Zivilisten im Gazakrieg
Viel ist geschrieben worden über den Goldstone-Bericht der UN-Untersuchungskommission, die sich mit den Ereignissen in Gaza während der “Operation Gegossenes Blei” im Dezember 2008 befasst. Lawrence Wright weiss nun im New Yorker ein interessantes Detail zu dem Vorwurf zu berichten, dass israelische Truppen auf Zivilisten mit Parlamentärsflagge geschossen haben sollen. Im Gespräch mit Herzi Halevi, einem der Kommandeure der Operation, erklärt dieser:
The ground troops attacked Gaza simultaneously from the north and the east. The soldiers expected fierce resistance, but the border areas were spookily empty. Some units spent a week in the Strip without seeing a single Arab. Halevi led the paratroopers into the northeastern zone. The first night, he occupied a small town, El Atatra. “This is what I found,” he told me later, in his office, on a military base near Tel Aviv. He unfurled a map, drawn by Hamas fighters, showing where snipers were to be stationed, tunnels had been dug, and improvised explosive devices had been planted. Halevi said of Hamas, “They took a civilian neighborhood and turned it into a military camp.” He showed me photographs of arms caches that his soldiers had uncovered in mosques, and of houses that had been booby-trapped. “This is the house of one of the Hamas officers in El Atatra,” he said, projecting a photograph of a dummy standing beside a dark staircase. “The dummy is to make us think he is a soldier,” Halevi said. “Behind him was an I.E.D. There was also a tunnel. The idea was that our soldiers see the dummy, they run to shoot him, and the I.E.D. explodes. Then the terrorists come out of the tunnel and kidnap our soldiers.”
Human Rights Watch has reported eleven instances of Israeli troops shooting civilians carrying white flags, including five women and four children—one of many incidents that human-rights groups say may constitute a war crime. According to Halevi, Hamas fighters had stationed weapons in various houses so that they could fire on the Israelis. When the troops approached, the fighters came outside unarmed, carrying a white flag. Maintaining this guise, they ran over to another arms cache and resumed firing.
Wenn diese Informationen richtig sind, dürfte von den Vorwürfen gegen die israelische Armee nicht mehr viel übrigbleiben.
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