Bulldozed crops, destroyed homes, constant threat of violence
3 million people under the longest military occupation in modern history
35 years of Israeli oppression
IDF checkpoints
miserable curfew horrible way to live life
torture ill treatment detention without charge
human rights violations by israeli forces
war crimes
That’s Palestine… what do the Israelis have in mind for Lebanon? What’s different this week in Lebanon from what has happened there since 1968? Why are media memories so short that the US and Israeli thugs are permitted one atrocity after another, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Lebanon with each vicious act reported fresh as if it wasn’t part of a mosaic of squalid oppression?
Failed Israeli policy, impotent thrashing of a mindless brutish nation, global condemnation, their only friends Bolton and the Bush regime…
5. The law of state responsibility requires a state that has committed an internationally wrongful act to restore the status quo ante, if possible, or failing that, to make reparations. “The State responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under an obligation to compensate for the damage caused thereby, insofar as such damage is not made good by restitution.” Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, art. 36, International Law Commission, Report of the International Law Commission on the Work of its Fifty-third Session , UN General Assembly, Official Records, 56th Session, Supplement No. 10, p. 43, UN Document A/56/10 (2001).
6 A state’s obligation to make compensation when an obligation breached is ” owed to the international community as a whole.”
7. Many official investigations of Israeli abuses found Israel guilty of extensive violations of international law, including the massacre of civilians, the illegal use of cluster bombs, and incendiary and fragmentation munitions, (phosphorous and flechette shells) as well as acts of violence directed against civilian objectives. Indeed, this very Commission made a finding in 1983 that Israel had committed genocide against hundreds of Palestinian Arabs in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon. United Nations Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1983/3, 15 February 1983. In April 1996, the United Nations Secretary General ordered an official investigation into an incident in which Israeli gunners fired 36 rounds of proximity fused artillery into the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Headquarters and its immediate vicinity in Qana where over 800 civilians were taking refugee from massive and indiscriminate bombing of some 98 villages in southern Lebanon. 106 civilians were killed in the massacre, 52 of whom were children.
8. Immediately after the attack on the UNIFIL base at Qana, the Secretary-General ordered an investigation to be conducted on an urgent basis. That investigation, completed 1 May 1996 stated: “while the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, the pattern of impacts in the Qana area makes it unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of technical and/or procedural errors.” Report of the Secretary General of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon , (UNIFIL Report) for the period 22 January 1996 to 22 July 1996 (UNIFIL 1996 Report
9. According to UNIFIL officials, the IDF was repeatedly informed by telephone that it was shelling civilians. UNIFIL officials told the press that only one or two minutes into the barrage, they contacted Israel and informed it that its forces were shelling their base. For at least 11 to 12 minutes after the initial UNIFIL contact was made, the Israeli forces continued to fire artillery at the base despite continued frantic requests by UNIFIL to cease fire.
10. The report by Major-General Franklin van Kappen confirms that the orders to fire came from Israeli officers of some level of seniority. Under intense political pressure, the United Nations dropped the investigation and never revealed to the public the underlying evidence and findings upon which the Van Kappen report was based. No final report on the Qana Massacre was ever published.
11. The Qana Massacre is only one of a multitude of incidents constituting persistent and gross violations of the human rights of Lebanese civilians perpetrated by Israel. Between 1968 and 1997 the United Nations Security Council issued 25 resolutions (UNSC resolutions 262, 270, 279, 280, 285, 313, 316, 317, 332, 337, 347, 425, 427, 444, 450, 467, 498, 501, 509, 515, 517, 518, 520, 587, 1052) condemning Israeli military action and attacks on civilians in Lebanon, notwithstanding the many resolutions vetoed in the Council by the United States (e.g., 30 UNSC resolutions vetoed by the United States between September 1972 and May 1990). However, the Qana incident was one instance in which the UN possesses the evidence necessary to establish Israel’s clear legal, if not criminal, responsibility for these violations because they occurred while in the custody and under the protection of UNIFIL soldiers, on territory clearly demarcated as a United Nations base
