GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – An international human rights group has urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to look into potential war crimes following the “unlawful attacks” committed during the Zionist regime’s deadly assault on the Gaza Strip in August.
Using photographs of weapons fragments, satellite imagery analysis, and testimony from dozens of interviews, the rights group reconstructed the circumstances around three specific attacks carried out during the offensive, it said in a report in late October.
“Israeli authorities boasted about the precision of their operation.” Yet, the rights group found that “victims of these ‘precise’ attacks included a four-year-old boy, a teenager visiting his mother’s grave, and a 22-year-old student at home with her family.”
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general said that “Israel’s latest offensive on Gaza lasted only three days, but that was ample time to unleash fresh trauma and destruction on the besieged population.” “The three-day deadly attacks we examined must be investigated as war crimes.”
Callamard pointed out that the violations documented by the rights group were perpetrated in the context of the regime’s ongoing illegal blockade on Gaza imposed since 2007, describing it as “a key tool of its apartheid regime.”
“Palestinians in Gaza are dominated, oppressed and segregated, trapped in a 15-year nightmare where recurrent unlawful attacks punctuate a worsening humanitarian crisis,” she elaborated, noting “As well as investigating war crimes committed in Gaza, the ICC should consider the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
According to the report, all the witnesses, survivors, and victims’ relatives interviewed by Amnesty demanded accountability for the heinous crimes committed by Zionist troops.
Wissam Nejem, who lost four cousins in the regim’s attack on al-Falluja cemetery in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, told the rights group “Nothing can bring back our dead children, but truth and justice could at least give the families some peace.”