Jerusalem, February 28: An Israeli inquiry has found that the armed forces acted on flawed intelligence to kill a “disproportionate” number of Palestinian civilians during an air strike nine years ago which targeted a Hamas militant in Gaza.
But a summary published on Sunday of the classified report concluded that there was no criminal wrongdoing, effectively ruling out further action against troops over the dropping of a one-tonne bomb in July 2002 that killed bomb-maker Salah Shehadeh and 13 civilians, among them women and children.
Foreign and domestic critics had seized on the attack at the height of the Palestinian uprising, in which thousands died, as an example of Israeli indifference toward Palestinian civilians.
Israel says it tries to avoid hitting non-combatants and the three-member inquiry panel, commissioned after a court case that challenged the legality of the air strike, concluded that what are known as “targeted killings” were a legal means of warfare.
The panel said killing Shehadeh had been justified as a way of thwarting a Hamas campaign of suicide attacks in Israel.
But it found what it called an “intelligence failure” by the military: “Too much weight was placed on the immediate strike on Shehadeh and too little weight was given to the possible risk to uninvolved civilians,” it said. As a result there was “disproportionate harm to uninvolved civilians”.
The panel found no cause for further legal steps, however.
Human rights activists accuse Israel of taking few too steps to avoid civilian casualties, citing a much higher Palestinian than Israeli death toll in the years after the uprising began in 2000. Similar charges were leveled after the Gaza war two years ago in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died.
Israel insists it takes steps to avoid collateral damage and accuses its enemies, such as Hamas, of failing to do the same.
——–Agencies