Israel’s War on Gazan Children by Stephen Lendman
A new Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) report is damning, providing more evidence of shocking Israeli war crimes - titled “Operative Protective Edge: A War Waged on Gaza’s Children.”
Saying Israeli aggression killed over 2,250 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 547 children. Another 3,374 were injured - “including over 1,000 children whose wounds rendered them permanently disabled.”
DCIP-I’s research “found overwhelming and repeated evidence” of willful Israeli high crimes against peace - including multiple daily attacks on civilian residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, UN shelters, and numerous other non-military targets.
Eyewitness testimonies and other documented evidence showed safe haven areas known to Israel were willfully attacked.
“Missiles fired from Israeli drones and warplanes, artillery shelling, and shrapnel scattered by explosions killed children in their homes, on the street as they fled from attacks with their families, and as they sought shelter from the bombardment in schools,” said DCI-P.
Scores of entire families were massacred in cold blood - murdering children, their parents and relatives. Children were slaughtered eating meals at home, sleeping or playing with friends.
A ground assault on Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood killed 27 children, injuring at least 29 others. On the same day, an entire family was massacred at home eating dinner, including 18 children.
These type incidents reflect longstanding Israeli policy. In the last eight years alone, it waged premeditated war without mercy on Gaza three times - as well as three other smaller scale military offensives - against a largely defenseless population trapped under siege with no place to hide. The entire Strip is a free-fire zone.
Since 2006, Israel murdered well over 1,000 Palestinian children - acts of cold, calculated willful murder.
“Israeli armed forces have been regularly implicated in serious, systematic and institutionalized human rights violations against Palestinian children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT),” said DCI-P - despite core international law protecting them, ignored by Israeli soldiers and other security forces with impunity.
DCI-P said facts on the ground it gathered firsthand “add to the body of well- documented evidence of war crimes and serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israel over the past decade” and earlier.
An entire population is collectively punished. Numerous incidents happening daily. DCI-P and dozens of other human rights groups demand Israel’s blockade end - its war criminals prosecuted and imprisoned for their high crimes.
DCI-P called its 98-page report “a snapshot of the devastation caused by Israel’s 50-day assault on Gaza…Palestinian children continue to withstand the worst of (its) repeated military offensives and increasingly suffer from a man-made humanitarian crisis created by Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza.”
International law is inviolable. It’s meant to be enforced. Accountability is long overdue!
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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