London – In a new report published yesterday, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) “warned that infant mortality has not declined for the last decade in Gaza Strip”, reported Xinhua.

According to UNRWA, “the infant mortality rate among Palestinian refugees in Gaza was 22.7 per 1,000 live births, within the same range of the previously reported rate of 22.4 per 1,000 live births in 2015 and 20.2 per 1,000 live births from the study conducted in 2006.”

“The Palestine refugees account for more than 70 per cent of the entire populations in Gaza. Infant mortality is a barometer of the health of an entire population,” commented Director of UNRWA’s Health Department, Dr Akihiro Seita.

“This finding needs our attention since the ultimate goal is to maintain a continuing decline of infant mortality and to stop preventable infant deaths,” said Seita.

Read: Baby in serious condition after Israel shells Gaza

UNRWA, in line with other UN agencies and humanitarian groups, stressed the role of Israel’s ongoing occupation and blockade in the deterioration of Gaza’s economy and health sector.

“It is reasonable to assume that the unstable power supply, the deteriorating functionality of medical equipment, the periodic shortages of essential drugs and medical consumables have had an impact on the quality of medical care with a consequent impact on infant mortality,” UNRWA added.

The Gaza Strip has ensured an 11-year long Israeli siege which has limited the entry of food, good and the supply of electricity. The UN has previously warned that Gaza would become “uninhabitable” by 2020.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Via Middle East Monitor

Featured Photo: Gigi Ibrahim/ Flickr, “Doctor attending to a baby at Shifaa Hospital, Gaza”

Think about that for a moment. The U.S. has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proven eager to sink at least a trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that’s still rising and outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure sags and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.

Clueless is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.

And when it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.

America Contained

In a way, it’s the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never — not until recently at least — empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.

Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a maniaof fear and suppression. However, the truth — at least in retrospect — was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”

In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.

That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn’t triumphalism (though that came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected, predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.

America Uncontained

Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the moment, “the end of history.” Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call “the last superpower,” the “indispensable” nation, the “exceptional” state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hitthe campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn’t all-American anymore).

In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the “last superpower” at that moment. There was even, however briefly, talk of a “peace dividend” — of the possibility that, in a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in the sinews of war-making but of peace-making (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being of the country’s citizens).

Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being relegated to Washington’s attic. Instead, with only a few rickety “rogue” states left to deal with — like… gulp… North Korea, Iraq, and Iran — that money never actually headed home and neither did the thinking that went with it.

Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.

And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993 when the world’s greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the planet (a place still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).

In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the twentieth century had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements, generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world — the very world of competing empires now being tucked into the history books — and it hadn’t gone away. In the twenty-first century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both, would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower.

Unchaining the Indispensable Nation

On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden sent his air force (four hijacked U.S. passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19 suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but unchained the last superpower.

Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on planet Earth. Just one superpower — wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse — had now been challenged by a small jihadist group.

To President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would instruct an aide at the Pentagon that day, “Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not.”

Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost instantly said to be “at war” and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have “terror networks” of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration’s potential gun sights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.

In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East. There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush’s top officials had been nursing just such dreams since, in 1997, many of them formed a think tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for the New American Century and began to write out what were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.

In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself. And this wasn’t to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration’s “unilateralism” rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging U.S. military power. The administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter bluntly: the U.S. was to “build and maintain” a military, in the phrase of the moment, “beyond challenge.”

They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all, as President Bush said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”

Though there was much talk at the time about the “liberation” of Afghanistan and then Iraq, at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet’s lone superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a “conservative” one, its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to everything. It was radical in ways that should have, but didn’t, take the American public’s breath away; radical in ways that had never been seen before.

Shock and Awe for the Last Superpower

Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that had never before been seriously imagined.

It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem — to them at least — that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty. But not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and pals. In the face of what seemed like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.

Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later, having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still with a military funded in a way the next seven countries couldn’t cumulatively match, the United States would have won literally nothing? Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the U.S. of the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all; that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a state of “infinite war” and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed states, destroyed cities, displaced people, and right-wing “populist” governments, including the one in Washington? Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this country would have found itself not just in decline, but — a new term is needed to catch the essence of this curious moment — in what might be called self-decline?

Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising — and doing so on a planet that seems itself to be going down. Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus in which America was both unchained and largely alone. The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so far suggests one reality about which America’s rulers proved utterly clueless: after so many hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.

Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.

The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.

Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.

All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

[Note: Two deep bows of thanks are in order — to Jim Peck and Nick Turse — for helping me think this piece out.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt

Featured Photo: Operation Buster-Jangle – Dog test — with troops participating in exercise Desert Rock I. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are a mere 6 miles from the blast. Nevada Test Site, 1 Novemeber 1951. Federal Government of the United States

Via Tomdispatch.com

CBS News: Raccoon survives climb up Minnesota skyscraper

Pro-government troops began the assault despite mounting international fears about the humanitarian fallout, pressing toward Hodeida airport south of the city after receiving a “green light” from the coalition.

By Wednesday night, the offensive remained on the outskirts of the rebel-held airport.

The Red Sea port, controlled by the Iran-backed Huthi rebels who hail from northern Yemen, serves as the entry point for 70 percent of the impoverished country’s imports as it teeters on the brink of famine.

The official United Arab Emirates news agency WAM confirmed that the operation was ongoing “with the participation and the support, through land and sea and air, of the Emirati armed forces”.

It added that the attacking forces managed to “liberate areas… in the surroundings of the airport” and captured and killed “dozens of Huthi” rebels.

The UN Security Council will meet on Thursday for urgent talks on the offensive, diplomats said, after a request from Britain. The closed-door meeting will be the second this week on the Yemen crisis.

The request came after the UN envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, said he was still holding negotiations on keeping the key port open to aid deliveries.

AFP / AFP. Yemen.

“We are in constant contact with all the parties involved to negotiate arrangements for Hodeida that would address political, humanitarian, security concerns of all concerned parties,” he said.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief warned of the “devastating” impact the assault would have.

“The latest developments will only lead to further escalation and instability in Yemen,” Federica Mogherini said in a statement.

The coalition insisted its humanitarian aid response would go in parallel with military operations.

– Huthis fan out –

Two Saudi and UAE aid ships were in the waters off Hodeida, coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki told Saudi state media.

The two countries also said they would operate a dedicated shipping lane to Hodeida from Abu Dhabi and the southern Saudi city of Jizan to deliver food and medical supplies.

In Hodeida, people waited anxiously for the fighting to reach their neighbourhoods. Those contacted by AFP said Huthi fighters had fanned out across the city.

Coalition sources said the alliance carried out 18 air strikes on Huthi positions on the outskirts of Hodeida on Wednesday.

According to medical sources in the province, 22 Huthi fighters were killed by coalition raids, while three pro-government fighters were killed in a rebel ambush south of Hodeida.

The UAE armed forces said on Wednesday night that four Emirati soldiers were killed in Yemen, without specifying when and where.

The city of Hodeida, home to 600,000 people, was captured by the insurgents in 2014 along with the capital Sanaa.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and a bloc of other countries intervened in Yemen the following year with the goal of restoring the government to power.

The coalition accuses the Huthis of using the port to secure Iranian arms, notably ballistic missiles the militants have increasingly fired into Saudi territory.

Yemen’s government said Tuesday that negotiations had failed to force the rebels from Hodeida, and that a grace period for UN-led peace efforts was over.

– Children in the crossfire –

WAM/AFP/File / HO. A handout file photo released on April 4, 2015 by the UAE news agency WAM shows an Emirati F-16 fighter jet taking off before raids against Huthi rebels in Yemen.

Emirati diplomats have insisted that similar large-scale offensives had improved the lives of Yemenis elsewhere.

Hassan Taher, the official Hodeida governor based outside the city, said Wednesday that Yemen’s government would ensure aid deliveries throughout the offensive.

“We want a rapid war, but it won’t be finished in two days,” Taher told AFP.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said any battle for Hodeida would exacerbate the suffering of the population.

“Life-saving items cannot be given to those in need while fighting is ongoing,” ICRC Middle East director Robert Mardini said in a statement.

The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, has raised alarm over the plight of Hodeida’s 300,000 children and the risk that drinking water supplies will be disrupted.

AFP / NABIL HASSAN. A Yemeni pro-government fighter burns a leaflet showing the banner of the Huthis which reads “God is the greatest… Death to America, death to Israel, cursed be the Jews, victory for Islam” in this picture taken at Al-Durayhimi on June 13, 2018.

“UNICEF has pre-prepositioned supplies in Hodeida: over 20,000 basic hygiene kits… We hope we don’t need to use them,” its Yemen representative Meritxell Relano said on Twitter.

The Huthi leadership on Tuesday called on the international community to “pressure a halt to the escalation”, warning an assault on Hodeida would put Red Sea navigation at risk.

On Wednesday, the Huthis said they targeted a coalition warship off the coast of Hodeida with two missiles, with rebel outlet Al-Masirah claiming a direct hit.

As the offensive got under way, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Yemen was defiant.

“Hodeida will be liberated, and the Yemeni people will gain back a major artery of life,” he tweeted.

Featured Photo: AFP / NABIL HASSAN. A column of Yemeni pro-government forces and armoured vehicles arrives in Al-Durayhimi district, south of Hodeidah airport, on June 13, 2018.

The United Nations General Assembly should support a resolution that calls for exploring measures to guarantee the protection of Palestinians in Gaza, and a UN inquiry mandated to investigate all violations and abuses should identify Israeli officials responsible for issuing unlawful open-fire orders. The killings also highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Third countries should impose targeted sanctions against officials responsible for ongoing serious human rights violations.

“Israel’s use of lethal force when there was no imminent threat to life has taken a heavy toll in life and limb,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The international community needs to rip up the old playbook, where Israel conducts investigations that mainly whitewash the conduct of its troops and the US blocks international accountability with its Security Council veto, and instead impose real costs for such blatant disregard for Palestinian lives.”

Kuwait has brought a resolution to the UN General Assembly that deplores Israel’s use of live ammunition against protesters in Gaza, as well as rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups at Israeli population centers, and calls for an end to the closure of Gaza and for the UN Secretary General to consider options to better protect Palestinians in Gaza. Kuwait sought General Assembly action after the US vetoed this resolution at the Security Council on June 1.

Human Rights Watch interviewed nine people who witnessed Israeli forces shooting protesters in Gaza on May 14, the day with the highest toll of deaths and injuries so far when more than 60 people were killed, and another who saw a journalist shot and killed on April 6. Seven of these interviewees not only witnessed people being shot, but were also themselves shot. The shootings happened at places where protests were held near the perimeter fences that separate the Gaza Strip from Israel, including east of Jabalya, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. Their accounts, along with photographs and videos, show a pattern of Israeli forces shooting people who posed no imminent threat to life with live ammunition. Israel should pay adequate compensation in all cases in which its forces unlawfully shot people or killed their family members.

Six of the witnesses Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were 200 to 300 meters from the two parallel fences, that in most places separate Gaza’s eastern periphery and Israel, on May 14 when Israeli forces shot them or people close to them with live ammunition. The victims include journalists, civil defense workers, and volunteers trying to evacuate the wounded, and a child running away from the fences.

Three other witnesses said that soldiers shot them when they were between 30 and 40 meters from the fences. These three include a 14-year-old boy and a 48-year-old man, shot in separate incidents, who said they had not thrown stones or otherwise tried to harm Israeli soldiers. A third man said he had approached the fences and thrown stones at Israeli forces, but that he was shot later, while attempting to evacuate another man who was shot and wounded. The accounts are consistent with numerous news reports and videos that show Palestinians being shot while standing still or running away from the fences.

Those Human Rights Watch interviewed said most of the shooting incidents they witnessed during the May 14 protests involved Israeli forces shooting people in the legs. But witnesses also described seven additional cases in which Israeli forces shot protesters who posed no imminent threat to life in the upper body, indicating that Israeli soldiers may have intended to kill them. One witness said he was shot in the back at a distance of 200 meters from the fences, with the bullet exiting his chest. Another said he saw a civil defense worker fatally shot in the chest 200 meters from the fences. Another witness said he saw a man in his 50s who was shot in the head when he approached to within 15 meters of the fences while holding a Palestinian flag. Two witnesses said they saw a man who was fatally shot in the head while being evacuated from close to the fences after being shot in the arm.

From March 30 to June 8, Palestinians have engaged in weekly demonstrations near the fences between Gaza and Israel to protest against the 11-year closure of Gaza and to commemorate the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees when Israel was established in 1948. Protests held on May 14 were also against the opening of the US embassy that day in Jerusalem. During the protests in this period, Israeli forces fired on demonstrators and killed 118 people during demonstrations, including 14 children, and wounded 3,895 with live ammunition who required hospitalization. At least 40 have needed to have limbs amputated, and hundreds more suffered severe injuries, medical officials reported.

The Israeli closure of Gaza, backed by Egypt, as well as disputes over funding between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have left medical facilities struggling to operate due to severe lack of electricity and essential drugs, medical disposables, and equipment. Doctors in Gaza have told Physicians for Human Rights–Israel they are powerless to provide needed treatment to many wounded patients. Israeli military authorities should reverse their policy of denying medical exit permits for Palestinians who were wounded in the protests. The Palestinian Authority should promptly issue required approvals for patients’ medical treatment.

During the weekly protests, the Israeli military shot and killed protestors on the basis of a policy, according to public statements by Israeli officials and a submission to Israel’s supreme court, to use live ammunition against people who approached or attempted to cross or damage the fences. Israeli leaders rejected repeated calls from the UN and the EU and petitions by human rights groups to change those orders and praised the military’s actions.

Israeli officials, including military commanders, apparently greenlighted the use of live ammunition against demonstrators. The officials include the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The vast majority of protesters were unarmed. Some threw rocks and “Molotov cocktails” (improvised gasoline bombs), used slingshots to hurl projectiles, launched kites with incendiary materials, and sought to damage the fences between Gaza and Israel. In one instance, four armed men fired at Israeli soldiers during a protest in northern Gaza on May 14, a witness said.

The UN reported that four Israeli soldiers have been wounded during the Gaza protests from March 30 to June 7, the first of whom was a soldier who was lightly wounded on May 14. An Israeli military spokesperson told the Guardian that no one had crossed the fences on May 14. “Our troops have not taken any sustained direct fire,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.

International human rights law standards on the use of force, which apply to law enforcement situations such as the Gaza protests, permit the use of live ammunition only as a last resort to prevent the imminent threat of death or serious injury. Israeli officials explicitly rejected human rights standards and argued that live ammunition was necessary to stop protesters from breaching the fences, because Hamas organized the protests so armed fighters could exploit the breaches to kill or capture soldiers or civilians. The use of live ammunition cannot be justified by automatically deeming every Palestinian who attempts to breach the fences to be an imminent threat to life, and in fact Israeli forces also shot medics, journalists, children, and others who were hundreds of meters away from the fences, Human Rights Watch said. In addition, because Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions as an occupied people, any wilful killing of them would constitute a war crime.

A senior Israeli military official told the Washington Post that the only weapons Israeli forces used were live ammunition and tear-gas, not water cannon or other measures that Israel uses in the West Bank, which the official said lacked adequate range.

In addition to the barbed wire fence separating Gaza and Israel, the two-meter-high fencing with electronic sensors, ditches, and military watchtowers along the Gaza periphery, in 2015 the Israeli military built fences around 12 Israeli communities near Gaza with electronic sensors that detect any contact with the fence and automatically alert the military. This further undercuts the claim that the protesters posed an imminent treat.

Photographs, videos, and statements by surgeons indicate that Israeli forces fired on protestors using military assault rifles that fire bullets at high velocity. Medical journal articles, including by Israel Defense Forces trauma surgeons, have documented that gunshot wounds from assault-rifle bullets cause severe soft tissue damage, have a high incidence of complications, and that “any delay at the scene of injury might jeopardize limb survival.”

The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is examining alleged serious crimes committed in Palestine since June 13, 2014, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. On May 22, Palestine submitted a “referral” requesting the prosecutor investigate crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction, including crimes against humanity and the war crimes of willfully killing or willfully “causing great suffering, or serious injury” to civilians and the residents of an occupied territory. Crimes against humanity are criminal acts committed on a widespread or systematic basis as part of an “attack on a civilian population,” involving a plan or policy to commit the crime. Such acts include murder, persecution on political grounds, and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health,” according to the Rome Statute.

Given strong evidence that serious crimes have been committed in Palestine since 2014, including new population transfers into occupied territories, Human Rights Watch has called on Bensouda to open a formal probe consistent with the ICC’s Rome Statute.

“Impunity for unlawfully killing and maiming people in Gaza risks continuing the cycle where still more lives and families will be torn apart in the future,” Whitson said. “The UN Human Rights Council inquiry should identify and call for sanctions against officials implicated in ongoing serious human rights violations.”

The Gaza Protests and Israel’s Use of Live Ammunition

Palestinians have held weekly protests beginning on March 30 near the fences along the eastern perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The protests were against Israel’s 11-year closure of the Gaza Strip and to commemorate the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s establishment, which Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

Dr. Ayman al-Sahabani, the head of the emergency department at al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, told Human Rights Watch that on May 14 alone the hospital received about 500 patients, most with bullet wounds to the legs, and 18 people who were dead on arrival. The emergency department’s capacity is 20 beds.

Many of the injuries are life-changing, according to medical personnel. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stated on April 19 that their clinics in Gaza had treated more than 250 people “where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone,” many of whom would require additional surgery. From March 30 to May 23, 40 people shot by Israeli forces, including at least three children, needed a limb amputated, 10 of whom lost a leg above the knee, according to information reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical sources to the World Health Organization.

Prior to the first mass weekly demonstration in Gaza on March 30, the Israeli government security cabinet – which consists of the prime minister, defense minister, and other senior officials – held two meetings to discuss the army’s planned response. The Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, briefed the security cabinet and later told Israeli media that “a big portion of the army” as well as more than 100 snipers would be present and that “the orders are to use a lot of force.” On March 29, Netanyahu’s Arabic spokesman posted a video of a man shot in the leg, stating, “This is the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face.”

On March 30, the Israeli military, using live ammunition, killed 17 Palestinians, 12 of them demonstrators, and wounded hundreds. The next day, the chairperson of Meretz, a left-leaning Israeli political party, the EU, and the UN secretary-general separately called for an independent investigation into the events. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman rejected those calls and said that “the IDF soldiers” at the Gaza fences “have my full backing.” Netanyahu thanked “our soldiers who are protecting the country’s borders.”

Protesters announced further demonstrations for the following Friday, April 6. Ahead of those protests, an Israeli military spokesperson stated that people “could potentially be shot” if they approached the fences or tried to damage them, and Lieberman stated that “anyone who comes close to the fence endangers his life.” During the April 6 protests, the Israeli military killed nine Palestinians in Gaza and injured hundreds more, according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which had called on soldiers to disobey unlawful orders to fire on protesters who posed no threat to life. At a cabinet meeting on April 11, Netanyahu chastised critics of the military’s actions and said “we will give [Israeli soldiers] all the backing they need to do their holy work.”

International Law and Israeli Claims

The use of force outside of active armed conflict is governed by international human rights standards set out in the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. These standards, which apply to the Gaza demonstrations, prohibit shooting live ammunition except to prevent “the imminent threat of death or serious injury” or “the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life,” and “only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives.”

The military did not publish its rules of engagement, but Israel’s state attorney disclosed some information in an April 29 response to a petition by Israeli human rights groups against the military’s use of lethal force against demonstrators in Gaza. The government response rejected applying human rights law applicable in law enforcement to the demonstrations, and claimed that only international humanitarian law, applicable in fighting in armed conflicts, applies, because the protests were “organized, coordinated and directed by Hamas, a terrorist organization engaged in armed conflict with Israel.” But even where the laws of armed conflict on targeting do apply, in any case where there is doubt as to a person’s civilian status, they must be presumed to be a civilian and may not be targeted.

Israeli officials argued that Hamas directed protesters to cross the fences so that armed fighters could run through the breach to kill or kidnap Israeli civilians or soldiers. The Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, said on May 15 that there was “no dilemma” in deciding between “having a lower amount of Palestinian casualties,” and using lethal force in order to “defend Israeli communities immediately behind the [Gaza perimeter fences].” The government’s April 29 court response elaborated that soldiers could use “potentially lethal force” to prevent protesters from breaching the fences and crossing from Gaza to Israel if “the evaluation is that the force is necessary at that time to remove the danger before it is realized, even if the danger itself has not yet become imminent,” and that shooting demonstrators before they reach the fences is justified because if crowds breached them, it would “operationally require live fire on a massive scale.”

In its efforts to justify the use of live ammunition to prevent Palestinians from crossing the fences, the government claimed in court to be following an open-fire policy that does not appear to account for the amounts of live ammunition used. The government stated to Israel’s supreme court that the orders only permit “accurate shooting towards the legs of a ‘major agitator or instigator’,” after giving verbal warnings and using non-lethal means to disperse demonstrations, “as a last resort only and subject to stringent requirements” of proportionality. The government stated that the orders do not permit live fire against a person because he is near the fences, took part in demonstrations, or supports Hamas.

In fact, Israeli forces appear to have routinely exceeded these restrictions, firing from behind sand mounds and the fences separating Gaza and Israel at demonstrators in many cases more than 200 meters away.

Netanyahu referred to a May 15 statement by a Hamas leader, Salah al-Bardawil, that 50 of 62 people killed by Israeli forces on May 14 were Hamas members – “in other words, members of a terrorist organization,” Netanyahu said. Israeli military and political officials also claimed that Hamas “strategically placed [civilians] in harm’s way” because graphic media coverage of their injuries would harm Israel’s image. Hamas’s encouragement of and support for the protests and the participation of Hamas members in the protests do not justify the use of live ammunition against protestors who posed no threat to life.

On May 25 Israel’s supreme court rejected petitions by human rights groups against the military’s live-fire orders without applying the clear standard on the use of lethal force set out in international human rights law, and substantially deferring to the government’s discretion. The court’s unwillingness to apply international law and to challenge a policy that authorizes lethal force even when there is no imminent threat to life highlights the importance of the International Criminal Court prosecutor opening a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

Palestinians in Gaza are protected persons under the Geneva Conventions. Willful killings of protected persons by the occupying power outside what is permissible under human rights standards would constitute a grave breach of the laws of occupation. The prohibition of war crimes and crimes against humanity can be the basis for individual criminal liability in international courts, as well as in domestic courts in many countries under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

Accounts from Witnesses

In total, from March 30 to June 2, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported that hospitals in Gaza received 530 Palestinians who were wounded in the head or neck, and 311 in the chest or back. News media reported that a 14-year-old girl who had tried to breach the fences with wire-cutters was fatally shot in the head.

The protesters were separated from the soldiers by the two fences and electronic sensors. Protesters had reached and torn down some of the barbed wire fence on April 27, and witnesses at the May 14 protests said that some protesters had cut or damaged sections of the barbed wire fence east of Gaza City, but that none had reached the electric fence beyond it.

One witness said he was aware of a person who had joined the May 14 protests while carrying a firearm, but apparently did not fire it because members of Hamas warned him that doing so could prompt Israeli soldiers to target the area. Another man said that four members of an armed group had attempted to attack Israeli forces east of Jabalya, by concealing guns until they reached the first fence, where they fired at Israeli forces positioned behind sand mounds about 80 meters away, before being shot fatally. Israeli forces killed at least 17 people in that area on May 14. Israeli concerns that members of armed groups would use the protests as cover to fire at Israeli soldiers or plant explosives near the fences do not justify the repeated use of live ammunition, including with apparent lethal intent, against protesters who posed no imminent lethal threat, Human Rights Watch said.

Witnesses consistently described the positioning of Israeli soldiers across the fences that separate Israel and Gaza, atop large earthen mounds overlooking the area where protesters congregated. The mounds were 10 to 30 meters apart, with 5 to 10 soldiers on each one. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan reported that Israeli forces entered Gaza at 3 a.m. on May 14 and leveled the land in front of the fences in multiple areas, apparently to eliminate protestors’ cover.

A freelance photojournalist, Mahmoud Abu Salama, 33, was covering demonstrations in an area east of Jabalya called Abu Safiyya, in the northern Gaza Strip, about 200 meters from the fences, where he saw a man shot in the groin at around noon on May 14, and a boy shot in the leg at about 3:30 p.m. Human Rights Watch has a photo he took of the boy. Abu Salama said:

I still hear the voices of people who were screaming after being shot. One man was launching stones with a slingshot, he was just a meter-and-a-half from me when he was shot in the groin. He was bleeding so badly that the paramedics didn’t know how to deal with him, his face color went between yellow and blue. The boy was also close to me when he was shot in his leg. I saw him while he was escaping from the teargas and running away with his back to the fence when they shot him.

Mohammad Meqdad, 39, a civil defense worker, spoke to Human Rights Watch while awaiting surgery at al-Shifa hospital on May 15. Wearing an orange, reflective vest, like other civil defense workers, he had been evacuating wounded people east of Gaza City to ambulances throughout the morning on May 14, he said. At around 1:30 p.m., he was walking back toward the fences after evacuating a casualty, and was about 300 meters away when he was shot in the leg:

My face was toward the fence. I was able to see soldiers on hills of sand and those hills were higher [on May 14] than they were on previous protest days. On each of the hills, there were about 10 soldiers. There were guys closer to the fence who were burning tires, chanting for Jerusalem, and throwing stones, but others were shot who were much farther away. The last people I evacuated before I was shot were three women, all in their late 20s, who were shot in the neck or in the head. They had been carrying flags and chanting, they were in a group of women that was about 150 meters from the fence, behind a group of men who were closer than they were to the fence. I evacuated one, and then another got shot, and then the other, over 5 or 10 minutes. One of them died immediately, but I don’t know what happened to the other two.

Mohaweya al-Ay, a 20-year-old student from the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, spoke to Human Rights Watch on May 17, after surgery at al-Shifa hospital. He said that he had been helping three civil defense workers evacuate wounded protesters east of Gaza City at 1 p.m. on May 14 when Israeli forces fatally shot one of the civil defense workers, Mousa Abu Hassanein, in the chest. They were about 200 meters from the fences at the time, al-Ay said. A Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, told Human Rights Watch that Abu Hassanein had helped rescue him when he was shot in the legs about an hour before Abu Hassanein was killed. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan reported that four paramedics were shot with live ammunition on May 14. On June 1, Israeli forces shot Razan al-Najjar in the chest, while the 21-year-old volunteer paramedic was wearing a white coat and treating wounded people at that day’s protest. The Israeli army has said “no shots were deliberately or directly aimed towards her.”

Al-Ay was shot in the back later that afternoon in the same area, while he was trying to reach a young man who had been shot, who he later learned was an 18-year-old named Ahmad al-Zarqa:

I saw a man was bleeding and walked toward him slowly. My back was toward the fence, no one was around me, throwing stones or anything else. Then a bullet hit my back from the right side and exited through my chest. I was about 200 meters away from the fence. There were no ambulances, they couldn’t come to us because of the shooting. Two civil defense men were near me and pulled me behind a wall [for cover from gunfire], and another guy took my phone and called my family.

Al-Ay said that he did not burn tires or throw stones. Israeli forces in that area had begun firing earlier in the day on a group of protesters who had reached the barbed-wire fence, tied a rope to it, and begun to pull it away, he said: “No one reached the electric fence. There were a large number of martyrs. The soldiers were on high hills of dirt and the first shootings were toward the top of people’s heads.”

The International Federation of Journalists identified nine journalists who were wounded on May 14, including photojournalist Farhan Abu Hadayed, 26, who was shot at around noon. He and two other witnesses, whom Human Rights Watch interviewed separately, said that he was about 150 meters from the fences wearing a flak jacket marked “Press” when he was shot in the leg. Abu Hadayed said that about 15 journalists had begun to follow a large group of demonstrators who were walking in the direction of the fences when “without any prior warning, and no firing of tear gas, they shot four people in the legs, and I was the fifth.”

A freelance photojournalist, Mohammad Qandil, said he also saw the shooting and held onto Abu Hadayed’s camera when he was evacuated to an ambulance. Abu Hadayed had gone to the protests with Ramzi al-Shakhreet, the supervisor at his media company, Truth Pioneers Network. Al-Shakreet, 34, said he was five meters away when Abu Hadayed was shot, and that “there was a clear line of sight from him to the soldiers at the fence. He was shot while he was taking photos.”

Al-Shakhreet also told Human Rights Watch that he saw two other protesters shot at around 1 p.m. A man in his 50s had approached to within 15 meters of the steel fence, waving a Palestinian flag, when he was shot in the head and apparently died instantly. A man in his mid-20s was about 150 meters from the fences when he was shot in the left leg: “He was seven or eight meters from me, I was to his right side, and he was shot while standing in the middle of the group of protesters, not doing anything except watching,” said al-Shakreet.

On April 6, Israeli forces had fatally shot another journalist, Yasser Murtaja, in the abdomen between 1:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon while he was covering demonstrations east of Khan Yunis. Another journalist, Muthana al-Najar, said that Murtaja “stepped forward to film someone who was injured on the ground, he had just turned to his right when he was shot in the left side of his waist.” Al-Najar said that there was thick smoke near the fences because protesters had been burning tires, but that he had a clear view of some snipers on a hill of dirt on the opposite side of the fences. Murtaja was more than 200 meters from the fences and was wearing a vest marked “Press” when he was shot. Murtaja was holding a digital camera and had told al-Najar he was filming a documentary about the weekly demonstrations. The Israeli military has opened an internal inquiry into some specific deaths, including Murtaja’s.

Human Rights Watch interviewed Abd el-Rahman Abu Qamar, a 14-year-old boy, at his bedside at al-Shifa hospital on May 17. He said he was running away from teargas and shooting and was about 200 meters from the fences east of Gaza City when he was shot in the leg at about 2 p.m. on May 14. His brother, Malek, 18, who went with his brother to the demonstration, said they were in a large group “chanting for Jerusalem.” Malek said Israeli forces fired on the group and he hit the ground to avoid the bullets, and then saw a paramedic and a civil defense worker evacuating Abd el-Rahman.

Defense for Children International-Palestine reported the names of six boys and a girl who were killed with live ammunition on May 14, the youngest being 13-year-old Izz al-Samak. Five were shot in the head or neck, and two in the abdomen.

Samer Nasser, 23, said he was part of a group east of Jabalya that was throwing stones and trying to approach the barbed-wire fence to cut it with wire-cutters when a man near him was shot in the arm. Nasser had driven a “tuk tuk,” a three-wheeled motorized vehicle, to the area. He loaded the wounded man onto it and was driving away to reach medical treatment when Israeli forces “started shooting heavily,” Nasser said. “The injured man in my tuk tuk was shot again in the head and immediately died, and I was shot in the thigh. I was bleeding for 15 minutes, and had to crawl until I reached a woman who helped me.”

Human Rights Watch obtained a video from another Gaza resident, Jamil Barakat, who said he filmed the woman who helped Nasser. In the video she is shown seeking cover behind a rock, gesturing to Nasser and encouraging him to crawl toward her. Barakat was also taking shelter behind the rock. “We were luckily not shot, but we were unable to move forward or backward for half an hour because they opened fire at us,” Barakat said. Barakat confirmed that the wounded man whom Nasser had put on his tuk tuk died before he could be evacuated. Nasser said that he participated in the demonstration to protest the US embassy move to Jerusalem (which happened on the same day as the 14 May protest), and Israel’s closure of Gaza.

Maher Harara, a 48-year-old from al-Shujaiya, a neighborhood east of Gaza City, said he saw a woman’s finger shot off as she was making a victory sign while facing the fences east of Gaza City at around 1 p.m. on May 14. She was about 40 meters from the fences. Harara was himself shot a few hours later. He had attended each of the protests since March 30 without being injured but was shot in his left leg at about 5 p.m. on May 14 in the same area, 40 meters from the fences: “I was not holding anything, even my mobile phone was in my pocket, and I was standing by myself, but maybe they shot me because I was wearing black trousers and a black t-shirt so they thought I was a leader, but I wasn’t.”

An 18-year-old youth said he was shot in the ankle in the Malaka area east of Gaza City, about 30 meters from the fences, in the afternoon of May 14:

There were about 50 people in front of me, they were the front group of protesters. I was watching them. Suddenly I fell down on the ground, shot in the leg. I was completely peaceful, doing nothing, just there because of the situation [the opening of the US embassy] in Jerusalem. I stood behind the main group assuming that would be safe, but they hit me. Around me there were a few guys throwing stones, and others burning tires, flying kites, and using slingshots. I also saw an old man get shot in his leg, he was 15 meters in front of me toward the fence, but also just standing and watching.

Featured Photo: Tear gas fired by Israeli forces fall near Palestinian protesters on May 14 east of Jabalya in the Gaza Strip. © 2018 Mahmoud Abu Salama.

Via Human Rights Watch