TITLE: CIVILIAN HARM: Secret Pentagon Investigation Found No One at Fault in Drone Strike That Killed Woman and 4-Year-Old
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/12/somalia-drone-strike-civilian-deaths/
EXCERPT: [E]xclusive documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former U.S. and Somali military personnel and government officials, victims’ relatives, and experts offer an unprecedented window into the U.S. drone war in Somalia, an investigator’s efforts to excuse the killing of a woman and child, and a “reporting error” that kept those deaths secret for more than a year from Congress, the press, and the American people. The Intercept’s investigation reveals that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths.
“Ultimately, this is just one of many tragedies caused by the U.S. military’s systemic failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants, to own up to its deadly mistakes, to learn from them, and to provide assistance to survivors,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “The failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants isn’t just tragic. It’s also a violation of international law and completely undermines U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”
More than five years after the strike, Mariam and Luul’s family has not been contacted by any U.S. official or received a condolence payment. Over two days this spring, I met with eight of their relatives in Mogadishu. They spoke about Mariam’s wide smile, Luul’s nurturing role as a sister and mother of two, and the terror that haunts Luul’s surviving son. Their anguish and outrage were palpable, particularly when I showed them the findings of the formerly secret U.S. investigation.
If the Somali military had killed Americans in similar circumstances, Abdi Dahir Mohammed, another of Luul’s brothers, told The Intercept, “the United States would have reacted and the Somali government would have reacted. The pain that Americans would feel is the pain that we feel. They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable. We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”
The attack was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed and imprecise targeting carried out by a Special Operations strike cell whose members considered themselves inexperienced, according to the documents. The secret investigation led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias: a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information that confirms their preexisting beliefs. Despite this, the investigation exonerated the team involved.
“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” wrote the investigator. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, seemed staggered as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told The Intercept. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”
TITLE: US backs Israel attacking hospitals used as military base
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/11/12/hamas-keeping-civilians-in-hospitals-gaza-netanyahu/
EXCERPT: America on Sunday night backed Israeli claims that Hamas was using hospitals in Gaza as military bases, accusing the terror group of “a violation of the rules of war”.
As fighting intensified around several hospitals in Gaza, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said Israeli military assessments that Hamas was using them as “command and control” centres were correct.
Hamas and its supporters say such accusations are Israeli propaganda. But a newly relevant 2015 report by the human rights group Amnesty International also alleges that one of the hospitals, Shifa, once served as a Hamas interrogation and torture centre.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, joined the criticism of Hamas on Sunday evening: “We condemn the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields by Hamas,” he said.
“Civilians must be allowed to leave the combat zone. Hostilities are severely impacting hospitals [and] taking a horrific toll on civilians.”
The Israeli military also said last week that Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, was connected to the so-called “Gaza Metro”, the tunnel network used by Hamas to transport fighters and weapons.
Medics and Hamas officials say that thousands of civilians are currently trapped in Shifa and other Gazan hospitals because of shell and sniper fire from Israeli troops.
On Sunday, staff at Shifa said that 37 babies in intensive care were are at risk of dying because the hospital’s power had run out. Both Shifa and another large hospital, al-Quds, announced that they were suspending operations.
Mr Sullivan said that while the US had urged the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to minimise the risk of hospital patients being caught in crossfire, it understood why the military was targeting them.
“The United States does not want to see firefights in hospitals where innocent people, patients receiving medical care, are caught in the crossfire and we’ve had active consultations with the Israel Defense Forces on this,” he told CBS News.
But he added: “Hamas is using hospitals as it uses many other civilian facilities, for command and control, for weapons storage, to house its fighters and this is a violation of the laws of war.”
Mr Sullivan said the US’s assessment was based on open source information rather than intelligence from the IDF, which has shared information about Hamas’s use of hospitals with Western governments.
TITLE: What is a ‘human shield’ and why is Israel using the term in Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/13/what-is-a-human-shield-and-why-is-israel-using-the-term-in-gaza
EXCERPT: Hospitals are protected under humanitarian law, but this status can be lost if their premises are used for military purposes.
“The law says hospitals are protected but immediately adds a series of exceptions where it is allowed to bomb hospitals,” [Neve] Gordon, said. “Israel knows what these exceptions are and frames the hospital as being a site where those exceptions apply.”
Gordon and co-author Nicola Perugini coined the phrase “medical lawfare” to describe “the idea of framing hospitals as carrying out a mission that is outside their humanitarian duty to justify strikes against them”.
This is a strategy “repeatedly deployed by the Israeli military and government to legitimise attacks on life-sustaining and saving infrastructure and shift the blame onto the Palestinians themselves,” Gordon said.
In the case of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Israel said it presented evidence in recent weeks that Hamas’s main command centre is located underneath the building, home to at least 5,000 patients and thousands more refugees.
Ezzat el-Reshiq, a Hamas official, denied allegations that the group was using the facility as a shield for its underground military. International observers including Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who worked at the facility for 16 years, said they never encountered any indication of any military activity beneath the facility.
Weller, the Cambridge professor, noted that even if military activity were to be proven and the site therefore became liable to attack, patients and staff must be given the opportunity to evacuate.
“Once more, it doesn’t mean that all the civilians in it are removed from the protection of humanitarian law more generally. There would still have to be a calculation of proportionality in terms of civilian damage and military gain,” Weller said.
“The very fact that we have seen 44 [Israeli] soldiers killed in this conflict and almost 11,000 [Palestinian] civilians gives an indication that the calculation of proportionality in Gaza has left the bounds of reasonableness.”
TITLE: Gaza reports more than 11,100 killed. That’s one out of every 200 people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/
EXCERPT: Strikes have hit refugee camps and residential neighborhoods, bakeries and water towers, solar panels and fishing boats, schools and hospitals, mosques and churches. Israel has said the strikes are aimed at Hamas infrastructure and are necessary to root out the group.
Hundreds are killed everyday as bombardments hammer one of the world’s most densely populated areas.
President Biden cast doubt on the numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health on Oct. 25. Others in his administration have said more recently that the casualty figures could be greater than reported.
“It could be that they’re even higher than are being cited,” Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf said in a congressional hearing last week.
“In these extraordinarily dense confines, it just stands to reason that there are very high casualties,” she said.
At least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units have been damaged or destroyed. Around 2,700 people are missing, the United Nations estimates; many are probably buried under the rubble.
More than 28,000 people are injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
“A whole generation has been permanently damaged and disabled,” said Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British Palestinian doctor working in hospitals in northern Gaza.
But medical care is increasingly difficult to find. Fewer than half of Gaza’s hospitals are functioning, according to the United Nations. The situation in northern Gaza is especially dire, as shelling and ground attacks intensify near al Shifa, the enclave’s largest hospital, and other medical facilities nearby.
At least three babies died at Shifa when power ran out and incubators stopped working, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported Saturday. Doctors say dozens more newborns are at imminent risk.
“We’re getting to a point of an even deeper level of catastrophic suffering and death,” said Mara Kronenfeld, the executive director of the U.S. National Committee of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. “Any of those hospitals that are functioning have oil to run their generators, and that fuel is running out.”
Supplies have begun to trickle in through Egypt. Aid workers say it’s not nearly enough.
“It’s a drop in the bucket,” said Amber Alayyan, a pediatrician and deputy program manager for Palestine at Doctors Without Borders. Alayyan said the lack of supplies and the volume of injuries are overwhelming health-care centers.
People are coming into hospitals with severe burns, severed limbs and internal bleeding — injuries that could require multiple surgeries and “if not weeks of recovery, months and years,” she said.
“It’s absolutely impossible for any type of hospital to be able to sustain this type of burden,” Alayyan added. As more hospitals fail, she said, more people will die.
Nearly half of Gazans are children. More than 4,500 children have been killed since Oct. 7, surpassing the number of children killed in conflict zones around the world each year since 2019, according to Save The Children.