No one should be above the law

Tariq Al-Maeena talmaeena@aol.com in Arab News

From 1945 to 1949, a series of trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, before the International Military Tribunal. In the dock were 24 major political and military leaders of Nazi Germany, indicted for aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges included the wanton killing and total disregard for the lives of Poles, Russians, Jews and others.

Now that there is a lull in the Holocaust in Gaza, several international organizations including appointees by the United Nations have taken it a step further to charge Israeli leaders for their complicity in the more than three weeks of murderous assault on the people of Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have all been named as conspirators in this murderous assault on a primarily defenseless people. A formal complaint was submitted by Lebanese lawyers to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, against Ehud Barak and others in the Israeli Cabinet on the charge that they had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by ordering and maintaining a siege on Gaza.

This was not a war as some may have been led to believe but a systematic destruction of human lives carried out with unmatched firepower. Since June 2007, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been under a blockade imposed by the Israeli government, helped in great part by former US President George Bush and his administration. According to international law, the siege, which is still in force, is collective punishment of innocent people.

The-year-and-a-half-long siege had caused severe food and fuel shortages, intermittent drinking water and electricity supply problems, disruption to sewage treatment plants and shortages of medicine and essential medical equipment, affecting the people — a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Rome Statute. The despair and depression of such a people cannot be described in simple words.

While Americans were going to the polls back in November, the Israelis were violating the fragile cease-fire agreement killing 15 Palestinian civilians and wounding 50 others including seven women and 15 children. This was preceded by the blocking of UN humanitarian supplies and holding shipments of EU-funded fuel to the territory’s sole power plant.

Then on Dec. 27, 2008, the Israelis began the aerial bombardment of civilian population centers in Gaza. The attacks involved scores of aircraft sorties, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza neighborhoods. Schools and hospitals were initially targeted, bringing the death toll of children to a disproportionate number.

More than 1,300 people — men, women and children lost their lives and 5,300 people were injured. The bombs damaged thousands of homes and turned hundreds of thousands of people into refugees. White phosphorus explosives were used indiscriminately against a defenseless people.

White phosphorus is an incendiary agent used to inflict serious burn wounds. UN officials and human rights groups have alleged Israel used it in the 22-day Gaza campaign. Amnesty International has called Israel’s firing of white phosphorus shells in densely populated residential areas of Gaza a war crime.

In their charge, Amnesty International stated that its researchers had found phosphorus wedges, sometimes still burning, in residential areas of Gaza. The group said that the wedges had been packed into steel artillery shells and fired from the air, a tactic that can scatter them over an area larger than a soccer field.

Medics interviewed in Gaza last week confirmed that so many patients had sustained burns consistent with white phosphorus and that it was obvious beyond a degree of doubt that Israeli forces used the chemical in highly populated areas.

At Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza City, doctors said that scores of patients had arrived with unusual burns, dark, foul-smelling splotches that grew deeper and blacker despite being washed with water and saline solution. The burns were so toxic in some patients that even those with relatively minor wounds, which ought to have been treatable, grew ill and died, the doctors said.

“We have never seen this type of injury or the number of such injuries,” said Dr. Nafez Abu Sha’ban, the head of the burns unit at Shifa. “These were not usual burns.”

The victims reported that they’d come into contact with smoking chunks of phosphorus, and in some cases had reached hospitals with wounds on their bodies still smoking. White phosphorus burns as long as it’s exposed to oxygen, and can reach temperatures well over 1,000 degrees.

To protect themselves, the Israelis first went into a total denial and spin mode. Then taking it a step further, they retrained their own media from revealing any details on those parties involved in this heinous crime.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli government made it forbidden for the press to make known the full names of military commanders of the units that participated in the war on Gaza. This action was taken to “prevent the possibility of prosecution for war crimes by Israeli left-wing activists and international organizations.” But can the Israeli government escape these charges so simply? Only if the rest of the world remains muted, and permits such atrocities to happen again and again without demanding punishment to the perpetrators.


Arif N. Khanhttp://www.netvert.biz/wordpowerhttp://profiles.yahoo.com/ank2000pkPS. Please endorse a copy of your comments on my post to ank2000pk@yahoo.com