Human Rights Watch on Thursday said the thousands of rockets fired by the Palestinian Iran-backed militant group Hamas during the 11-day war with Israel “violated the laws of war and amount to war crimes.”
HRW investigated Iran-backed Hamas rocket attacks that killed 12 civilians in Israel, as well as a misfired rocket that killed seven Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip.
HRW has repeatedly come under fire by Israel and its supporters over reports accusing Israel of war crimes against the Palestinians as well as apartheid and persecution. But in this report, it agreed with most legal experts — and Israel itself — that indiscriminate rocket fire from Palestinian population centers directed at civilian areas is a violation of international law.
“Palestinian armed groups during the May fighting flagrantly violated the laws-of-war prohibition on indiscriminate attacks by launching thousands of unguided rockets towards Israeli cities,’’ Human Rights Watch acting Middle-East and North Africa director Eric Goldstein said in a statement.
Hamas, founded in the 1980s and backed by Iran, rejects Israel’s existence, is responsible for scores of deadly attacks on Israeli civilians, and is considered a terrorist group by the US, EU, and Israel.
“We do say this loud and clear … Iranians are the ones who support us with weapons, money, and food,” a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad official, Ramez al-Halabi, told an Iraqi TV channel on the eve of the fight.
After the battle, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh said in a televised speech that Iran “did not hold back money, weapons, and technical support.”
Human Rights Watch in July interviewed 12 people in Israel and Gaza who witnessed a Palestinian rocket attack or are relatives of civilians killed. Human Rights Watch examined two rocket strikes in Israel that killed three civilians: Leah Yom Tov, 63, who was killed by metal fragments from a Palestinian rocket at her home in Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv, on the evening of May 11; and Nadine Awad, 16, and Khalil Awad, 52, killed in front of their home in the Palestinian village of Dahmash in central Israel, about 20 kilometers from Tel Aviv, in the early morning of May 12.
Source: Human Rights Watch
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