Mao Shung
Mao Shung's JournalPalestinians admit building Israel bombed was a Hamas office, not merely a luxury residence.
Under international law, a terrorist office can be bombed, even if it means inconveniencing non-terrorists. As the article below explains, no one died in the bombing. And Israel was humane, even calling everyone in the building to evacuate. The NY Times reports:
“She asked him which floor or which apartment are you going to hit,” recalled Mr. Mathkour, who is known as Abu Rani. “He said we’re going to hit the whole building. She said that’s haram — forbidden — she was appealing to him. He said yala yala — let’s go, let’s go — goodbye. She came to me, hey, Abu Rani, they are going to bring down the whole building. I told her he is joking. He wants to terrify you.”
Mr. Ibrahim said he needled Mr. Mathkour about how many bombs it would take to topple the tower. The proud builder said 10. Turned out two did the job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/world/middleeast/at-gaza-tower-israel-leveled-lost-homes-and-dreams.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Maybe now Palestinians will take seriously the fact that harboring terrorists is a war crime, to which Israel can respond, in conformity with international law. The remainder of the article explains:
GAZA CITY — The men of Zafer Tower No. 4 sit in the shade across the street from the wreckage.
Somewhere in there is Dr. Mohammad Abu Rayya’s stethoscope. Buried, too, is a hard drive filled with 15 years of articles, photos and notes by Hisham Saqalla, a journalist and blogger. And a three-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower that Faraj Shorafa, a 72-year-old lawyer, brought from Paris in 1999.
Nobody was killed in Israel’s destruction of the tower, the first of three high-rises felled in the finale of this summer’s fighting with Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement that dominates the Gaza Strip. But about 500 people lost more than their homes. “They have destroyed our dreams,” said Dr. Abu Rayya, 38.
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Zafer 4 was erased by two powerful explosions around 7 p.m. on Aug. 23, 17 years to the day after it opened with two penthouses and 40 three-bedroom apartments of 1,615 square feet that originally sold for $60,000. Filled by high-ranking government officials and private-sector professionals, the 11-story tower was an alternative to the Gaza way of extended families living in compounds. It was part of a construction empire whose founder quit school after ninth grade to pick tomatoes in Israel and now lives in a four-story villa with its own elevator and a mosaic-tiled pool in the basement, where Zafer 4’s evacuees waited out the attack.
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Interactive Map: Assessing the Damage and Destruction in Gaza
The Israeli military said the building was “a command and control center” where “multiple floors” were “used regularly by Hamas for operational activities” throughout the seven-week battle. Military officials refused to say what types of activities, why the entire tower was targeted or what type of bombs were used.
In interviews, more than half the tower’s occupants said that Hamas had taken over one of the penthouse apartments in 2007 for what several said was a “media office” filled with computers and communications equipment. Residents said the unit was abandoned during the war, and that teenagers passed many nights on that floor using PlayStation as bombers buzzed overhead.
Atef Adwan, one of 28 Hamas lawmakers elected in 2006, bought a first-floor apartment five years ago for his second wife, and spent much of the summer there with her and their two young sons, fearing the Israelis would target his home in the border town of Beit Hanoun. (They did not.)
“There was concern and people are still concerned” about Hamas presence in the building, said Wael Abu Najja, 47, who lived on the ninth floor, “but they can’t talk about this publicly.”
Most of the tower was taken by leaders of Hamas’s rival, Fatah, men who continued to receive salaries but had not actually worked in the security services or the president’s office since 2007, when Hamas routed Fatah from power in Gaza.
So when residents received mobile-phone evacuation orders that Saturday from an Arabic-speaking Israeli soldier named Mousa, they never expected the entire tower to be destroyed. Many fled without the emergency bags that Gazans keep packed with cash, documents and mementos.
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“Hamas is everywhere — in every building, they have an apartment,” said Mohammed Owda H. Abu Mathkour, the wealthy mogul who runs the Zafer contracting company and lives in the villa across Safed Street from the fallen tower. “Israel has no right to destroy the whole building because of one apartment.”
Mr. Mathkour said he could rebuild the tower in eight months for $3 million, a fraction of the $7 billion the Palestinian leadership estimates is required to reconstruct some 11,000 demolished and more than 50,000 damaged structures across Gaza. Besides the money, the massive effort depends on a new arrangement for the import of cement and steel, which Israel has restricted for fear it would be used to manufacture rockets or build tunnels like those militants used to repeatedly penetrate Israeli territory this summer.
First, though, there is the rubble — 2.5 million tons of it. Removal alone could cost $10 million, and the minister of public works said his five bulldozers are not enough to tackle the task.
The pile that was Zafer 4 is perhaps three stories high, topped by a Palestinian flag that Mr. Saqalla’s 17-year-old son, Shafiq, planted with pride. Mattresses and bedclothes peek out between the sandwiches of concrete floors — or ceilings?
There is an Angry Birds notebook and papers from an engineering course explaining “probability theory” and “The Normal Distribution.” A flower pot. A green suitcase, a mangled bathtub, a cracked microwave. Protruding from the back is a crushed white Kia Sportage that belonged to Mr. Adwan, the Hamas lawmaker.
Zafer was the name of a cousin of Mr. Mathkour’s who died of cancer in an Israeli prison in 1993, the year the company was founded.
Mr. Mathkour said three of his 14 Zafer towers were hit by Israel this summer, including the curved glass No. 9, an office building where Gaza’s first rooftop restaurant opened June 13 (his wife’s birthday). On July 17, he said, a missile hit an interior-ministry antenna on Zafer 9’s roof; over the next two weeks, tank shells sprayed the tower three times.
The Israeli military, in an emailed statement, called Zafer 9 “a hub of Hamas terror activity” that had “been ‘on the radar’ for years” and housed “several senior Hamas members.” The statement said the tower was “struck with precise Air Force fire,” though Mr. Mathkour has the tank shells in his office, and walls on several floors were clearly pockmarked by them.
Are the criminal indictments Israel issued in 2008, evidence Israel can investigate alleged crimes?
In 2008, Israel issued 3 indictments of its soldiers concerning misconduct during the Gaza war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-israel-criminal-investigation.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Israel has now started investigations of its conduct in the more recent war, and some Human Rights groups are questioning whether Israel should be the one conducting these examinations.
But do the indictments that followed from the last war serve as some evidence Israel can conduct a fair investigation?
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