UN report accuses Israel and Palestine of war crimes during war in Gaza
UN report details 'unprecedented' suffering during last year's war in Gaza.
Both Israel and Palestinian militants may have committed war crimes during last year's Gaza war, a widely anticipated United Nations report said yesterday, decrying "unprecedented" devastation and human suffering.
The Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict announced it had gathered "substantial information" and "credible allegations" that both sides committed war crimes during the conflict, which killed more than 2,140 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.
"The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented and will impact generations to come," said the chair of the commission, judge Mary McGowan Davis.
Israel, critical of the commission since its inception last year, blasted the report as biased, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting his country "does not commit war crimes".
"Israel defends itself against a terror organisation which calls for its destruction and that itself carries out war crimes," Netanyahu said in a statement, referring to Islamist movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
The report criticised both sides, but especially decried the "huge firepower" Israel had used in Gaza, with more than 6,000 airstrikes and 50,000 artillery shells fired during the 51-day operation.
The bombings of residential buildings had especially dire consequences, wiping out entire families, with 551 children killed, a choked-up McGowen Davis pointed out to reporters.
Hundreds of Palestinian civilians had been killed in their own homes, and the report provided heart-wrenching testimony from a member of the Al Najjar family who lost 19 of his relatives in an attack in Khan Younis on July 26, including his mother and all of his children.
"We all died that day, even those who survived," he said.
According to the report, at least 142 families lost three or more members in an attack on residential buildings.
"The fact that Israel did not revise its practice of air strikes, even after their dire effects on civilians became apparent, raises questions of whether this was part of a broader policy which was at least tacitly approved at the highest level of government," the commission said in a statement.
The investigators meanwhile decried the "indiscriminate" firing of thousands of rockets and mortars at Israel, which it said appeared to have been intended to "spread terror" among civilians.
McGowen Davis pointed to a "pervasive failure on all sides to achieve justice" for the wrongs committed.
The investigators voiced particular concern that a sense of "impunity prevails across the board for violations... allegedly committed by Israeli forces, whether it be in the context of active hostilities in Gaza or killings, torture and ill-treatment in the West Bank".
