Israeli rabbi: It’s okay to kill innocent civilians and destroy Gaza

By Ami Kaufman  July 22, 2014

972mag.com

Results of Israeli “Operation Protective Edge" as of July 22, 2014

Dov Lior, a racist Israeli rabbi from the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, recently posted a Halakhic ruling allowing to kill innocent civilians, after being asked about the “war” (it’s a massacre) in Gaza.

Here are a few lines from the ruling (pictured below):

“The Torah of Israel guides us in all walks of life, private and public, on how to behave during war and also how to keep moral standards.

The Maharal from Prague (Rabbi Judah Loew), in his book Gur Arye, clearly writes that… in all wars the attacked people are allowed to attack fiercely the people from whom the attackers came from and they do not have to check if he personally belongs to the fighters.

Therefore, during war the attacked people are allowed to punish the enemy population in any punishment it finds worthy, such as denying supplies or electricity and also to bomb the whole area according to the discretion of the army minister and not to just simply endanger soldier’s lives but to take crushing deterrence steps to exterminate the enemy.

In the case of Gaza, the Minister of Defense will be allowed to instruct even the destruction of Gaza so that the south will no longer suffer and to avoid harm to our people who have been suffering for so long from the surrounding enemies.”

Any kind of talk about humanism and consideration are moot when speaking of saving our brothers in the south and in the rest of the country and bringing back quiet to our country.” Source

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An Israeli tank shell hit the third floor of Al-Aqsa hospital in the central Gaza Strip on Monday, July 21, 2014, killing four people and wounding 16, the Health Ministry said.  "All patients were evacuated and the 100-bed hospital is no longer functioning," a World Health Organization (WHO) statement said on Tuesday after a WHO team visited the site. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), guardian of the rules of war, condemned the attack on the Al-Aqsa hospital which it said had come under "direct fire at least four times”. Warring parties are obliged under international humanitarian law to protect medical personnel, ambulances and facilities, the ICRC said in a statement issued late on Monday.

On the evening of July 21, the Israelis bombed an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. The building collapsed as rescue crews were inside, killing more people. The death toll, at least 13, was still being tallied.

Crater where the four-story Abu Jameh house had stood

An Israeli missile leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip. It also killed 25 members of four Abu Jameh family — including 19 children — gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. The situation at the Abu Jameh home, where, survivors said, the family was gathered to break its daily Ramadan fast — a ceremonial meal —  was at a time when Israeli military officials would have known that people were likely to be home.

Of those who lived in the house, only four people survived, three men who had gone to pray, and Tawfik Abu Jameh’s toddler, shielded by the body of his mother. The children killed ranged in age from 4 months to 14 years, and included an adopted orphan whose father had been killed in an Israeli strike.

One of the survivors, Bassam Abu Jameh, lay on a mat with a broken leg, his eyes rimmed with red. His wife, Yasmeen; two brothers; and three children, Batool, 5, Sohaila, 3, and Bassam, 1, had all been killed. “There is nothing left,” he said, pressing his hand to his eyes. “It is the end for us.”

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GENEVA, July 22 (Reuters) - Palestinian civilians in densely-populated Gaza have no place to hide from Israel's military offensive and children are paying the heaviest price, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Israel pounded targets across the Gaza Strip, saying no ceasefire was near as U.S. and U.N. diplomats pursued talks on halting fighting that has claimed more than 600 lives as the conflict entered its third week.

"There is literally no safe place for civilians," Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told a news briefing in Geneva.

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It is something of a miracle that social media is successfully reporting Israeli war crimes compared to 2009, when Israelis launched a major military campaign into Gaza and the Israeli military (IDF) prevented foreign media from entering the territory. Back then, the IDF also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, allowing few cellphone photographs to appear outside Gaza, according to the New York Times.

Rabbi Dov Lior’s religious ruling on permissible killing of Palestinian civilians

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Justice Richard Goldstone: Israeli war crimes in Gaza

The Goldstone report accused 'Israel' of a disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population

The Zionist media are conspiring to soften the impact of the highly embarrassing news of Judge Richard Goldstone's confirmation of widespread war crimes committed by Israeli military forces in Gaza last December and January, by spinning the Goldstone report as, "UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes."

This spin is easily revealed to be a species of Talmudic delusion by citing a solitary datum: during the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza "some 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including at least several hundred civilians; as well as 13 Israelis: 10 soldiers and 3 civilians" (New York Times).

It is obvious to everyone except the propaganda ministers who compose the headlines for the American press, that there is no equivalence between the heinous war crimes of the Israeli occupiers and the relatively ineffective armed resistance of the severely oppressed Palestinians.

Justice Richard Goldstone: Israeli war crimes in Gaza

From: The New York Times online, Sept. 15, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16gaza.html?hp

A United Nations fact-finding mission investigating the three-week war in Gaza...issued a lengthy, scathing report on Tuesday (Sept. 15)...The four-member mission (is) led by Justice Richard Goldstone, a widely respected South African judge...The report, the bulk of which focused on the Israeli violations, said that during the war, Israeli forces engaged in a deliberate policy of collective punishment in furtherance of “an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population” through blockades and the destruction of food, water and sanitation systems of its people...

In one case, armored bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically flattened the chicken coops of a farm that reportedly supplied 10 percent of the Gazan egg market, killing all 31,000 chickens inside. In another, the forces carried out a strike on a sewage plant wall, sending 200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into neighboring farmland, the report said. The panel did not find a justifiable reason for the Israelis’ actions in either case.

It also found that the Israeli forces used disproportionate force against the Palestinian civilian population. In a number of cases, it said, Israeli forces launched “direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcome,” even when the facts indicated no justifiable military objective. Those incidents, the report concluded, amounted to war crimes.

Israeli forces twice shelled civilian hospitals in Gaza, but in neither case was the attack justified, the report found. In the attack on Al Quds Hospital, the shelling of the building and an adjacent ambulance facility with white phosphorus shells caused fires that took a day to extinguish, and at no point was any warning given of an imminent strike, the report said. The panel found no evidence of the enemy fire that the Israeli military cited as rationale for its attack.

Another event that the panel judged equivalent to a war crime took place in the Samouni neighborhood in Gaza City, when Israel soldiers shelled a house where soldiers had forced Palestinian civilians to gather. In seven cases, the report found, “civilians were shot while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and in some cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so.”

Israeli forces also intentionally attacked civilians in aiming a missile strike at a mosque during the early evening prayer, killing 15 people, and in firing antipersonnel flechette munitions, which release thousands of metal darts, on a crowd of family members and neighbors at a condolence tent, killing 5.
“These incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population,” the report said. The conduct of the Israeli armed forces in these instances, it said, “constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention” and as such, “give rise to individual criminal responsibility.”

Palestinian armed groups, the group found, fired repeated rockets and mortars into southern Israel. By failing to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population, those actions also “constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity,” the report said.

Responding to Israeli allegations that Palestinian fighters used civilians as human shields, the panel found that Palestinian armed groups did launch rockets from urban areas in Gaza, and that Palestinian armed groups “were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from civilians.”

However, the mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants “mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack,” the report said, nor did it find evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups “either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

The mission was tasked by United Nations Human Rights Council in April to investigate all violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law that might have been committed during the conflict. As part of Israel’s refusal to cooperate, it banned the panel members from entering the country. The panel made two visits to Gaza, entering from Egypt, but conducted the bulk of their research from Geneva.

The panel conducted 188 interviews, reviewed 10,000 pages of documents, and viewed more than 1,000 photographs and videos before drawing its conclusions. The panel said that Israel did not respond to a comprehensive list of questions, but that Palestinian authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank cooperated.

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