Human rights lawyer says Israeli probe raises more questions
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice says the findings of an Israeli investigation into the slaying of 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in Gaza raise questions about the Israeli military’s conduct in the Strip and the thoroughness of the investigative process.
“It’s a pretty surprising document. It’s also a document that invites many questions that it will be difficult, I suspect, for the [Israeli military] to answer,” Nice told Al Jazeera in a television interview.
“For example, [there is] the proposition that six of these people were Hamas, presumably members of Hamas on active [military] service, not people who might have been associated with Hamas in some way. No documentary evidence at all is identified [for that],” he added.
PRCS says Israeli narrative on killing of Gaza medics ‘contradictory’
The president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society has told Al Araby TV that the Israeli narrative on the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in Rafah was “contradictory”.
“It is incomprehensible why the occupation soldiers buried the bodies of the paramedics in a criminal manner,” Younis al-Khatib said.
Al-Khatib added that the Israeli army communicated with the paramedics before killing them and that the evidence – including a video showing their ambulances flashing emergency lights – proved “the falsity of the occupation’s narrative regarding the limited visibility at the site”.
“An independent and impartial investigation must be conducted by a UN body,” he said.
“The report is full of lies,” PRCS spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told AFP. “It is invalid and unacceptable, as it justifies the killing and shifts responsibility to a personal error in the field command when the truth is quite different.”
Israeli probe into killing of medics is a ‘whitewash’: Human rights advocate
Human rights advocate Adam Shapiro says that Israel’s report on the execution of Palestinian medics in Gaza attempts to place limited blame for the incident on a single person while leaving the systematic Israeli policies that enabled it untouched.
“I think ultimately this is a whitewash. It’s an effort to pin the blame on the errors of one person rather than an honest accounting of what happened,” he told Al Jazeera. “We know from the evidence that has been collected and presented by the Palestine Red Crescent that the victims were targeted, that they suffered close-range bullet wounds, that they had the lights on their vehicles at the time. Everything that the Israelis put out from the beginning was a lie.”
Shapiro also said that such efforts have long defined Israel’s approach towards allegations of rights abuses.
“Whether it’s in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Lebanon in previous generations, everywhere the Israeli military operates it conducts and commits war crimes and then it covers them up,” he said.
