When the fighting between Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement began last summer, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians fled their homes in the densely packed Gaza Strip, fearful of Israeli air strikes. Since neither Israel nor Egypt would permit them access, many of them fled to schools run by the United Nations.
Now an internal investigation by the UN says that Israel is responsible for the deaths of 44 Palestinian civilians out of a total of 2200 Palestinians, many of them civilians, who were killed in the 50 days of fighting, along with 72 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
The fighting in Gaza was one of the primary reasons that the Palestinian Authority applied for membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Palestinian officials say they want to bring war crimes charges against Israeli soldiers in Gaza. The ICC has begun a preliminary investigation and the UN report could be used in that investigation.
The UN inquiry found that Israel killed civilians in seven different attacks on UN schools. It also found that Hamas weapons were found in three empty schools in Gaza, and that Hamas gunmen “probably” used two schools to launch rocket attacks.
“It is a matter of the utmost gravity that those who looked to them for protection and who sought and were granted shelter there had their hopes and trust denied,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said.
The UN inquiry investigated ten separate incidents. In one case, a UN girls’ school was hit by 88 mortar rounds. In a second incident, a girls’ school was hit by an Israeli missile.
Israeli officials reacted cautiously.
“We are studying the summary of the UN inquiry,” a foreign ministry official told The Media Line on condition of anonymity. “It clearly documents the exploitation by terrorist organizations of UN facilities in the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli army is conducting its own inquiry, as are several other human rights groups.
Meanwhile, two senior American legal experts have concluded that Israel’s policy of “targeting,” complies with international law. Michael Schmitt and John Merriam, both of the US Naval War College wrote in a recent article that they are not specifically referring to the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Their report found that Israel’s practices are “broadly within the mainstream of contemporary state practice but the nuances…can only be understood” in Israel’s specific context.