Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas Page 2

  Hamas quickly resumed its attacks. In February alone, forty-seven rockets were fired. By June, Hamas and other groups had launched hundreds of Qassams, as well as an Iranian-made Grad rocket. On June 25, Hamas launched an attack inside Israel, having tunneled under the border near the Kerem Shalom (Vineyard of Peace) border crossing. In the ensuing battle, Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, killing two Israeli soldiers in the process and injuring others. Following the tunnel attack and kidnapping, Israel attacked terrorist targets in Gaza and closed the Rafah Crossing. The closure was not an attempt to punish Palestinians for the elections result five months before, but was the direct consequence of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

  Even after Hamas abducted Shalit, the Gaza borders were not completely closed. The Rafah Crossing was open for twenty-four days over the next six months, and some movement of people and goods—albeit restricted—was allowed. Throughout this time, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip continued to terrorize Israeli civilians. Still, the international community gave the Palestinian leaders another chance to meet the basic demands it had issued in January 2006. But the two main Palestinian factions—Fatah, which controlled the executive, and Hamas, which controlled the legislature—began fighting openly with each other. After extensive negotiations, the two parties agreed to form a unity government, which was formed in March 2007. But the rockets continued to rain down—reaching a record high of 257 in May 2007—and in June 2007, Hamas launched a military coup against the Fatah executive, driving its leaders out of Gaza and killing over one hundred of their fellow Palestinians, including many civilians. Again, the events garnered little media focus and no protest marches. With the entire territory of Gaza under its iron-fisted control, Hamas increased rocket attacks against Israel, with other Palestinian terror organizations joining in. These attacks accelerated dramatically after Israel and the exiled Palestinian Authority leaders—still legally governed by Fatah, in the eyes of the international community—signed an agreement in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007, pledging to work toward a two-state solution.

  It was only after Hamas’s coup, and the heavy rocket attacks that followed, that Israel imposed more extensive sanctions on Gaza. In January 2008—two years after Hamas took power, and after thousands of rockets and mortars had fallen on Israel’s southern towns—Israel began restricting fuel and electricity to Gaza, in accordance with a nuanced ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice. Still, it continued to allow fuel and humanitarian aid to enter, and allowed Palestinians to come in to Israel to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Israel did not want ordinary Palestinians to suffer and did all that it could to alleviate their living conditions while reducing Hamas’s ability to function as a terrorist regime. And yet Hamas continued to smuggle weapons into Gaza via underground tunnels on the Egyptian border. More than two thousand rockets and mortars were launched from Gaza into Israel in the first six months of 2008. In June of 2008, presidential candidate Barak Obama visited Sderot, and after viewing the rocket residues and meeting with residents, this is what he said:

  I don’t think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens.

  The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if—I don’t even care if I was a politician. If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same.

  In December 2008, Hamas unilaterally declared that it would resume its attacks with full force—and it promptly did so, forcing Israel to respond with Operation Cast Lead in late December of 2008.

  When these facts are examined, it is clear that Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians were not a response to Gaza’s increasing isolation, but the cause. The first rocket attacks began in October 2001, precisely when the world was most eager to create a viable Palestinian state. They continued even after Israel pulled its army and its settlements out of Gaza in 2005. They accelerated after Hamas took power in 2006, increasing dramatically in 2007 when Israel and the Palestinian Authority resolved to renew negotiations toward a two-state solution. And the attacks were renewed in December 2008 when Hamas unilaterally declared that it would refuse to extend a period of calm that had been accepted by both sides.

  The sanctions that were imposed on Gaza—not only by Israel, but the world—were the direct result of Hamas’s refusal to meet the international community’s basic, reasonable demands: stop terror, recognize Israel, and respect previous agreements. Even after Hamas took power in the 2006 elections, the Gaza borders remained relatively open, until Hamas escalated the conflict by abducting Gilad Shalit in June 2006, overthrowing the legitimate Palestinian executive in a violent coup in June 2007, and launching more and more rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. Hamas brought about the isolation of Gaza because it is neither interested in peace nor in the welfare of the Palestinian people. Instead, it is fanatically committed to the destruction of Israel itself, a goal it pursues using weapons and funding it receives from the Islamic Republic of Iran, for which Hamas acts as a proxy and whose ambitions of regional domination it serves. More recently, Hamas has also been supported by Qatar and Turkey.

  Israelis and Palestinians have the same right to live in peace. Hamas and its fellow terror organizations deny that right, and disrupt every attempt to move the peace process forward. That is why Operation Cast Lead, which ended on January 21, 2009, was necessary.

  It was against this backdrop that I began to write a series of op-eds during Operation Cast Lead. These op-eds comprised the bulk of my short book, The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. Following the publication of that book, the Goldstone Report was issued under the auspices of a UN fact-finding mission. It accused Israel of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead and exculpated Hamas from the charge that it used civilians as human shields. It turned a military defeat suffered by Hamas into a legal and public relations victory. Because of its importance, I begin this book with my response to that mendacious screed. The Goldstone Report not only falsified the past; it had a negative influence on the future by encouraging Hamas to repeat its own double war crimes: firing rockets at Israeli civilians from behind Palestinian human shields—and killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians and soldiers through its terrorist tunnels.

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  The Case Against the Goldstone Report—and Why It Still Matters

  January 27, 2010

  The Goldstone Report is much more scurrilous than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. According to the report, Israel used the more than 8,000 rocket attacks on its civilians merely as a pretext, an excuse, a cover for the real purpose of Operation Cast Lead, which was to target innocent Palestinian civilians—children, women, the elderly—for death. This criminal objective was explicitly decided upon by the highest levels of the Israeli government and military, and constitutes a deliberate and willful war crime. The report found these serious charges “to be firmly based in fact” and had “no doubt” of their truth.

  In contrast, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict decided that Hamas was not guilty of deliberately and willfully using the civilian population as human shields. It found “no evidence” that Hamas fighters “engaged in combat in civilian dress,” “no evidence” that “Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack,” and no support for the claim that mosques were used to store weapons.

  The report is demonstrably wrong about both of these critical conclusions. The hard evidence conclusively proves that the exact opposite is true, namely that: 1) Israel did not have a policy of targeting innocent civilians for death. Indeed the IDF went to unprecedented lengths to minimize civilian casualties; and 2) that Hamas did have a deliberate policy of having its combatants dress in civilian clothing, fire their rockets from densely populated areas,
use civilians as human shields, and store weapons in mosques.9

  What is even more telling than its erroneous conclusions, however, is its deliberately skewed methodology, particularly the manner in which it used and evaluated similar evidence very differently, depending on whether it favored the Hamas or Israeli side.

  I have written a detailed analysis of the Goldstone methodology, which is now available online.10 It is being sent to the Secretary General of the United Nations for inclusion in critiques of the Goldstone Report received by the United Nations. This analysis documents the distortions, misuses of evidence, and bias of the report and those who wrote it. It demonstrates that the evidence relied on by the report, as well as the publicly available evidence it deliberately chose to ignore, disproves its own conclusions.

  The central issue that distinguishes the conclusions the Goldstone Report reached regarding Israel, on the one hand, and Hamas, on the other, is intentionality. The report finds that the most serious accusation against Israel, namely the killing of civilians, was intentional and deliberately planned at the highest levels. The report also finds that the most serious accusations made against Hamas, namely that their combatants wore civilian clothing to shield themselves from attack, mingled among the civilian populations, and used civilians as human shields, was unintentional. These issues are, of course, closely related.

  If it were to turn out that there was no evidence that Hamas ever operated from civilian areas, and that the IDF knew this, then the allegation that the IDF, by firing into civilian areas, deliberately intended to kill Palestinian civilians, would be strengthened. But if it were to turn out that the IDF reasonably believed that Hamas fighters were deliberately using civilians as shields, then this fact would weaken the claim that the IDF had no military purpose in firing into civilian areas. Moreover, if Hamas did use human shields, then the deaths of Palestinian civilians would be more justly attributable to Hamas than to Israel.

  Since intentionality, or lack thereof, was so important to the report’s conclusions, it would seem essential that the report would apply the same evidentiary standards, rules, and criteria in determining the intent of Israel and in determining the intent of Hamas.

  Yet a careful review of the report makes it crystal clear that its writers applied totally different standards, rules, and criteria in evaluating the intent of the parties to the conflict. The report resolved all doubts against Israel in concluding that its leaders intended to kill civilians, while resolving all doubts in favor of Hamas in concluding that it did not intend to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.

  Moreover, when it had precisely the same sort of evidence in relation to both sides—for example, statements by leaders prior to the commencement of the operation—it attributed significant weight to the Israeli statements, while entirely discounting comparable Hamas statements. This sort of evidentiary bias, though subtle, permeates the entire report.

  In addition to the statements of leaders, which are treated so differently, the report takes a completely different view regarding the inferring of intent from action. When it comes to Israel, the report repeatedly looks to results and infers from the results that they must have been intended. But when it comes to Hamas, it refuses to draw inferences regarding intent from results.

  For example, it acknowledges that some combatants wore civilian clothes, and it offers no reasonable explanation for why this would be so other than to mingle indistinguishably among civilians. Yet it refuses to infer intent from these actions. Highly relevant to the report’s conclusion that militants did not intend for their actions to shield themselves from counterattack is that the mission was “unable to make any determination on the general allegation that Palestinian armed groups used mosques for military purpose,” “did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used by the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities,” did not find evidence “that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes,” and did not find “that Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat activities from United Nations facilities that were used as shelters during the military operations.”

  There is, however, hard evidence that Hamas did operate in mosques and, at the very least, near hospitals. Circumstantial evidence (precise weaponry) was used to prove Israeli intent. Regarding Hamas, the circumstantial evidence is even stronger in inferring intent. It is beyond obvious that militants do not fire rockets in the vicinity of mosques or hospitals because it is easier to launch rockets near community institutions. Rather, they do so only because of the special protections afforded to hospitals and religious centers in war.

  The report—commissioned by an organization with a long history of anti-Israel bigotry, and written by biased “experts,” with limited experience—is one-sided and wrong in its fundamental conclusions. This should not be surprising since conclusions can be no better than the methodology employed, and the methodology employed in this report is fundamentally flawed.

  So now it is up to Richard Goldstone to explain the evidentiary bias that is so obviously reflected in the report, and that is documented in my lengthier analysis available online. The burden is on him to justify the very different methodologies used in the report to arrive at its conclusions regarding the intentions of Israel and the intentions of Hamas. Failure to assume that burden will constitute an implicit admission that the conclusions reached in the Goldstone Report are not worthy of consideration by people of good will.

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  Finally, A Hamas Leader Admits that Israel Killed Mostly Combatants in Gaza

  December 17, 2010

  Since the end of the Gaza War in January 2009, Israel has stood accused of targeting civilians rather than terrorist combatants. The Israeli Defense Force has claimed that during Operation Cast Lead it targeted only combatants in its efforts to protect its civilians from rocket attacks. It has also claimed that most of the dead were combatants and issued lists of names of many of the combatants killed and identified them as members of the specific Hamas military units. Despite unprecedented efforts to avoid civilian casualties—including hundreds of thousands of leaflets, telephone calls, and nonlethal, noise-making warning bombs11—some civilians were killed, because Hamas deliberately hid behind civilians, using them as shields, when they fired rockets at Israeli civilians.

  Following the end of the Gaza War, which temporarily stopped Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, there was a great debate about the number of Gaza civilians actually killed, and the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths during this difficult military operation.

  The Israel Defense Force put the total number of known combatants killed at 709 and the number of known civilian deaths at 295, with 162 (mostly men of fighting age) “unknown.”12 Such a ratio, if true, would be far better than that achieved by any other nation in a comparable conflict. Not surprisingly, Israel’s enemies initially disputed this ratio and claimed that the number of combatants killed was far lower and the number of civilians far higher. The United Nations, the Goldstone Report, various human rights organizations, and many in the media automatically rejected Israel’s documented figures, preferring the distorted numbers offered by Hamas and other Palestinian sources.

  But a statement recently made by a Hamas leader confirms that Israel was correct in claiming that approximately 700 combatants were killed.

  First, a word about the context of the Hamas statement. In the aftermath of the war, Hamas has come under considerable criticism from rival terrorist groups for not doing enough to defend Gaza and for allowing so many civilian casualties. So, in a recent interview with a London paper, Al-Hayat, Fathi Hamad, Hamas’s Interior Minister, responded to these criticisms as follows:

  It has been said that the people were harmed by the war, but is Hamas not part of the people? It is a fact that on the first day of the war Israel struck police headquarters and killed 250 members of Hamas and the various factions, in addition to
the 200300 operatives from the [Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades. In addition, 150 security personnel were killed, and the rest were from people.13

  This statement not only supports the Israeli numbers, but it also acknowledges what Israel has long said about the 250 policemen who were killed on the first day of combat: they were “members of Hamas and the various factions” and were indeed combatants by any realistic definition of that term.

  Fathi Hamad’s figures are in striking contrast to those originally issued by Palestinian groups, which claimed that only forty-eight combatants were killed and that the total amounted to a mere 17 percent of all fatalities.

  Because it uncritically accepted the original Hamas claims of very few combatant deaths, the Goldstone Report was able to reach its flawed conclusion that the purpose of the operation must have been to kill civilians, not combatants. This is what the Goldstone Report said:

  The Mission notes that the statistics from non-governmental sources are generally consistent. Statistics alleging that fewer than one out of five persons killed in an armed conflict was a combatant… raise very serious concerns about the way Israel conducted the military operations in Gaza. The counterclaims published by the Government of Israel fall short of international law standards.