Is Israel's Gaza War a New War Crime?
by Dennis Bernstein

The use of the internationally banned substance white phosphorus in
highly densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip gives new meaning to
the phrase "white power." White western supremacy enforced by latest
advanced weaponry.

And not only white phosphorus, but also the latest in bunker buster
bombs, unmanned drones, not to mention U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets,
Apache helicopters, etc.

Journalists, human rights officials, international aid workers, and
many doctors and field medics, including high officials of the Red
Cross and the UN, have accused the Israelis of using white phosphorus
illegally against civilian populations, as well as other advanced
weaponry. They have repeatedly witnessed burns on civilians, including
women and children, consistent with the use of white phosphorous.

Meanwhile, Richard Falk, internationally respected legal scholar, and
Special Reporter for the UN on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine,
stated in a recent interview that Israel has potentially committed a
new kind of war crime, by making it impossible for endangered civilians
to flee a war zone.

Israel "has basically locked the population into this war zone and as
far as I know, that hasn't really happened before in such a systematic
way and it probably should be considered a new kind of war crime," said
Falk.

On Jan. 15, Israeli forces bombed several hospitals and a UN compound.
As many as 500 people were sheltering in the Al-Quds Hospital in the
city's southwestern Tal Al-Hawa district when it was bombed multiple
times by Israel and set on fire.

A hospital spokesman said the fire was sparked by phosphorus shells.
"We have been able to control the fire in the hospital," the spokesman
told reporters, "but not in the administrative building. We hope that
the flames don't spread again to the wings of the hospital."

Sharon Lock is an independent journalist and human rights activist from
Australia. For the past two weeks, Lock has been riding in a Red
Crescent ambulance in Gaza, documenting attacks on medics and
ambulances, as they try to reach hundreds of victims of the bombings,
people cut down in the streets or caught under the rubble of hundreds
of destroyed buildings.

According to Lock, who was in Al-Quds Hospital when it was struck
multiple times, 80 percent of the calls for help have gone unanswered,
because Israeli forces "attack the medics" when they try to retrieve
the wounded and the dead, "even after they have been given permission
to move in."

In an interview on Jan. 16, Lock described the attack on Al-Quds
Hospital, in a densely populated part of Gaza City, one of three
medical centers bombed by Israel in a single day.

"During the night we had quite a lot of attacks, about 50 strikes
people counted in our immediate area," she told me, "and about 4 or 5
had actually hit our building. The two that did involve major damage
happened in the morning ...

"One was a rocket that went through the wall of the hospital, into the
pharmacy building, and we retrieved the rocket shell. The other went
through the roof of the social center, which was a part of the hospital
complex, and that started the fire on the roof which the medics were
fighting.

"We did manage to put it out eventually but it was quite difficult. And
then, actually, we were only in the middle of getting the last bits of
the fire out, when we heard shouting from upstairs and went up to the
main steps and I saw my medical colleague covered in blood.

"He said that he'd just picked up a little girl who was part of a
family fleeing their house, and who had come to the hospital to take
shelter. He heard screaming and had gone out and saw she had been shot
by a sniper, and had gunshot wounds to her face and also to her abdomen
and so he swept her off and brought her in for surgery. "

Later the central building at Al-Quds was bombed and also set ablaze.
Lock and other medical staff had to walk hundreds of Palestinians, who
had fled to the hospital for safety, through the darkened streets to
another location in front of Israeli snipers who had taken positions on
the roofs of various building near the hospital.

Overflowing Morgues

Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights activist working in Gaza City
as a volunteer with ambulance services and as co-coordinator for the
Free Gaza Movement. Butterly describes in troubling detail what life
was like at Shifa Hospital, another key medical center attacked by
Israel with U.S.-made weaponry.

"The morgues of Gaza's hospitals are overflowing. The bodies in their
blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa
Hospital's morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs
twisted into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown
off, skulls crushed in.

"Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother, husband,
father, mother, wife, child. Many of those who wait their turn have
lost numerous family members and loved ones. ... Blood is everywhere.
Hospital orderlies hose down the floors of operating rooms, bloodied
bandages lie discarded in corners, and the injured continue to pour in
- bodies lacerated by shrapnel, burns, bullet wounds. Medical workers,
exhausted and under siege, work day and night and each life saved is
seen as a victory over the predominance of death."

On the same day, Israeli shells rained down on a UN compound in Gaza
City, setting fire to its warehouses and reducing to ashes tons of
sorely needed food and medical aid. Some 700 Palestinians had fled to
the UN complex at the time of the bombings and a number of them were
wounded.

John Ging, director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the
Gaza Strip, accused the Israelis of bombing the UN Food Complex with
phosphorus shells."They are phosphorus fires so they are extremely
difficult to put out because, if you put water on, it will just
generate toxic fumes and do nothing to stop the burning," he said.

On Jan. 17, two Palestinian young boys, brothers aged five and seven,
were killed when Israeli tank fire hit a UN school in Gaza. Twenty-five
other Gazans were wounded in the shelling at the school run by the UN
relief agency in Beit Lahiya, The school was the third UN shelter to be
hit by Israeli fire in its 22-day war on the tiny Gaza strip.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN-run school, said several
tank rounds hit the school. The third floor of the school took a direct
hit after a short pause, killing the pair of brothers and injuring
another 14 people.

Gunness said about 1,600 civilians had sought refuge from the fighting
inside the building when it was hit. And he made it clear that Israel
knew what it was hitting.

"The Israeli army knew exactly our GPS coordinates and they would have
known that hundreds of people had taken shelter there," he told Arab-
run news services. "When you have a direct hit into the third floor of
a UN school, there has to be an investigation to see if a war crime has
been committed."

John Ging added "People today are alleging war crimes here in Gaza.
Let's have it properly accounted for. Let's have the legal process
which will establish exactly what has happened here. It is another
failure for our humanity and it is exposing the impotence of our [the
international community's] inability to protect civilians in conflict."

The statistics through the 20th day of the war - over 1,100
Palestinians dead, of which 300 are children, and 5,400 more wounded,
some critically. So far the Israeli strikes have claimed over 15
mosques, many schools, at least three hospitals, several UN facilities,
more than six field medics, and hundreds of private homes and civilian
apartment buildings.

Tutu's Concern

In 2006, Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of the
South African anti-apartheid movement, was prevented from entering
Israel and the Gaza Strip to investigate another potential massacre of
innocent Palestinian civilians.

It took him two years to finally get in. Tutu has been quoted many
times in regards to the similarities between the former apartheid
system in South Africa and the current treatment of occupied
Palestinians.

Tutu wrote in 2003, "Yesterday's South African township dwellers can
tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only
blocks in his own homeland, a (Palestinian) grandfather waits on the
whim of a teenage soldier.

Dennis Bernstein is an award-winning investigative reporter and public
radio producer. He is co-host and executive producer of the daily radio
news magazine, Flashpoints, on Pacifica Radio, and a contributing
editor to the Pacific News Service.

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