AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – Human Rights Watch on Tuesday said the Zionist regime’s military is carrying attacks that “apparently amount to war crimes” during an 11-day war against people in the besieged Gaza Strip in May.
The human rights organization issued its conclusions after investigating three Zionist airstrikes that killed 62 Palestinian civilians. It said “there were no evident military targets in the vicinity” of the attacks.
“Israeli forces carried out attacks in Gaza in May that devastated entire families without any apparent military target nearby,” said Gerry Simpson, associated crisis and conflict director at HRW.
He said the regime’s “consistent unwillingness to seriously investigate alleged war crimes,” underscored the importance of an ongoing investigation into the crimes by the International Criminal Court, or ICC.
There was no immediate reaction to the report by the occupying regime’s military.
The war erupted on May 10 after Hamas fired a barrage of retaliatory rockets toward Al-Quds in support of Palestinian protests against the regime’s heavy-handed policing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and the threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families by Zionist settlers in a nearby neighborhood. Resistance groups in Gaza fired over 4,000 rockets and mortars toward the occupied territories. Over 250 people were killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The HRW report looked into Zionist airstrikes. The most serious, on May 16, involved a series of strikes on Al-Wahda Street, a central thoroughfare in downtown Gaza City. The airstrikes destroyed three apartment buildings and killed a total of 44 civilians, HRW said, including 18 children and 14 women. Twenty-two of the dead were members of a single family, the Al-Kawlaks.
In its investigation, HRW concluded that the Zionist regime had used U.S.-made GBU-31 precision-guided bombs, and that the regime had not warned any of the residents to evacuate the area ahead of time. It also it found no evidence of military targets in the area.
“An attack that is not directed at a specific military objective is unlawful,” it wrote.