Israeli Commander: We Rewrote the rules of war for Gaza

Do not expect this article to get wide coverage. It shows what should have been obvious after the Goldstone report that Israel's conduct in the Gaza incursion was not that concerned about civilian casualties and that much of the official Israeli response is simply not in accord with the facts-to put it politely! I doubt that these revelations will encourage Netanyahu to have a full inquiry and if an inquiry ever is set up it probably will be a carefully chosen group. This is from the Independent.


Israeli commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza'

Civilians 'put at greater risk to save military lives' in winter attack - revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem



A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.


The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".

The officers' revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel's most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander's acknowledgement – if accurate – was "a smoking gun".

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Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel's biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: "Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area... We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference."

His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine – enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF's own code of ethics – that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.

Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: "Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn't have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us."

Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade's war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza – particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets – had "taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head". Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, "here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it."

The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report – that the Israeli military had deliberately "targeted" the civilian population – most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier "any movement must entail gunfire. No one's supposed to be there." He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that "if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement."

The other soldier in the war-room explained: "This doesn't mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That's not something you're going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that."

He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. "Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote ... compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted," he said.

Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.

In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF's ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life "must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians". While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, "it is demanded in Israel's military code and this has always been its tradition".

The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.

That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the "acute dilemmas" posed by Hamas's operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: "Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A 'civilian objective' is any objective which is not a military target." It adds: "In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian."

Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.

How to help Israel!

Israel is pounding Hamas positions not Fatah's. Israel sides with Fatah and the civil strife does nothing to promote the Palestinian cause. It simply weakens an already weak Palestinian opposition to Israel. Israel is happy to help out Fatah in destroying Hamas. Of course the US voices its support for Israeli attacks!

Israeli planes pound Hamas targets
IBRAHIM BARZAK
Associated Press
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli planes pounded Hamas targets and rival Palestinian factions exchanged bursts of automatic weapons fire outside Gaza City's Islamic University Friday. The volatile mix of Israeli strikes and Palestinian infighting plunged Gaza deeper into chaos.

Five Palestinians were killed in a single airstrike by Israel, which said it was responding to Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel - a campaign that showed no sign of subsiding Friday. Hamas fired three rockets at the town of Sderot, where three people were injured by shrapnel and several others were treated for shock.

The sound of gunfire and explosions from fighting between Hamas and Fatah rang out for the sixth straight day in Gaza. Outside the Islamic University - a Hamas stronghold - one person was wounded from the exchange of fire but it was not immediately known from which side.

Members of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' presidential guard and other Fatah loyalists were advancing on Hamas fighters from different directions - and the house of the university's dean was attacked by rocket propelled grenades, according to Hamas.

However, presidential guard spokesman Ali al-Kaisi denied his group was involved in any attack on the university.

The university's president, Kamelen Shaath, appealed for an immediate halt to the violence.

"Universities must be outside the circle of violence and I appeal to the president and all the wise people on both sides to try and spare the university the agony of this fight," he said.

In six days of mayhem, 46 Palestinians have died in the infighting and another 17 were killed in Israeli strikes.

The fighting between Hamas and Fatah has all-but destroyed a two-month-old power sharing deal between them, and brought them close to all-out civil war. The Israeli strikes have introduced a new layer of violence and uncertainty - though a senior army official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no official decision has been made, said Israel had no immediate plans for a major ground offensive to halt rocket fire.

Israeli aircraft fired missiles east of Gaza City on Friday, killing five Palestinians, at least three of them Hamas militants, and wounding six people, Hamas and local doctors said. The military said the target was a Hamas headquarters building. Two other strikes followed but there was no word of any casualties, Palestinian doctors said. The army said it struck at a squad that fired rockets into Israel.

The Palestinian street battles were down from their height two days ago, but the latest cease-fire worked out between the sides was not holding. Gunfire could be heard in many areas, and gunmen who had promised to withdraw from the streets were still manning roadblocks and taking up positions on rooftops.

"Our retaliation for (Fatah's) crimes is going to be beyond their imagination," Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas' military wing, told The Associated Press.

Walid al-Awad, a member of a committee set up to implement the cease-fire, said his team worked late into the night to get the sides to withdraw, but to no avail.

"Nothing has been implemented, and I have warned both sides that this a time bomb that is sabotaging our efforts," al-Awad said.

By most accounts, Hamas' performance in the latest round of internal fighting has been superior to Fatah's, with greater discipline and more motivated fighters.

Although Israel said it wasn't taking sides, the airstrikes did make it harder for Hamas gunmen to move around and that could help Fatah's fighters.

There was no sign of any Israeli military buildup that would indicate plans for a serious intervention into chaotic Gaza, though a few tanks and soldiers moved just across the Gaza border on Thursday.

"Israel will take every defensive measure to stop these rocket attacks. We will defend our citizens against the rockets, against the weapons, against the Iranian-backed Hamas who are attacking Israel," government spokeswoman Miri Eisen said.

Analysts said Israeli policy makers were likely trying to walk a narrow line to avoid uniting Palestinian factions into a common front against Israel but Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a retired general, said Israel could not stand idly by while Palestinian rockets continued to fall.

"We have to show them one thing, that the moment you fire, we shall return fire," he told Israel Radio.

Hamas Web sites, radio and TV carried accusations that forces loyal to Abbas were working with Israel - a charge dismissed as "absurd" by a Fatah spokesman.

The Israeli strikes complicated an already chaotic situation in Gaza, making the embattled Abbas even more vulnerable to Hamas accusations that he is in Israel's pocket. With his aides citing security concerns, Abbas canceled a Thursday trip to Gaza for talks with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

Israel had remained on the sidelines during the infighting, but security officials said the military had to respond to the rocket attacks on Sderot.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was under intense public pressure to respond to the Hamas barrage, and he visited the town late Thursday to tell residents they shouldn't feel alone, his office said. "I am handling this crisis in order to remove this threat as much as possible," he was quoted as saying.

Olmert is fighting for political survival in the face of plummeting popularity and harsh criticism of his handling of last summer's war in Lebanon.

Still, he probably would be wary of a major ground offensive in Gaza, fearful of another inconclusive effort.