Een
geheim Israëlisch rapport toont aan dat de vier Palestijnse jongens, in de leeftijd van 10 en 11 jaar,
spelend op het strand van Gaza (op 16 juli 2014), door het Israël werden vermoord met
gebruikmaking van een drone, zou schrijft Robert Mackey in een
artikel op The Intercept……..
Uitvoerig
wordt ingegaan hoe e.e.a. heeft kunnen gebeuren en de reden waarom
Israël e.e.a. geheim wilde houden >> niet alleen vanwege de wereldwijde
verontwaardiging (al was die buiten het westen een stuk groter..), maar ook om de verkoop van Israëlische drones naar het
buitenland veilig te stellen. Zo stond er een contract met Duitsland
op het spel, een contract voor ‘het leasen’ van drones voor maar
‘liefst’ 600 miljoen euro…..
In
het artikel gaat Mackey in op de stelling van Israël dat er een
vergissing werd gemaakt bij het beoordelen van de beelden waarop de
beslissing werd genomen die tot de dood van de vier jongens leidde.
Echter gezien eerdere gebeurtenissen en de gebeurtenissen sinds maart dit jaar, waarbij vreedzame (nog steeds voortdurende) demonstraties onder de naam ‘The Great Return
March’, doelbewust onder vuur werden genomen, kan je echt niet spreken van ‘vergissingen……..’ Onder vuur genomen door psychopathische Israëlische scherpschutters (met een uitstekend werkend vizier
op hun wapen), die een groot aantal ongewapende mensen hebben vermoord, Palestijnse mensen waaronder duidelijk
herkenbare kinderen en medische hulpverleners………
‘Je
zou bijna gaan denken’ dat Israël dit geheime rapport expres heeft
gelekt om aan te tonen dat men wel degelijk menselijke trekken heeft
en men moeite heeft met dit soort ‘vergissingen’, terwijl de
dagelijkse werkelijkheid laat zien dat Israël er totaal geen moeite
mee heeft om kinderen, vrouwen, gehandicapten en zelfs mensen met het Downsyndroom* (nogmaals: doelbewust) gevangen te nemen, gruwelijk te martelen, dan wel standrechtelijk te vermoorden…..
Lees
het volgende artikel en oordeel zelf:
Secret
Israeli Report Reveals Armed Drone Killed Four Boys Playing on Gaza
Beach in 2014
August
11 2018, 10:09 a.m.
A
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT by Israeli military police
investigators seen by The Intercept explains how a tragic series of
mistakes by air force, naval, and intelligence officers led to an
airstrike in which four Palestinian boys playing on a beach in Gaza
in 2014 were killed by missiles launched from an armed drone.
Testimony
from the officers involved in the attack, which has been concealed
from the public until now, confirms for the first time that the
children — four cousins ages 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed
by drone operators who somehow mistook them, in broad daylight, for
Hamas militants.
The
testimony raises new questions about whether the attack, which
unfolded in front of dozens of journalists and triggered global
outrage, was carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life
and without proper authorization. After killing the first boy, the
drone operators told investigators, they had sought clarification
from their superiors as to how far along the beach, used by
civilians, they could pursue the fleeing survivors. Less than a
minute later, as the boys ran for their lives, the drone operators
decided to launch a second missile, killing three more children,
despite never getting an answer to their question.
Suhad
Bishara, a lawyer representing the families of the victims, told
The
Intercept that Israel’s use of armed drones to kill Palestinians
poses “many questions concerning human judgment, ethics, and
compliance with international humanitarian law.”
Remotely
piloted bombers “alter the process of human decision-making,”
Bishara said, and the use of the technology in the 2014 beach attack
“expands the circle of people responsible for the actual killing of
the Bakr children.”
Just
hours before the attack, on the morning of July 16, 2014, the public
relations unit of the Israel Defense Forces had been promoting the
idea that the live video feeds provided by drones enabled its air
force to avoid killing Palestinian civilians.
The
PR unit released operational
footage,
apparently taken from the
screens of Israeli drone operators,
which documented how three Israeli airstrikes had been called off
that week because figures, identified as civilians, had appeared
close to targets in the densely populated Gaza Strip.
Those
images were released one week into Israel’s Operation Protective
Edge, a 50-day offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza in which
Israel would eventually kill 1,391
civilians, including 526 children.
Later
that same day, at about 3:30 p.m., an Israeli Hermes 450 surveillance
drone hovering over a beach in Gaza City transmitted images of eight
figures clambering from the strand onto a jetty.
A
small shipping container on the jetty had been destroyed by an
Israeli missile the day before, based on intelligence indicating that
it might have been used by Hamas naval commandos to
store weapons. Some analysts have questioned that intelligence,
however, since there were no secondary explosions after the structure
was hit and journalists staying in nearby hotels reported that no
militants had been seen around the jetty that week.
The
Israeli military police report reviewed by The Intercept documents
what happened next. After one of the figures on the jetty entered the
container that had been destroyed the previous day, an Israeli air
force commander at the Palmachim air base, south of Tel Aviv, ordered
the operators of a second drone, which was armed, to fire a missile
at the container.
AS
MY COLLEAGUES Cora
Currier and Henrik Moltke reported in
2016, although the Israeli government maintains an official stance of
secrecy around its use of drones to carry out airstrikes, hacked
Israeli surveillance images provided
to The Intercept by former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden showed an Israeli drone armed with missiles in 2010.
Speaking
privately to a visiting American diplomat after Israel’s 2009
offensive in Gaza, Avichai Mandelblit, who was the country’s chief
military prosecutor at the time and now serves as its attorney
general, acknowledged that two missiles that injured civilians in a
mosque had been fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle, according to
a leaked
State Department cable.
One
reason that Israel might decline to acknowledge that its drones have
been used to kill Palestinian children is that such information could
complicate sales of its drones to foreign governments. In June, the
state-owned company Israel Aerospace Industries signed a $600
million deal to
lease Heron drones to Germany’s defense ministry. That deal was
initially delayed by concerns from German politicians that the
drones, to be used for surveillance, could also be armed. The same
state-owned company has also sold drones to Turkey, a strongly
pro-Palestinian nation, which has nonetheless used the Israeli
technology to bomb Kurds in Iraq.
The
Israeli military police report on the 2014 strike seen by The
Intercept offers the most direct evidence to date that Israel has
used armed drones to launch attacks in Gaza. Testimony from the drone
operators, commanders, and intelligence officers who took part in the
attack confirms that they used an armed drone to fire the missile
that slammed into the jetty, killing the person who had entered the
container, and also to launch a second strike, which killed three of
the survivors as they fled across the beach.
According
to the testimony of one naval officer involved in the strikes, the
mission was initially considered “a great success,” because
the strike team believed, wrongly, that they had killed four Hamas
militants preparing to launch an attack on Israeli forces.
Within
minutes of the two strikes, however, a group of international
journalists who had witnessed the attack from nearby
hotels reported that
the victims torn apart by the missiles were not adult militants
but four
small boys,
cousins who were 10 and 11 years old.
Another
four boys from the same family survived the attack, but were left
with shrapnel wounds and deep
emotional scars.
Harrowing
images of the children running desperately across the beach after the
first missile had killed their cousin were quickly shared by
a Palestinian
photographer,
an Al
Jazeera reporter and
a camera
crew from French television.
A
brutal image of the immediate aftermath captured by Tyler Hicks of
the New
York Times,
one of the journalists who witnessed the attack, made the killing of
the four boys, all of them sons of Gaza fishermen from the Bakr
family, reverberate worldwide.
Maybe it’s the fact that I walked on that beach—and have a small child that makes this photo so devastating. #Gaza
The
French TV correspondent Liseron Boudoul, whose report that day
included distressing
video of
the boys running along the beach before the second strike, noted that
she and other witnesses to the attack were unclear where, exactly,
the missiles had come from — although initial speculation centered
on Israeli naval vessels seen just offshore.
THE
SECRET TESTIMONY from the Israeli military
personnel involved in the attack establishes for the first time that
the drone operators treated the jetty as a free-fire zone on the
mistaken assumption that it was off-limits to anyone but militants.
After
images of the attack prompted widespread outrage, Israel’s army
conducted a review of the mission and recommended that a military
police investigation into possible criminal negligence be conducted.
The testimonies collected by the military police from the strike team
were included in a report presented to Israel’s military advocate
general, Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni, 11 months after the boys were
killed.
Efroni
did not release the testimonies, but did make a summary
of the report’s findings public
on June 11, 2015, when he closed
the investigation
without filing any charges. Israel’s chief military prosecutor
decided that no further criminal or disciplinary measures would be
taken, since the investigators had concluded that “it would not
have been possible for the operational entities involved to have
identified these figures, via aerial surveillance, as children.”
Efroni
did not explain why that was impossible. Two days before the strike
in question, Israel’s military PR unit had released another
video clip
in which drone operators could be heard deciding to halt strikes
because they had identified figures in their live feeds as children.
Adalah,
also known as the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights
in Israel, has spent the past three years fighting on behalf of the
families of the boys — Ismail Bakr, 10; Ahed Bakr, 10; Zakaria
Bakr, 10; and Mohammed Bakr, 11 — to have the decision not to
prosecute the soldiers overturned by an Israeli court.
Much
of that time has been spent waiting
for Israel’s attorney general,
Mandelblit, to simply reply to appeals filed by Adalah and two Gazan
rights groups, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and Al Mezan
Center for Human Rights.
In
February, Adalah said in a statement that
Israel’s own investigation “revealed that the Israeli military
did not take any measures to ascertain whether the targets on the
ground were civilians, let alone children, prior to intentionally
directing the attacks against them.”
Bishara,
one of the Adalah lawyers representing the boys’ families, told The
Intercept in a telephone interview that the Israeli investigation of
the killings, in which the military cleared itself of wrongdoing, was
flawed in several ways. To start with, the testimonies were only
collected by the military police four months after the incident, and
only considered what could be seen of the beach through the drone
cameras. No
testimony was taken from
the international journalists who witnessed the attack, and the
accounts of Palestinian witnesses, including written affidavits from
boys injured in the strikes, were discounted.
A Wall
Street Journal video report filed
on the day of the attack by Nick Casey, a correspondent staying
in a hotel close to the jetty, cast doubt on the Israeli intelligence
that designated the site a Hamas compound. Casey’s report, which
featured images of the first young victim’s mangled body being
taken from the jetty, explained that “no one knew why this place
had been bombarded; there have been no Hamas attacks from here and no
rockets that we’ve seen.”
When
the Israeli authorities closed the case in 2015, Alexander Marquardt,
a former ABC Jerusalem correspondent who had also witnessed the
attack, disputed the
finding that the jetty was sealed off from the beach, arguing that it
was open to civilians.
Lees verder op ‘The Intercept‘
============================
Zie ook:
‘Israëls huidige oorlog tegen de Palestijnen: o.a. de etnische zuivering van Oost-Jeruzalem‘
‘Israëlische ‘helden’ schieten invalide Palestijn in het achterhoofd‘
‘TUI met reizen naar Israël: “Discover apartheid and the mass murders on Palestinians and smile….”‘
‘VS onder Trump >> een nog grotere stimulator van Israëlische terreur‘
‘Israël bestormt voor de zoveelste keer met groot machtsvertoon de Al-Aqsamoskee……‘
‘Het ‘dappere’ Israëlische leger……‘
‘Israël blokkeert toegang tot dorp Ahed al-Tamimi……‘
‘Israël nu officieel fascistische apartheidsstaat: natiestaat wet aangenomen………‘
‘Israëlische ‘helden’ schieten weer een ongewapend kind dood‘
‘Bevrijd de 4 Tamimi vrouwen, inclusief een meisje van 16!‘
‘Israël zet snelle reactiemacht op poten tegen anti-Israëlische kritiek‘
‘Why Liberal Zionists Have Nothing to Say About Ahed Tamimi’s Slap and Arrest‘
‘Jerry Seinfeld valt keihard door de mand als zionist………..‘ (Seinfeld, ‘een liberale zionist’)
‘‘Heldhaftige Israelische militair‘, die op verdenking van het gooien met stenen, een 15 jarige jongen vermoordde, gaat vrijuit……..‘
‘Israël martelt 60% van de gevangengehouden Palestijnse kinderen…….‘
‘Israëlische rechtbank besloot proces tegen 17 jarig meisje Ahed al-Tamimi achter gesloten deuren te houden >> voor haar eigen bestwil….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
‘Israël weigert 17 jarig meisje Ahed al-Tamimi vervroegd vrij te laten……..‘
‘Israël gebruikt nieuw chemisch wapen tegen Palestijnse demonstranten in de Gazastrook‘
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