הוועד הציבורי נגד עינויים בישראל

This week, seven human rights organizations based in Israel presented a report to the UN Fact-Finding team investigating allegations of war crimes during “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza, led by Justice Richard Goldstone.  The authors of the report - The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, HaMoked: The Center for the Defence of the Individual, Yesh Din, Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - believe that the Goldstone Committee’s mission of seeking the truth is of critical importance, in particular due to the refusal by Israel’s Attorney General of the organizations' request to order a domestic, independent, and impartial inquiry into the Gaza events. 

The report presents the Goldstone Committee with detailed findings concerning violations of the laws of war that the Israel military allegedly committed during its attack on the Gaza Strip, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”, which should be investigated, referring mainly to policies of collective punishment used against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The report details Israeli military offensives that failed to discriminate between combatants and civilians, damage to civilian government buildings for political objectives, attacks on medical rescue teams, damage to public infrastructure, holding detainees in conditions that violate Israeli and international law, and collective punishment. The authors stressed that, as human rights organizations based in Israel, it is their mandate to report on issues under Israel’s control and responsibility.  They also demanded that suspicions that Hamas violated the laws of war be investigated.

In the introduction of the report, the organizations stated that reliable, thorough, and impartial investigations are an essential tool for the protection of human rights and for extending maximal protection to civilian populations in wartime. Thus, the organizations also asked the Israeli government to cooperate with the inquiry team.  The organizations pointed out that the events of Operation Cast Lead cannot be viewed independently of the closure on the Gaza Strip, which was imposed almost two years before the attack and has continued ever since. They therefore additionally asked the team to review the policy of closing the Gaza border passages before, during, and after the military operation.