(https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/13/israel-apparent-war-crimes-gaza)

(New York) - Israeli forces' repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 protesters in Gaza and wounded thousands with live ammunition.

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Human Rights Watch interviewed nine people who witnessed Israeli forces shooting protesters in Gaza on May 14, the day with the highest toll of deaths and injuries so far when more than 60 people were killed, and another who saw a journalist shot and killed on April 6. Seven of these interviewees not only witnessed people being shot, but were also themselves shot. The shootings happened at places where protests were held near the perimeter fences that separate the Gaza Strip from Israel, including east of Jabalya, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. Their accounts, along with photographs and videos, show a pattern of Israeli forces shooting people who posed no imminent threat to life with live ammunition.

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Six of the witnesses Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were 200 to 300 meters from the two parallel fences, that in most places separate Gaza's eastern periphery and Israel, on May 14 when Israeli forces shot them or people close to them with live ammunition. The victims include journalists, civil defense workers, and volunteers trying to evacuate the wounded, and a child running away from the fences.

Three other witnesses said that soldiers shot them when they were between 30 and 40 meters from the fences. These three include a 14-year-old boy and a 48-year-old man, shot in separate incidents, who said they had not thrown stones or otherwise tried to harm Israeli soldiers. A third man said he had approached the fences and thrown stones at Israeli forces, but that he was shot later, while attempting to evacuate another man who was shot and wounded. The accounts are consistent with numerous news reports and videos that show Palestinians being shot while standing still or running away from the fences.

Those Human Rights Watch interviewed said most of the shooting incidents they witnessed during the May 14 protests involved Israeli forces shooting people in the legs. But witnesses also described seven additional cases in which Israeli forces shot protesters who posed no imminent threat to life in the upper body, indicating that Israeli soldiers may have intended to kill them. One witness said he was shot in the back at a distance of 200 meters from the fences, with the bullet exiting his chest. Another said he saw a civil defense worker fatally shot in the chest 200 meters from the fences. Another witness said he saw a man in his 50s who was shot in the head when he approached to within 15 meters of the fences while holding a Palestinian flag. Two witnesses said they saw a man who was fatally shot in the head while being evacuated from close to the fences after being shot in the arm.

From March 30 to June 8, Palestinians have engaged in weekly demonstrations near the fences between Gaza and Israel to protest against the 11-year closure of Gaza and to commemorate the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees when Israel was established in 1948. Protests held on May 14 were also against the opening of the US embassy that day in Jerusalem. During the protests in this period, Israeli forces fired on demonstrators and killed 118 people during demonstrations, including 14 children, and wounded 3,895 with live ammunition who required hospitalization. At least 40 have needed to have limbs amputated, and hundreds more suffered severe injuries, medical officials reported.

The Israeli closure of Gaza, backed by Egypt, as well as disputes over funding between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have left medical facilities struggling to operate due to severe lack of electricity and essential drugs, medical disposables, and equipment. Doctors in Gaza have told Physicians for Human Rights-Israel they are powerless to provide needed treatment to many wounded patients.

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During the weekly protests, the Israeli military shot and killed protesters on the basis of a policy, according to public statements by Israeli officials and a submission to Israel's supreme court, to use live ammunition against people who approached or attempted to cross or damage the fences. Israeli leaders rejected repeated calls from the UN and the EU and petitions by human rights groups to change those orders and praised the military's actions.

Israeli officials, including military commanders, apparently greenlighted the use of live ammunition against demonstrators. The officials include the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The vast majority of protesters were unarmed. Some threw rocks and “Molotov cocktails” (improvised gasoline bombs), used slingshots to hurl projectiles, launched kites with incendiary materials, and sought to damage the fences between Gaza and Israel. In one instance, four armed men fired at Israeli soldiers during a protest in northern Gaza on May 14, a witness said.

The UN reported that four Israeli soldiers have been wounded during the Gaza protests from March 30 to June 7, the first of whom was a soldier who was lightly wounded on May 14. An Israeli military spokesperson told the Guardian that no one had crossed the fences on May 14. “Our troops have not taken any sustained direct fire,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.

International human rights law standards on the use of force, which apply to law enforcement situations such as the Gaza protests, permit the use of live ammunition only as a last resort to prevent the imminent threat of death or serious injury. Israeli officials explicitly rejected human rights standards and argued that live ammunition was necessary to stop protesters from breaching the fences, because Hamas organized the protests so armed fighters could exploit the breaches to kill or capture soldiers or civilians. The use of live ammunition cannot be justified by automatically deeming every Palestinian who attempts to breach the fences to be an imminent threat to life, and in fact Israeli forces also shot medics, journalists, children, and others who were hundreds of meters away from the fences, Human Rights Watch said. In addition, because Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions as an occupied people, any wilful killing of them would constitute a war crime.

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Many of the injuries are life-changing, according to medical personnel. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stated on April 19 that their clinics in Gaza had treated more than 250 people “where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone,” many of whom would require additional surgery. From March 30 to May 23, 40 people shot by Israeli forces, including at least three children, needed a limb amputated, 10 of whom lost a leg above the knee, according to information reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical sources to the World Health Organization.

Prior to the first mass weekly demonstration in Gaza on March 30, the Israeli government security cabinet - which consists of the prime minister, defense minister, and other senior officials - held two meetings to discuss the army's planned response. The Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, briefed the security cabinet and later told Israeli media that “a big portion of the army” as well as more than 100 snipers would be present and that “the orders are to use a lot of force.” On March 29, Netanyahu's Arabic spokesman posted a video of a man shot in the leg, stating, “This is the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face.”

On March 30, the Israeli military, using live ammunition, killed 17 Palestinians, 12 of them demonstrators, and wounded hundreds. The next day, the chairperson of Meretz, a left-leaning Israeli political party, the EU, and the UN secretary-general separately called for an independent investigation into the events. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman rejected those calls and said that “the IDF soldiers” at the Gaza fences “have my full backing.” Netanyahu thanked “our soldiers who are protecting the country's borders.”

Protesters announced further demonstrations for the following Friday, April 6. Ahead of those protests, an Israeli military spokesperson stated that people “could potentially be shot” if they approached the fences or tried to damage them, and Lieberman stated that “anyone who comes close to the fence endangers his life.” During the April 6 protests, the Israeli military killed nine Palestinians in Gaza and injured hundreds more, according to the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, which had called on soldiers to disobey unlawful orders to fire on protesters who posed no threat to life. At a cabinet meeting on April 11, Netanyahu chastised critics of the military's actions and said “we will give [Israeli soldiers] all the backing they need to do their holy work.”

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(https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf)

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There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.

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To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism. In return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

All Natives Resist Colonists

There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."

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There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding". The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

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It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.

Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab.

Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.

The Iron Wall

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism.

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population - behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.
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(https://www.gov.il/en/pages/event-ceremony180723)

One hundred years after the 'iron wall' was stamped in Jabotinsky's writings we are continuing to successfully implement these principles.

If Hamas knows that any Palestinian who approaches the fence gets shot (I don't know that this is really true but hypothetically), then think about why Hamas agents would hand rocks to children and encourage them to run up to the fence.

It's because of you. You make it an effective tactic for them. Your naivete about the nature of evil ensures that using civilians is a winning tactic for them. You get sad for the poor kiddoes, Israel caves and gives concessions, the evil doers get a victory. And since it worked for them, it ensures they will use children as a weapon next time. Congrats. If you didn't give them any attention, the tactic would not work for them, thus they would stop doing it.