A UN Group May Have Committed War Crimes

Joe Lauria’s article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal was headlined U.N.: Israel and Palestinian Groups May Have Committed War Crimes, but here’s the thing: the United Nations Human Rights Commission is accusing Israel of war crimes for defending itself against what its report is only willing to “strongly suggest” was the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist war against Israel.

Oh, wait: the UN doesn’t even address the Palestinian Authority in any serious sense—in only goes on about “Palestinian armed groups” as the ones committing the terrorism and the PA’s claimed inability to control its own territory. Never mind that the PA’s terror war was done explicitly under the auspices of the Hamas branch of the unity government that is the Palestinian Authority.

The UN did decry the toll,

In Gaza, the scale of the devastation was unprecedented. The death toll alone speaks volumes: 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians with 299 women and 551 children.

Never mind that the vast majority of these civilian deaths were from Hamas shooting from residential buildings from which the civilian occupants were prevented from leaving—they were shields for the terrorists and bodies for the publicity.

The UN’s report also had this:

In the cases in which attacks were directed at military objectives located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects, mortars are not the most appropriate weapon. The imprecise nature of mortars makes it difficult for an attacking party using this weapon in an area in which there is a concentration of civilians to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and the military objective of the attack, and to limit its effects as required by international humanitarian law. Therefore, the use of such weapons with wide area effects by Palestinian armed groups against targets located in Israeli towns and villages, and the possible indiscriminate effects, are likely to constitute a violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.

The UN, though, carefully omits the reason those military objectives were “located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects” in the first place. The PA were using those civilians as shields and as body count.

Even though the Israelis were at pains to warn the occupants of these putative “civilian objects” prior to a strike, the report’s “investigators” were careful to trot out their witnesses who said there were no warnings. Except for a slip of the tongue by a UNRWA “witness.”

The UN, in its report, also made light of its own UNHCR storing many of the PA’s weapons for it and that when caught the UNRWA turned those weapons over to the PA. The report does decry Israel, though, for warning the UNRWA (that tongue slip) of an impending strike against a PA (the report says “Hamas”) arsenal staged below a cluster of UNRWA buildings—and then carrying out the strike.

The UN’s report goes on in this vein.

The UNHRC is complicit after the fact in the Palestinian Authority’s terror war fought from Gaza last summer.

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