Is Israel Guilty of War Crimes?

by Denis MacEoin • January 29, 2015 at 5:00 am

Can the International Criminal Court [ICC] even be considered an impartial legal body, any more than a Jim Crow court in America's old South?

The supporters of this repackaged anti-Semitism always seem perfectly comfortable "forgetting" that Hamas offers its people no human rights. Thus is a liberal democracy, Israel, maligned by a theocratic tyranny.

It is clear that these illustrious members of the international community are secretly hoping that if they can rig the system so that the Arabs can finish off Israel, they, in the international community, will still be able to preen and congratulate themselves that the obliteration of the Jewish state had nothing to do with them.

Groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hizbullah or Hamas are considered terrorists because they do not abide by the principles of international or domestic law. That, as well as the acts they commit, is what identifies them as terrorists. The differentiating factor with Islamist terror organizations is that they do not recognize international law at all.

Islamic law frees Hamas and other such groups from any obligation to abide by international standards, which they demonize as "Western" or "Christian" and therefore "Satanic."

As stated by an official UN report of 2009, among others, systematic and deliberate targeting of civilians violates International Humanitarian Law and amounts to a war crime.

Any movement, such as Hamas, that is openly determined to bring about the abolition of a sovereign state and the genocide of its citizens, breaks every clause in every charter of international law.

Hamas boasted that Palestinian civilians were killed while Hamas's terrorists remained alive, hiding in their underground bunkers and tunnels. (Image source: Hamas video screenshot)

On November 4, 2014, Amnesty International published a scathing report on Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza during the war between Hamas and Israel last year. Entitled, "Families under the rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes," the report accuses Israel of displaying "callous indifference" in launching attacks on family homes in the densely populated coastal strip, and argued that in some cases the conduct amounted to war crimes. The report makes difficult reading. The toll of human tragedy in the conflict was enormous. Over 2,100 Palestinians were killed, about 1000 of them civilians. But did Israel commit war crimes? And is Amnesty reading war crimes legislation in a balanced way?

Continue Reading Article