* ‘Culture of impunity’ on both sides of conflict
By Rory McCarthy in Gaza City
Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel laureate, called for an end to the “abominable” Israeli blockade of Gaza yesterday and condemned a “culture of impunity” on both sides of the conflict.
Tutu was in Gaza on a three-day mission, sent by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the deaths of 18 Palestinians from a single family, who were killed by a wave of Israeli artillery shells in Beit Hanoun in November 2006. Tutu said he was in a “state of shock” after seeing Gaza and taking detailed witness testimony from survivors of the incident.
“We saw a forlorn, deserted, desolate and eerie place,” he said. “The entire situation is abominable. We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege, if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like themselves.” The international community was also at fault, he said, for its “silence and complicity”.
Tutu said he and his team had wanted to travel to Israel as well, to hear the Israeli account of what happened and to visit the town of Sderot, which is the frequent target of rocket attacks from militants in Gaza. However, in the past 18 months since the deaths in Beit Hanoun Israel has not granted Tutu a visa. He reached Gaza this week by making a rare crossing from Egypt.
The archbishop and anti-apartheid campaigner said peace between Israel and the Palestinians would only come with accountability for incidents like the Beit Hanoun shelling, and with dialogue between the warring parties.
“There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations,” he said. “Israel has admitted it made a mistake but this falls far short of accountability and due redress for victims and their families.”
Israel’s military has said the shelling in Beit Hanoun was mistaken and was the result of a “rare and severe failure in the artillery fire control system” which created “incorrect range-findings”. It said no legal action would be taken against any officer.
However, it is not clear why the artillery weapon was targeted so close to a residential district of Beit Hanoun, nor why shells continued to be fired after the first one hit the house. At least six shells were fired in the space of a few minutes that morning, though some witnesses told Tutu’s team that as many as 15 were fired.
Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, who travelled with Tutu in his team, said it was her preliminary assessment that the incident was still a breach of international law.
“Firing in a way that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants is clearly a violation of international humanitarian law,” she said. “I don’t think that the idea of a technical mistake takes away from the initial responsibility of the action of firing where civilian casualties are clearly foreseeable … it has to be foreseeable when you give yourself such a small margin that any error has the potential to lead to civilian casualties.”
Tutu met with the former Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday and told him that, while he was opposed to the Israeli occupation, he condemned the rocket fire by militants into Gaza. Tutu said there should be more dialogue with Hamas.
“True security, peace, will not come from the barrel of a gun,” he said. “It will come through negotiation; negotiation not with your friends, peace can come only when enemies sit down and talk. It happened in South Africa. It has happened more recently in Northern Ireland. It will happen here too.
Tutu meets Hamas leader, raps Israel for barring entry
05.30.2008 | Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu criticized Israel’s refusal to allow him entry to the country, in his role as head of the U.S. special committee to investigate the November 2006 incident in Beit Hanun where 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire.
In a telephone interview with Haaretz after he met with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, Tutu said he was disappointed that he was not allowed to visit Sderot and meet the victims of the Qassam rocket attacks there.
The former archbishop of Capetown, South Africa - who won the Nobel in 1984 for his struggle against apartheid - was appointed to head the special committee by the UN human Rights Council in Geneva.
However, Israel has announced that it will not cooperate with the committee.
Committee representatives have asked the Israeli delegation to the UN in Geneva a number of times to make arrangements for a visit, but have never received replies. Tutu then decided to settle for a visit in Beit Hanun. He arrived in Gaza on Tuesday after traveling through Egypt, and entered the Gaza Strip via the Rafah Crossing.
Tutu, 77, expressed his astonishment at Israel’s behavior, as he has been invited a number of times to speak in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on behalf of the Peres Center for Peace, where he is a member of the International Board of Governors, along with other Nobel Prize winners.
Tutu told Haaretz that he made it clear to Haniyeh and other Hamas members he spoke to that there is no difference between firing Qassam rockets on Israeli citizens and Israeli attacks on Gazans.
“We also say that the people of Sderot suffer from the Qassam rockets. We care about them too,” said Tutu.
He said he expects the Israelis, as those who remember the Holocaust, like the South Africans, to be sensitive to the suffering of the Palestinians. Tutu added that he did not remember the last time he was so deeply shocked as when he met with the families of the victims of the Israeli shelling of Beit Hanun.
Tutu ‘devastated’ by Palestinian survivor stories
UN team meets survivors of 2006 Israeli bombing that killed 19 Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
05.28.2008 | Middle-East-Online.com
By
GAZA - UN human rights observers led by Desmond Tutu on Wednesday met survivors of a 2006 Israeli bombing that killed 19 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, leading the South African cleric to say the group was “devastated” by what they learned.
Tutu: ‘This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy’
The UN team travelled to the town of Beit Hanun in northern Gaza where residents told of the Israeli shelling on the night of November 8, 2006, that killed the civilians, including five women and eight children, in their homes.
“I was here with my son. I was holding his hand when he died. Can you imagine a mother holding the intestines of her own son,” said Tahini al-Assamna through her tears, describing the attack.
She took Tutu and his UN team on a tour of her three storey house where a hole still remains in the roof from the artillery fire. She also lost three of her brothers-in-law in the attack.
Tutu commented that the purpose of the visit was to gather information to write a report for the UN Human Rights Council, “but we wanted to say that we are quite devastated.”
“This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy,” added the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.
In February, the Israeli army announced that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack.
After conducting an internal investigation, Israel concluded that the shelling of the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system.”
The UN Human Rights Council had decided to send a team to Gaza to investigate the killings in 2006 but Israel refused to grant visas.
Tutu and his team on Tuesday circumvented Israeli restrictions by entering the Palestinian territory through the crossing with Egypt, which was opened especially for them.
Tutu plunges into heart of Israeli-Palestinian conflict
05.29.2008 | http://afp.google.com
By AFP
BEIT HANUN, Gaza Strip (AFP) — Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Wednesday plunged into the harsh reality of the conflict in Gaza where a tearful Palestinian family recounted losing loved ones in an Israeli attack and the ruling Hamas movement expounded its hardline stance.
Ismail Haniya and Desmond Tutu
The South African cleric, heading a team of UN human rights observers, listened to members of the Assamna family tell of a 2006 Israeli shelling of their village that killed 19 civilians, including eight children, while they were sleeping.
On the top floor of the Assamna’s bombed home, the glass in the windows is gone and there is a hole in the ceiling and the blue sky can been seen through the rusted iron frame of the house.
“I was here with my son. I was holding his hand when he died. Can you imagine a mother holding the intestines of her own son,” said Tahini al-Assamna through her tears, describing the scene after the attack.
Tutu commented that the purpose of the visit was to gather information to write a report for the UN Human Rights Council, “but we wanted to say that we are quite devastated.”
The Palestinian woman told Tutu and his UN team that she also lost three brothers-in-law in the attack. And her husband was killed two days before the bombing during an Israeli army operation against rocket firings from Gaza.
Imad Okal, a UN representative in northern Gaza, looked around the Assamna house and commented that it was “very evident that this building was a residential home.”
Leaning against a scorched wall of the house, Saad Abdallah Assamna, 52, said he only hoped that “there will be an inquiry and those responsible will be judged before an international tribunal.
Tutu also met with the mayor of Beit Hanun, a member of the Islamic Hamas movement which has ruled Gaza since last June after ousting forces loyal to moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
“The Israelis do not need any pretext to kill civilians. The only goal is to kill,” the mayor, Mohammed Naziq al-Kafarna, told Tutu and British professor Christine Chinkin who is accompanying the mission.
“What we have seen confirms that what has happened is totally unacceptable,” said Tutu, also conveying his sympathies to the townspeople.
But the longtime anti-apartheid and peace activist pointed out that there is also suffering on the other side of the border in Israel.
“We also say that the people of Sderot suffer from the Qassam rockets. We care about them too,” said Tutu, referring to the southern Israeli town that is the frequent target of rockets fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza.”
“The two people, Israeli and Palestinian, can live peacefully together but it cannot happen through acts of violence,” he said.
The Palestinian mayor frowned and responded: “You must realize that the Palestinians are fighting for their rights. The rockets are one reaction” to Israeli military operations.
“Rockets are nothing in the face of Israeli Apache helicopters and F-16s which kill our children day and night,” he added.
But Tutu interrupted the mayor to say “any attack against civilians, whatever their motivations, is a violation” against human rights.
Israel has refused to allow the UN rights observers to visit Sderot to speak with the victims of rocket firings from Gaza. It also refused to issue visas to the UN Human Rights Council team sent to Gaza to investigate the 2006 slaughter.
Tutu and his team on Tuesday circumvented Israeli restrictions by entering the Palestinian territory through the crossing with Egypt, which was opened especially for them.
As for the killings in Beit Hanun, the Israeli army announced in February that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack.
After an internal investigation, Israel concluded that shelling the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system.”
The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel but, due to the technical problem, the shells instead hit two homes.
Archbishop Tutu meets devastated Gaza family
05.29.2008 | The Independent
By Donald Macintyre in Beit Hanoun
Archbishop Desmond Tutu walked from his car and, his head lowered, paused for a moment’s silent prayer or reflection at the alley where so many of the Athamneh family had been killed.
Then he stepped forward to the warm embrace of a tearful Saad Athamneh, 55, who lost three of his sons, all of them fathers, 18 months ago. “The siege is continuing,” he told the venerable South African in a short speech of welcome outside the family home. “The US is controlling the Middle East. The Israelis killed my children while I was praying. Please come in and see what happened.”
The Archbishop was visiting the still ravaged house in this northern Gaza town 17 months later than he had intended. He was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the Israeli shelling that killed 21 civilians – 18 of them Athamneh family members – on 8 November 2006.
The mission intended to visit a month later but were refused Israeli entry visas, and it is only now they have been able to enter through Egypt and the southern Rafah crossing.
Yesterday the most bereaved of the Athamneh family met him at the two-storey house, a hole in the roof still testifying to the direct hit, the walls festooned with lists of the dead, adults and children alike.
Leaving the house the Archbishop would only say: “We are quite devastated. It is not something you would wish on your worst enemy.”
Earlier the Archbishop, who has condemned Qassam rocket fire, stood in respectful silence as Usama Athamneh told him simply: “My wife, my mother, my sister, were all killed.” One of his sons, Mustafa, 12, must live with the memory of escaping after his mother fell dead beside him. Another standing beside him, said Mr Athamneh, had shrapnel in the brain. Thanks to treatment in an Israeli hospital “he’s recovered, he’s OK”.
The Israeli military’s investigation into the shelling found that “the injury of the Palestinian civilians was not intentional and was directly due to a rare and severe failure in the artillery fire control system”. But in their June 2007 report recounting their failure to visit the scene, the UN mission – which must also assess the victims’ current needs – said that “whether the casualties at Beit Hanoun were caused by a mistake, recklessness, criminal negligence or were wilful, those responsible must be held accountable”.
