A multinational delegation of senior military and political leaders has submitted a report to the United Nations asserting that “Israel not only met a reasonable international standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard” during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. A copy of the report was published by UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog group, on Friday.
The delegation, which included 11 former chiefs of staff, generals, high-ranking officers and politicians from the U.S., UK, Germany, Holland, Colombia, Italy, Spain, and Australia, was led by former Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi and General Klaus Naumann, who previously served as the Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, the highest ranking military post in the German armed forces, and as Chairman and most senior officer of NATO’s Military Committee.
In emphasizing the IDF’s compliance with the laws of armed conflict during its 50-day war with Hamas, the report asserted that “Israel sought to avoid the conflict and exercised great restraint over a period of months before the war when its citizens were targeted by sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza. Once the war had begun, Israel made repeated efforts to terminate the fighting.” It called the conflict legitimate, asserting that it was necessary for Israel in order “to defend its citizens and its territory against sustained attack from beyond its borders.”
The report detailed a number of measures the IDF employed to reduce civilian casualties, which were described as often being “in excess of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions,” and stated that while the armed forces of the delegates’ respective nations were each dedicated to protecting civilians during armed conflict, “none of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the IDF last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population in such circumstances.”
We were briefed on the IDF’s strict procedures and standards for confirming the validity of a military target and the presence or absence of civilians, and the stringent requirements for both military and legal authorisation to attack a target. We were briefed on some cases where the IDF declined to attack known military targets due to the presence of civilians, risking, and in some instances costing, Israeli lives.
Measures taken to warn civilians included phone calls, SMS messages, leaflet drops, radio broadcasts, communication via Gaza-based UN staff and the detonation of harmless warning explosive charges, known as “knock on the roof”. Where possible the IDF sought also to give guidance on safe areas and safe routes.
We were briefed on the IDF’s proportionality principles and calculations used in circumstances where an attack was likely to result in civilian deaths. We believe that in general Israeli forces acted proportionately as required by the laws of armed conflict and often went beyond the required legal principles of proportionality, necessity and discrimination.
The report also described Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, its extensive network of attack tunnels built to “kill and abduct Israeli civilians,” its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and its exploitation of UN facilities to store and launch rockets as actions that “clearly amount to war crimes.”
The delegation further affirmed statements previously made by General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in November of 2014 said that “Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties.”
The report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council’s Schabas-Davis commission of inquiry on Gaza, which is set to publish its own findings on Operation Protective Edge next week. The commission has been mired in controversy since its establishment, with its former head, Canadian professor William Schabas, having stepped down after overseeing its work for six months due to allegations of bias. In an op-ed published by The New York Times in April, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor explained:
Following last summer’s conflict in Gaza, the Human Rights Council established a Commission of Inquiry and selected William Schabas, a Canadian law professor, to chair the investigation. In February, Mr. Schabas was forced to resign after documents came to light revealing that, in 2012, he had done consulting work for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Surprisingly, this fact slipped Mr. Schabas’s mind during his vetting process.
It was clear from the outset that Mr. Schabas was not an impartial arbiter since he had a record of public statements suggesting that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former president, Shimon Peres, should face trial at the International Criminal Court. When Israel protested, however, the United Nations ignored it.
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs published a study in March, undertaken by five retired American generals, which reviewed the methods the IDF employed to identify legitimate targets and avoid civilian casualties. The generals observed:
Contrary to accusations of widespread unlawful military conduct, we observed that Israel systemically applied established rules of conduct that adhered to or exceeded the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) in a virtually unprecedented effort to avoid inflicting civilian casualties, even when doing so would have been lawfully permitted, and to satisfy the concerns of critics.
A recent article in The Weekly Standard by Vanderbilt University law professor Willy Stern profiled the IDF’s legal organization, known as Dabla, and outlined the procedures the IDF followed to avoid civilian casualties. Stern quoted an officer from Dabla, Lt. Col. Robert Noyfield, who explained Israel’s rationale in taking such care: “There is no symmetry in international law. We do it out of moral obligation; we do it for ourselves. We are a democratic country that abides by the rule of law. By doing so, of course, we also hope to avoid criticism from the international community. How can we be faulted when abiding by the law?”
In Why the Schabas Report Will Be Every Bit as Biased as the Goldstone Report?, which was published in the March 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, warned that the UNHRC has a systematic bias against Israel that will influence its upcoming report on Operation Protective Edge.
Do we have any reason to expect a fair, objective, and credible report?
Not if we consider the built-in prejudice of the commission’s founding mandate, spelled out in resolution S-21/1 of July 23, 2014, which preemptively declares Israel guilty. […] The resolution mentions Israel 18 times. Hamas is not mentioned once.
Not if we consider that Schabas, the activist chairman who says that he “devoted several months of work” to the project, is someone who performed undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO—on the subject of how to prosecute Israelis in international courts—and who famously declared barely three years ago that the leader he most wants to see in the dock at the International Criminal Court is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
[The] OHCHR’s bias was manifest from day one in their agency chief’s farcical selection of Schabas—of all the law professors in the world—to lead the inquiry. OHCHR knew that, a few months earlier, he had been rejected by a committee of five ambassadors for a similar UN mandate to investigate Israel—on the grounds that he lacked impartiality. Georgetown Law School professor Christine Cerna, herself a one-time UN candidate, has stated that Schabas was chosen specifically because of his well-known positions against Israel. Even Aryeh Neier, a colleague of Schabas at Sciences Po in Paris, founder of Human Rights Watch, and an NGO icon known as a defender of the UN, said of Schabas, “Any judge who had previously called for the indictment of the defendant would recuse himself.” The same OHCHR that recruited Grietje Baars to staff Goldstone I chose Schabas to head Goldstone II.
[Photo: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung / Flickr ]