Despite the ceasefire declared on Sunday, each morning since Israeli
gunboats have fired towards Gaza's coastline. Nine people were injured
as a result of such shelling from an Israeli gunboat, Amnesty
International’s fact-finding team in Gaza was told on Wednesday.
In its fifth post on Amnesty International's Livewire blog,
the team described how on Thursday, it had visited families whose homes
had been forcibly taken over and used as military positions by Israeli
soldiers during the recent three week long conflict.
In the houses, the team saw discarded Israeli army supplies, including
sleeping bags, medical kits, empty boxes of munitions and spent
cartridges, incontrovertible evidence of the soldiers’ occupation of
the houses.
In every one of the homes the team visited, rooms had been ransacked,
with furniture overturned and/or smashed. Clothing, documents and other
personal items belonging to the families who lived there had been
strewn over the floor and soiled, and in one case urinated on.
In one house in the Sayafa area in north Gaza several cardboard boxes
full of excrement were left in the house – although there was a
functioning toilet which the soldiers could have used. Walls were
defaced with crude threats written in Hebrew, such as “next time it
will hurt more". In every case the soldiers had smashed holes in the
outer walls of the houses to use as lookout and sniper positions.
Chris Cobb-Smith, a military expert and part of Amnesty International's
team, was an officer in the British Army for almost 20 years. He said
he was staggered by what he saw and by the behaviour and apparent lack
of discipline of the Israeli soldiers. “Gazans have had their houses
looted, vandalized and desecrated. As well, the Israeli soldiers have
left behind not only mounds of litter and excrement but ammunition and
other military equipment. It’s not the behaviour one would expect from
a professional army,” he said.
In most cases, the families had fled or were expelled by the soldiers.
In some cases, however, the soldiers prevented the families from
leaving, using them as "human shields".
Abu Abdallah told the Amnesty International team that the soldiers who
took over his home in Hay al-Salam, east of Jabalia, north Gaza, had
confined him, his wife and their nine children for two days in the
basement. “We had no water to drink and the soldiers did not allow us
to go get water. I had to take water from the toilet cistern with a
small receptacle for the small children to drink. I went to the
bathroom several times to weep. I did not wish my children to see me
cry."
-- Amnesty International: Israeli soldiers leave Gaza homes in devastated condition; 23 January 2009.
Photo: A T-shirt printed for members of Israeli Paratroop Battalion 890 after Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (Dec 2008-Jan 2009) shows a King Kong-like soldier destroying a city and its mosque, and reads: "If you believe it can be fixed, then believe it can be destroyed!".
Source: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz); via Mondoweiss.
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