UN Watch BriefingLatest from the United Nations  Vol. 540 |  June 25, 2015

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UN Debate on Gaza Report: UN Watch to Lead Response Prominent Officers, Experts, Heading to Geneva for Monday Session of UNHRC                    LIVE WEBCAST: MONDAY, JUNE 29, FROM 11:15 AM EST TO 1:00 PMwww.unwatch.org/gazaresponse HEADING TO GENEVA: Maj-Gen. Michael Jones, Lieutnant-Colonel Geoffrey S. Corn, Col. Richard Kemp GENEVA, June 25, 2015 - UN Watch will be leading an international response to the UN's new Gaza report in the plenary of the Human Rights Council, at a debate on Monday under the 47-nation body's permanent agenda item targeting Israel. The campaign to tell the truth about the war launched last summer by Hamas will include appearances by prominent American, British and European political and military figures at the UNHRC plenary, a press conference, and a panel event for diplomats and human rights activists. Speeches will be posted on our channel at YouTube.com/unwatch. • Senior military experts will present the findings of two fact-finding missions -- the report of the JINSA Task Force on the Gaza Conflict by five U.S. generals, and the preliminary findings of the high-level international group of 11 military and political figures -- both of which contrast sharply with the UN report. Watch their event on live webcast at www.unwatch.org/gazaresponse on Monday, June 29th, at 5:15 pm Geneva time (11:15 am EST to 1:00 pm EST). • A major new book by UN Watch and NGO Monitor, Filling in the Blanks: Documenting Missing Dimensions in UN and NGO Investigations of the Gaza Conflict, will be released at the side event.   • Expert speakers will additionally include Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who will analyze the funders of Hamas; and NGO Monitor president Prof. Gerald Steinberg and Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg, who will address distortions of the report, and the problematic role played by groups like Human Rights Watch, whose director Ken Roth actively supported Hamas during the war. (See below his infamous "International Humanitarian Law allows" tweet from August 19th, in defense of Hamas terror tunnels.)                    The report of the UN inquiry -- headed for six months by William Schabas until he was forced to resign over his undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO, and then by Mary McGowan Davis, who in 2010 served on a similar committee to implement the notorious Goldstone Report -- repeatedly equates Israel with Hamas, and insinuates that Israel's "political and military leaders" are guilty of war crimes. The UN report concludes with a thinly-veiled call for members of Israel's "political and military establishment, including at the senior level" to be investigated by the International Criminal Court; prosecuted by individual countries that embrace universal jurisdiction; and for other countries to "comply with extradition requests" pertaining to "suspects of such crimes" to be sent to countries where they would "face a fair trial." For analysis of the UN report: • One of the most detailed and damning comes from The Lawfare Blog, affiliated with the Brookings Institution. Brookings senior fellow Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare associate editor Yishai Schwartz are clear: “The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza war, released Monday, is a bad piece of work—bad in almost entirely predictable and boring ways, but no less bad for being bad and predictable." • Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who will be part of the UN Watch delegation, published a brilliant op-ed in today's New York Times -- see below.          ________________________ The U.N.’s Gaza Report Is Flawed and Dangerous By RICHARD KEMP     JUNE 25, 2015 LONDON — As a British officer who had more than his share of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it pains me greatly to see words and actions from the United Nations that can only provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that. The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s “protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007 it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war of aggression. In an unusual concession, the report suggests that Hamas may have been guilty of war crimes, but it still legitimizes Hamas’s rocket and tunnel attacks and even sympathizes with the geographical challenges in launching rockets at Israeli civilians: “Gaza’s small size and its population density make it particularly difficult for armed groups always to comply” with the requirement not to launch attacks from civilian areas. There is no such sympathy for Israel. Judge Davis accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Yet no evidence is put forward to substantiate these accusations. It is as though the drafters of the report believe that any civilian death in war must be illegal. Referring to cases in which Israeli attacks killed civilians in residential areas, Judge Davis says that in the absence of contrary information available to her commission, there are strong indications that the attacks were disproportionate, and therefore war crimes. But all we get is speculation and the presumption of guilt. The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless. The commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that group, and our report, made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population.” The report acknowledges that Israel took steps to warn of imminent attacks but suggests more should have been done to minimize civilian casualties. Yet it offers no opinion about what additional measures Israel could have taken. It even criticizes Israel for using harmless explosive devices — the “knock on the roof” — as a final warning to evacuate targeted buildings, suggesting that it created confusion. No other country uses roof-knocks, a munition developed by Israel as part of a series of I.D.F. warning procedures, including text messages, phone calls and leaflet drops, that are known to have saved many Palestinian lives. Judge Davis suggests that the I.D.F.’s use of air, tank and artillery fire in populated areas may constitute a war crime and recommends further international legal restrictions on their use. Yet these same systems were used extensively by American and British forces in similar circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are often vital in saving the lives of our own soldiers, and their curtailment would jeopardize military effectiveness while handing an advantage to our enemies. The I.D.F. is not perfect. In the heat of battle and under stress its commanders and soldiers undoubtedly made mistakes. Weapons malfunctioned, intelligence was sometimes wrong and, as with all armies, it has some bad soldiers. Unnecessary deaths resulted, and these should be investigated and the individuals brought to trial if criminal culpability is suspected. The reason so many civilians died in Gaza last summer was not Israeli tactics or policy. It was Hamas’s strategy. Hamas deliberately positioned its fighters and munitions in civilian areas, knowing that Israel would have no choice but to attack them and that civilian casualties would result. Unable to inflict existential harm on Israel by military means, Hamas sought to cause large numbers of casualties among its own people in order to bring international condemnation and unbearable diplomatic pressure against Israel. Judge Davis’s report is rife with contradictions. She acknowledges that Israeli military precautions saved lives, yet without foundation accuses “decision makers at the highest levels of the government of Israel” of a policy of deliberately killing civilians. Incredibly, she “regrets” that her commission was unable to verify the use of civilian buildings by “Palestinian armed groups,” yet elsewhere acknowledges Hamas’s widespread use of protected locations, including United Nations schools. Most worrying, Judge Davis claims to be “fully aware of the need for Israel to address its security concerns” while demanding that it “lift, immediately and unconditionally, the blockade on Gaza.” Along with the report’s endorsement of Hamas’s anti-Israel narrative, this dangerous recommendation would undoubtedly lead to further bloodshed in both Israel and Gaza. To support the vital work of UN Watch, please contribute here. UN Watch is an independent human rights group founded in 1993 in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving no financial support from any organization or government. We rely on the generosity of charitable donations. Thank you for your support.