The Islamist group Hamas, rejecting charges of war crimes in a UN report, said on Thursday three Israeli civilians killed in rocket attacks by its members during Israel’s Gaza offensive last year were hit by mistake.
Hamas said the explanation was part of its 52-page response to a UN report on last year’s Gaza war by a panel led by jurist Richard Goldstone, which accused it of targeting civilians by firing hundreds of rockets on Israeli communities.
“The killing of three Israeli civilians as alleged by Israel and as mentioned in the Goldstone report was by mistake and the target was military installations inside the Zionist cities,” said Salah al-Bardaweel, a senior Hamas official. “Resistance fighters were warned against hitting civilians.”
However, New York-based Human Rights Watch rejected the Islamists’ claim of unintentionally targeting civilians and even noted comments by Hamas leaders during the three-week conflict that said attacks against Israeli civilians were acceptable.
“Hamas’ claim that rockets were intended to hit Israeli military targets and only accidentally harmed civilians is belied by the facts,” the rights group said.
Yigal Palmor of Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the Hamas explanation was “an absurd attempt to delude world opinion”.
This is the first time a leader of Hamas has described attacks in which Israeli civilians have died as mistakes. The group is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings since the 1990s.
A Hamas official who declined to be named defended past suicide attacks as a justifiable “response to the killing of Palestinian civilians throughout years of Israeli occupation.”
Hamas has also made no apology for firing thousands of inaccurate homemade rockets at southern Israeli towns over the past few years. Though most cause no injuries, the salvoes disrupt daily life and some of them are lethal.
Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets that hit Israeli communities in the Gaza war.
The Goldstone report criticizes both sides in the conflict, which killed up to 1,387 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis, including the three civilians in question. But it was harsher towards Israel.
Israel boycotted the UN panel and also rejected allegations that it committed war crimes, also saying its forces had tried to minimise civilian casualties, in heavily populated areas in the Gaza Strip where militants operated.
The Goldstone report gives Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants six months to mount credible investigations or face possible war crimes prosecution in The Hague.
Israeli Cabinet minister Yuli Edelstein said on Sunday Israel would make do with internal army investigations of last year’s war that resulted in a handful of courts-martial over minor offences, but would deliver a “formal response” to the report.
Israel said it attacked the Gaza Strip to stem years of Palestinian rocket salvoes and in the absence of peace prospects with Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel and spurns Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his diplomacy.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened