilians die too often in reported ‘surgical’ strikes which is unacceptable even by the ‘law of war’.
“The US has launched about 80 targeted killing operations in Yemen since 2009,” claims Humans Rights Watch Senior Researcher Letta Tayler.
Still, the HRW report considers only six of them, one of which took place in 2009, and other five occurring in 2012-2013. These six attacks claimed the lives of 82 people, 57 of whom - or practically 70 percent - were civilians.

According to one of the two the UN reports on drones issued in September, “the first remotely piloted aircraft strike reported in Yemen occurred on November 3, 2002, in an operation aimed at killing a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole in February 2000.”
After that there were no drone strikes in Yemen till May 2011, when a failed attempt to kill cleric Anwar Awlaki, a dual Yemeni and American citizen, took place. 
Several months later, in September 2011, a drone killed Awlaki anyway, opening the way to dozens of ‘target killings’ done by both military and special services, such as the CIA, drones. The total fatalities in Yemen drone warfare estimated by the UN are “between 268 and 393.”

The deadliest of those airstrikes that came into the HRW’s spotlight was probably not the work of drones at all. It occurred in a village of Al-Majalah on December 17, 2009, where alleged US Navy cruise missiles (too big to be fired from a UAV) dropped cluster bombs on a Bedouin village, killing 14 alleged militants along with 41 civilians, including nine women and 21 children. Only five people survived.
“I have a question for America: Despite having drones and spy planes and all of this technology, can’t America differentiate between a terrorist and an innocent civilian?” told the HRW Moqbil Muhammad Ali, who lost 28 relatives in the attack on Al-Majalah village.
So far American strikes to eliminate militants have practically always been accompanied by civilian casualties, despite President Barack Obama promising to avoid them.
“And before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians would be killed or injured, the highest standard we can set,” the HRW quoted President Barack Obama as saying.
“President Obama says the US is doing its utmost to protect civilians from harm in these strikes. Yet in the six cases we examined, at least two were a clear violation of the laws of war,” commented Tayler.
The HRW report also points out that civilian casualties actually work against the US efforts to decrease the terror threat in Yemen.
“Should the United States continue targeted killings in Yemen without addressing the consequences of killing civilians and taking responsibility for unlawful deaths, it risks further angering many Yemenis and handing another recruiting card to AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula]. In response to these killings, AQAP has issued statements accusing the United States of fighting a war not just against Al-Qaeda, but against all Muslims. Residents have set up roadblocks and held demonstrations in which they chant anti-US slogans,” the report reads.
Among cases mentioned in the HRW report is an attack that happened on September 2, 2012, when a US strike on a vehicle in a central Yemeni city of Radaa killed 12 civilians, including three children and a pregnant woman, while the intended target, a tribal leader named Abd Raouf Dahab, was nowhere near the vehicle.
Another airstrike took place on January 23, 2013, killing two alleged militants in a Yemeni village of Al-Masnaah, but again with two confirmed civilian victims.
According to the HRW report, civilians who have absolutely no contacts with terrorists sometimes die trying to earn some money and giving a lift to strangers who turn out to be militants. In that case when an airstrike is launched against such vehicles, missiles destroy the cars with everyone inside.

Protesters loyal to the Shi'ite al-Houthi rebel group burn an effigy of a U.S. aircraft during a demonstration to protest against what they say is U.S. interference in Yemen, including drone strikes, after their weekly Friday prayers in the Old Sanaa city April 12, 2013. (Reuters/Khaled Abdullah )

Also witnesses questioned by the HRW very often mention the fact that victims of airstrikes were not simply mutilated, but also charred beyond recognition, which raises a question about possible thermobaric nature of the warheads used in the US missiles.
One modification of the Hellfire rockets in the US possession, AGM-114N, has a thermobaric warhead.
The Human Rights Watch group does not question America’s right to eliminate its enemies in ‘targeted killing’ strikes without a court ruling, but calls to minimize civilian casualties in the process.
“President Obama should acknowledge these strikes and the US should ensure that it is following the law and President Obama’s policies on targeted killings so that civilians are not unnecessarily killed in these strikes,” Tayler said.
Washington has always insisted that its lethal drone strikes abroad, in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, are fully legitimate, being conducted within the framework of the ‘War on Terror’ against terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and its associates.
In September, British barrister and UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism Ben Emmerson, the author of second of two latest UN reports on the use of drones, accused the CIA of creating the ‘almost invariably classified’ atmosphere around the special forces drone operations in Yemen.
Drone strikes are being made these days on an ‘accountability vacuum’ condition, Emmerson claimed, demanding a full public investigation into the civilian casualties issue be launched, even if it demands certain “redactions on grounds of national security.”
The CIA’s own estimates of civilian deaths in Yemen due to drone strikes, according to the UN report, confirming no more than 58 civilian casualties at the highest. 
Legal Director of the human rights charity Reprieve, representing civilian victims of drone strikes, Kat Craig, told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the UN report by Ben Emmerson “highlights the US’ failure to reveal any information whatsoever about their shadowy, covert drone program. Hiding the reality of civilian deaths is not only morally abhorrent, but an affront to the sort of transparency that should be the hallmark of any democratic government. Some basic accountability is the very least people in Pakistan and Yemen should expect from the CIA as it rains down Hellfire missiles on their homes and villages.” 

Israel war crimes, your tax dollars at work

Israel war crimes, your tax dollars at work

A pro-Palestinian organization - The Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign - had purchased ad space on twelve Seattle King County Metro Transit buses alleging Israeli war crimes in Gaza and featuring the tag line: "your tax dollars at work." Edward Mast from the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign says human rights violations have been found on both sides but Israeli war crimes are far greater in number and far more under reported in this country.