collective punishment

Israeli media revealed ... that one of the first acts of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister elected in 2006, was to send a message to the Bush White House offering a long-term truce in return for an end to Israeli occupation. His offer was not even acknowledged.

Instead, according to the daily Jerusalem Post, Israeli policymakers have sought to reinforce the impression that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”. On this thinking, collective punishment is warranted because there are no true civilians in Gaza.

The Foreign Office intervened to stop a criminal investigation into the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers by British troops, in a cover-up that puts Britain's colonial past under renewed scrutiny. Newly disclosed documents reveal that in the 1990s UK officials pressured Malaysian authorities into aborting a police inquiry into the alleged killings by Scots Guards in Malaya in 1948.

They reveal that Malaysian police officers contacted Interpol and were due to visit the UK in 1993 to interview soldiers involved in the shootings, only for the Foreign Office to pressure the country's high commissioner into halting the visit. One memorandum states that senior Foreign Office officials later met Malaysian police chiefs to discuss closing the inquiry shortly before it was aborted...

The plantation workers were shot in cold blood by a 16-man patrol of Scots Guards in December 1948. Many of the victims' bodies were found to have been mutilated and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground. No weapons were found when the village was searched during a military operation against Chinese communists in the post-second world war Malayan emergency.

The British government has refused to apologise for the incident or offer reparations, and last November it said it would not hold a public inquiry into an incident that campaigners dub "Britain's My Lai massacre".

If Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreeement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket. Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force "in self-defense" unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext...

The policy of blockade, punishing the entire civilian population of Gaza for the acts of a few, is a collective punishment, which is unacceptable and violates international law. The blockade is also in breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1860, and of the Agreement on Movement and Access signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2005.

Q: Was and is the blockade of Gaza a war crime?

RG: It was a violation of international law, it was not a war crime because there was no war. It was a violation of the 4th Geneva convention. There has to be an actual military armed conflict for it to be a war crime. It is also a violation of international human rights law.

Q: What are the specific steps that Israel could have taken to stop the shelling of southern Israel before commencing an attack on Gaza?

RG: Well, it could have used greater pressure by diplomatic means. They could have used the security council for that purpose. Israel could have put the security council on notice and said "if you don't stop this, if you don't do something to stop it, we will have to resort as a last resort to military means."

... Military force should be the very last resort. I think it is arguable here that other diplomatic means could have worked.

Israel flew about 3,000 sorties over Gaza. Every plane came back. None was damaged. None was downed. There was no fighting in Gaza. If you read the reports that were issued by the—the testimonies of the Israeli soldiers, the one consistent theme in all of the testimonies was they never met any Hamas militants, they never engaged in any battles. Some of the Israeli soldiers expressed exasperation: “We came here to fight. We’re not fighting anyone.” There was no—there were no battles. There were no Hamas militants in the field. The basic fact was, as a couple of Israeli soldiers said—one of them said, “This was like PlayStation, a computer game.” Another Israeli soldier said, literally—I’m quoting exactly, almost word for word—he said, “It was like a child with a magnifying glass burning ants.” That’s what Gaza was like.