By Independent News Roundup
David Shavin EIRNS
The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released their 19-page report which finds Israeli forces guilty of committing war crimes, including directing attacks against civilians and willful killing, in their attacks on educational facilities that caused civilian casualties. “In killing civilians sheltering in schools and religious sites, Israeli security forces committed the crime against humanity of extermination. While the destruction of cultural property, including educational facilities, was not in itself a genocidal act, evidence of such conduct may nevertheless infer genocidal intent to destroy a protected group.... Israel has obliterated Gaza’s education system and destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip.”
The commission was set up by the UN to investigate violations of humanitarian and human rights law in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. The three-member commission said Israeli attacks “targeted religious sites that served as places of refuge, killing hundreds of people, including women and children.” Commission chair Navi Pillay, a senior South African judge, said in a statement accompanying the report: “We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza.... Children in Gaza have lost their childhood. They are forced to worry about survival amid attacks, uncertainty, starvation and subhuman living conditions.”
The report centered upon the horrors in Gaza but its mission also included the West Bank. There it found that Israel had “done little” to deal with the attacks on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories as a whole, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel itself. It said Israel had “done little” to prevent or prosecute Jewish settlers in the West Bank who “intentionally targeted educational facilities and students to terrorize (Palestinian) communities and force them to leave their homes.” Rather, Israeli authorities had intimidated and, in some cases, detained Israeli and Palestinian teachers and students who “expressed concern or solidarity with the civilian population in Gaza.”
The Commission urged the Israeli government to stop attacking cultural, religious and education institutions, “immediately end its unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory” and cease all settlement activity. It said the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should comply fully with provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice.
The court has ordered Israel “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide against people in Gaza” and allow full humanitarian aid to get through.
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