Livewire - Amnesty International blogging for human rights

4 February 2009: As we leave after more than two weeks in Gaza, we are still shocked and horrified by the scale of the destruction caused by the 22-day offensive the Israeli army launched on 27 December. The task of reconstruction will be truly immense.

The main priority in our fact-finding research has been to investigate the Israeli forces’ direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and their homes, but, before concluding our visit, we also spent some time focusing on the wholesale destruction of factories, workshops and farms, for which it is difficult or impossible to see any possible justification. What we found was even worse than we had first realized.

Continue reading ‘The task of reconstruction will be truly immense’

1 February 2009: A 13-year-old girl who was asleep in her bed; three primary school-age boys who were carrying sugar canes; two young women on their way to a shelter in search of safety; a 13-year-old boy on his bicycle; eight secondary school students who were waiting for the school bus to take them home; an entire family sitting outside their home – these are among the many victims of missiles fired from Israeli UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), commonly known as drones.

Here in Gaza people call the drones “zannana”, an onomatopoeic description reflecting the buzzing sound that they emit as they fly overhead. Their main function is surveillance, but, in recent years, Israeli forces have also used them to fire missiles, often to assassinate “wanted” Palestinians.

Continue reading ‘Faulty intelligence, wanton recklessness, or a combination of the two’

29 January: With virtually all foreign journalists barred from entering Gaza by the Israeli authorities during the three-week long conflict that began on 27 December, the story of the unprecedented scale of the Israeli military offensive there was told mostly through the pictures and film footage taken by local Palestinian journalists.

“Pictures don’t lie; they show the reality. The world seems to find it difficult to believe what Palestinians say or write about what happens to them but perhaps they may believe it if they see it,” a local cameraman told me.

Four Palestinian journalists were killed and several others were injured during the three-week conflict. Basel Ibrahim Faraj, a cameraman for Algerian TV, was fatally wounded when he was near a building in Gaza City which Israeli forces attacked on 27 December, the first day of air bombardment, and died a week later.

Continue reading ‘Journalists under fire’

28 January 2009: We read in the news that a home-made rocket was fired from Gaza to southern Israel by Palestinian fighters this morning, but it didn’t fall near any people. We saw yesterday at Sderot and Ashkelon police stations what these rockets – among them Qassems, Grads, Quds – look like: they are very crude, rusty 60, 90, or 120mm pipes about 1.5 metres long with fins welded onto them.

They can hold about five kilograms of explosives as well as shrapnel in the form of nails, bolts, or round metal sheets which rip into pieces on impact. They have a range of up to 20km, but cannot be aimed accurately. Anybody with some basic chemicals and scrap metal can make them. One can readily get a sense of why these rockets are inherently indiscriminate.

Continue reading ‘A day in southern Israel’

29 January 2009: As we have travelled about Gaza in recent days, compiling information about the circumstances in which unarmed civilians were killed, we have become exposed to the tragedies of so many families whose homes were destroyed and who are now homeless. The UN, quoting figures from the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, says more than 4,000 homes have been completely destroyed while a further 17,000 others have been damaged and partially destroyed.

We have not ourselves tried to count each destroyed house that we have seen, but the figures quoted by the UN do not seem to be excessive compared to what we have observed on the ground. Entire neighbourhoods that I visited only a few months ago have now been reduced to rubble.

Continue reading ‘Widespread destruction of homes’