The UN has held an unprecedented public hearing in Gaza to broadcast live witness accounts from Palestinians who described seeing their relatives killed and injured during Israel’s January war.
One after another, they detailed Israeli rocket strikes and artillery shelling near a mosque, a UN school and on several homes across Gaza during the three-week war. The two-day hearing is part of an inquiry by the UN human rights council into the war led by the respected South African judge, Richard Goldstone.
Israel has refused entry for the inquiry team, accusing the UN council of an anti-Israel bias even though Goldstone himself is Jewish. But another round of hearings will be held in Geneva next week, for which some Israeli witnesses are expected to be flown in. They may include residents of Sderot, near Gaza, which has suffered repeated Palestinian rocket attacks.
“The purpose of the public hearings in Gaza and Geneva is to show the faces and broadcast the voices of victims – all of the victims,” Goldstone said last week. He had sat on South Africa’s constitutional court after the fall of apartheid and was a chief prosecutor on the UN criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
I’ll be sending the results of this hearing to the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange Chairman, Albert Dadon, for his comment following his disgusting justification in the 22 January 2009 Australian newspaper, for the shelling of Gaza civilians. Heres’ an excerpt from the article titled:
Images of bloodshed obscure truth
“If Israel has learned the lessons of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas has learned from that war too. Hezbollah was able to use the southern Lebanese population as human shields, and get away with it.
You would think that such a crime would be denounced by humanitarian groups, by the UN and by Western media.
Alas, the strategy has worked for Hamas: it produced the images that screamed from the front pages of newspapers and TV screens, pushingthe buttons of people across theworld.
Emotions cloud the context; the result is a circus. It is mind-boggling that barely any media outlet outside Israel has consistently denounced Hamas for using Palestinian women and children as human shields.
By forgetting the context, voluntarily or not, much of the Western commentators have implied this: it is permissible for terror groups to use civilians as human shields, but not fora legitimate country to mistakenly kill civilians in the course of battling the enemy.”
It’s hard to believe that an Australian community leader could utter such obscene words to defend the killing of civilians, and not be censured by any political party.
For the record, this is the same Albert Dadon that PM Rudd & Deputy PM Gillard have since publicly referred to as their personal friend, with Gillard & Dadon leading the Australia Israel Leadership Group to Israel late in June. Pewkworthy…..