As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 200, the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem is accusing Israel of committing war crimes by killing blockaded civilians and destroying infrastructure on a massive scale.
Israeli society, first, is receiving on domestic media a very different view than what people are experiencing in Gaza and what people are seeing around the world. Israeli media, not because of military censorship, but because of self-censorship, is reporting on Hamas rockets attacking Israeli civilians inside Israel, as indeed they should report on that, but they are barely reporting about the situation in Gaza. So, from the perspective — and this also is not new. This has been that one-sided reporting domestically by Israeli media, almost all of it, certainly Israeli TV, also in the previous Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip. It’s a story of Israel under attack. And it’s almost never a story about the situation in the Gaza Strip.
We’re saying that because that is the way it is. And I feel almost embarrassed to try and quote the relevant aspects of international law that are meant to protect civilians at times of war. To talk about distinction and proportionality, the two key principles of international law, they seem to crumble in the face of Israeli strategies of the way the Israeli army is using military force in the Gaza Strip again and again and again and again and again. This is not new. We’ve seen this before, with horrific consequences. We’ve seen war crimes in previous military assaults on Gaza. And, in fact, the impunity of the previous
— source democracynow.org | May 17, 2021