Crimes de guerra em Gaza

«The prolonged situation of impunity has created a justice crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that warrants action»

Esta é apenas uma das muitas frases fortes do relatório das Nações Unidas, hoje divulgado, sobre os crimes de guerra cometidos em Gaza (e possíveis crimes contra a Humanidade), pelas tropas israelitas. Mas o dedo também é apontado a grupos armados palestinianos.
O assunto merece destaque na primeira página do New York Times de hoje.

Li já uma parte do documento, em busca de notícias sobre o clã Samouni, cuja história contei na Visão, em Janeiro, na reportagem Terra Fértil para Mártires. O que diz a ONU sobre o desaparecimento daqueles 35 membros de uma só família, mortos num só dia?
Diz que considera «as mortes daqueles civis injustificadas», em violação de todas as regras. Eram apenas agricultores.

E agora? Israel já declarou, por diversas vezes, que não aceita a criação de um tribunal internacional para julgar crimes de guerra. Foram criadas comissões de inquérito internas, no seio das Forças Armadas hebraicas, embora a sua independência deixe muito a desejar...

Era importante que as «Nações Unidas» agissem de alguma forma, contra tamanhos atropelos dos Direitos Humanos. Ali, no Médio Oriente, como em tantos países de África, ou nos Estados Unidos, onde reina a impunidade. Escrever relatórios, aprovar resoluções e fazer condenações públicas não é, como está visto e provado, o suficiente.

Aqui ficam alguns excertos que me impressionaram particularmente:

- The timing of the first Israeli attack, at 11:30 am on a week day, when children were returning from school and the streets of Gaza were crowded with people going about their daily business, appears to have been calculated to create the greatest disruption and widespread panic among the civilian population.

- The treatment of many civilians detained or even killed while trying to surrender is one manifestation of the way in which the effective rules of engagement, standard operating procedures and instructions to the troops on the ground appear to have been framed in order to create an environment in which due regard for civilian lives and basic human dignity was replaced with the disregard for basic international humanitarian law and human rights norms.

- The repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians appears to the Mission to have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers, as described by some of them, and not the result of occasional lapses. The Mission recognizes that some of those killed were combatants directly engaged in hostilities against Israel, but many were not.

- It is clear from evidence gathered by the Mission that the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces. It was not carried out because those objects presented a military threat or opportunity but to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.

- Allied to the systematic destruction of the economic capacity of the Gaza Strip, there appears also to have been an assault on the dignity of the people. This was seen not only in the use of human shields and unlawful detentions sometimes in unacceptable conditions, but also in the vandalizing of houses when occupied and the way in which people were treated when their houses were entered. The graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.

- What occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.