The Israeli Ministry of Defense has announced that “a Jordanian military field hospital has been coordinated between Israel and the Jordanian authorities and is scheduled to arrive tomorrow at the Gaza Strip. Some 33 trucks, with approximately 210 medical staff and equipment, will access the region at Allenby Bridge and make their way to the Gaza Strip via Erez Crossing”.
At its weekly cabinet meeting, the Israeli government adopted a statement saying that “As a moral army without peer, the IDF took care to act in accordance with international law and did its utmost to prevent harming civilians who were not involved in the fighting, including their property, and to this end, inter alia, distributed very many flyers and also used the local media and the local telephone network in order to deliver timely general and detailed warnings to the civilian population. The IDF also acted to provide for the humanitarian needs of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip during the fighting …”
The Israeli cabinet statement added that:
“As in any operation, the IDF will undertake operational investigations, and draw lessons and the necessary conclusions therefrom. The Government expresses its full confidence in this serious process and ascribes national importance to them. The Government condemns and rejects the attempts to cast aspersions on the character of the IDF, its soldiers and commanders, and expresses its confidence in its norms and values” …
On January 10, Human Rights Watch posted a statement on their website saying it believed the IDF is using White Phosphorous in Gaza. See post here.
On January 22, Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth wrote in a commentary that “Now that Human Rights Watch and other observers have been let in, it has become clear that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were not the only casualties of the fighting. So was the credibility of the IDF. Part of the problem was the IDF’s expansive definition of a military target. It attacked a range of civilian facilities, from government offices to police stations, on the theory that they all provided at least indirect support to Hamas militants. But by that theory, Hamas would have been entitled to target virtually any government building in Israel on the ground that its office workers indirectly supported the IDF. That would make a mockery of the distinction between civilians and combatants that lies at the heart of the laws of war, which require direct support to military activity before civilians become legitimate military targets. Behind the unsupportable legal claim seemed to lie a determination to make Gazans suffer for the presence of Hamas–a prohibited purpose for using military force. The IDF’s credibility probably took the biggest hit on the issue of its use of white phosphorous. A typical artillery shell of white phosphorous releases 116 phosphorus-soaked wedges which, upon contact with oxygen, burn intensely, releasing a distinctive plume of smoke. That smoke can be used legitimately to obscure troop movements, but white phosphorous can be devastating when used in urban areas, igniting civilian structures and causing people horrific burns. Its use by the IDF in densely populated sections of Gaza violated the legal requirement to take all feasible precautions during military operations to avoid harming civilians. It never should have been deployed. The IDF has tried to defend itself with denial and obfuscation. It first denied using white phosphorous at all. Then, when that proved untenable, it claimed that use was limited to unpopulated areas of Gaza. Neither claim is true. On Jan. 9, 10 and 15, a Human Rights Watch military expert personally observed white phosphorous being fired from an artillery battery and air burst over Gaza City and the Jabalya refugee camp. Its telltale jellyfish-like plume was a dead giveaway, as can be seen from many photographs that are now emerging from Gaza of white phosphorous raining down on civilian areas … As for obfuscation, the IDF claimed that all weapons it used were ‘legal’, but that begs the critical question of how they were used. The use of white phosphorous is legal in certain circumstances but illegal when deployed in a way that causes unnecessary or indiscriminate harm to civilians. The IDF cited press reports suggesting that the International Committee of the Red Cross supported its position, but in a rare public comment, the ICRC denied that claim. The IDF’s latest line is that the shells fired in Gaza ‘contained phosphorus material but were not actual phosphorus shells’. That is semantic game-playing. Nothing that indiscriminately burns the way the IDF’s shells did, regardless of name, should be used in densely populated areas … [T]he IDF probably caused more civilian casualties with its use of 155 mm high-explosive artillery shells in Gaza. These weapons can injure civilians from blast and fragmentation over an area with a radius of as much as 300 meters. That’s roughly the equivalent of taking three football fields, lining them end to end and then rotating them around the point of the shell’s impact. In the densely populated residential areas of Gaza, where Human Rights Watch saw these shells used on Jan. 15, they can cause extensive civilian casualties. Such use clearly violates the laws-of-war prohibition of indiscriminate attacks because the shells strike military targets and civilians without distinction. Such unlawful endangering of civilian life in Gaza cannot be justified by Hamas’ deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on Israeli cities and towns. Illegality by one side to a conflict does not excuse illegality by the other.” … Kenneth Roth’s commentary on “The Incendiary IDF” is posted here.