U.N. Report Reframes Debate Over Searing Image of a Father’s Agony in Gaza

Majed Hamdan/Associated Press Jihad Masharawi, a Palestinian journalist who works for the BBC in Gaza, cradling the dead body of his 11-month-old son, Omar, at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Nov. 14, 2012.

As The Lede reported in November, within hours of the start of Israel’s Gaza offensive that month, images of the dead and wounded, particularly those of children, were shared widely on social networks by Israelis and Palestinians, as both communitiessought to alert the world to their grief.

Four months later, a new argument has erupted online over one of those images, a photograph that showed Jihad Masharawi, a Palestinian journalist who works for the BBC in Gaza, cradling the dead body of his 11-month-old son, Omar, at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The child, and his teenaged aunt and uncle, were killed by a bomb that dropped on the family home on Nov. 14, shortly after Israel launched Operation Pillar of Cloud with a precision-guided strike on the car of Ahmed al-Jabari, the Hamas military commander.

As my colleague Isabel Kershner explains, a United Nations report released last week suggested that the bomb that tore apart the Masharawi family home might have been “a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel,” rather! than an Israeli strike. The cause of the boy’s death remains disputed, however, since the the U.N. report on casualties of the Gaza conflict devotes just one sentence to the finding and provides no details of the evidence on which it was based. A U.N. spokesman said that the investigators, who visited the ruined home four weeks after the incident, could not “unequivocally conclude” that a Palestinian rocket was responsible.

The spokesman, Matthias Behnke, told The Associated Press that investigators from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had concluded, based on eyewitness testimony, that Hamas rockets were fired from near the family’s home, but the area was also targeted by Israeli airstrkes.

Jon Donnison, a BBC correspondent in the region, reported that the boy’s father dismissed the findings as “rubbish,” and said that the investigators had not even spoken with him. Mr. Donnison noted in a television appearance on Tuesday that Israel’s military “had never denied carrying out the strike and, in fact, at the time was briefing journalists that it had targeted the house because it believed there was a militant in the building.” Israel’s military told my colleague in Jerusalem on Monday that it has not determined whether it hit the house or not, saying it does not have clear information about what happened.

Despite this lack of clarity, pro-Israel bloggers treated the U.N. report as definitive and immediately pressed the BBC and other news organizations to apologize for publishing a photograph of the bombed out Masharawi home ta! ken by a ! colleague of the boy’s father who wrote on Twitter that the damage was caused by “an Israeli shell.”

In response, at least pro-Palestinian blogger noted that the single sentence in the U.N. report on the family includes an obvious factual error. The report said the bombing killed “a woman, her 11-month-old infant, and an 18-year-old adult.” In fact, the child’s mother was present at his funeral the following day. As Jihad Masharawi himself explained on the night of the bombing, in a wrenching interview with the BBC while cradling his dead son in his arms, the explosion had killed his sister-in-law and badly wounded his brother.

The month after the deadly bombing, the Guardian correspondent Harriet Sherwood visited Jihad Masharawi in Gaza and reported that “his brother Ahmed, 18, died after 12 days in intensive care with burns to 85 percent of his body.”

According to Ms. Sherwood report, the bereaved father told her that he was baffled that Islamist militants claimed to have won the battle with Israel. “Hamas think they were heroes, with a great victory,” he said, “I don’t know how they can talk about victory. There will be another escalation for sure. Like everyone here, I’m not expecting a long period of quiet. My child was killed, and nothing on the ground has changed. No one achieved anything. Families lost children and loved ones. How c! an this b! e a victory”

While most partisans seized on the single sentence about the Masharawi family in the U.N. report, the 17-page document (embedded below), contains details of many other deaths, and clear condemnation of both Israel’s military and Hamas for their conduct of the battle.

Human Rights Council Report on 2012 Gaza Casualties

The report, which was prepared to inform the body’s rights council about the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” begins with the following breakdown of the 180 people who were killed in the fighting:

During the crisis, 174 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. At least 168 of them were killed by Israeli military action, of whom 101 are believed to be civilians, including 33 children and 13 women. Hundreds of persons were injured.4 Six civilians, including one woman and three children, may have been killed by rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups that landed in Gaza. In the context of the crisis, six Israelis, including four civilians, were reportedly killed, an! d 239 Isr! aelis, including 219 civilians, were reportedly injured.

The investigators go on to condemn both sides in clear terms. In a section on the deaths apparently caused by Israel Defense Forces, the authors wrote:

In a number of cases, civilians who happened to be present in or passing through open areas and fields, locations that could potentially be used for rocket launches, were killed. The cases mentioned below raise the question of whether the IDF took all feasible measures to verify that their targets were military objectives, in line with the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law, which requires that the parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between civilians and combatants. Under international human rights law these cases may constitute violations of the right to life.

On 19 November, a father, his 12-year-old daughter, and his 19-year-old son were allegedly killed by a drone missile while collecting spearmint in a farm adjcent to their house in Ahmad Yassin Street, north of Gaza City. Information collected by OHCHR indicates that the victims were farmers. In a similar case, on 21 November, an 84-year-old man working on his olive farm and his 14-year-old granddaughter were killed by a missile that landed in their farm, east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip.

In their description of the findings on deaths apparently caused by Palestinian militants, the authors reported:

In one incident that took place on 15 November, three Israeli civilians, including a woman, were killed when a Palestinian rocket hit an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, a town in Israel’s southern district…. An estimated 80 Israeli houses were either destroyed or sustained damages as a result of Palestinian rocket attacks during the crisis.

While some projectiles were directed at military objectives, many, if not the vast majority of the Palestinian attacks on Israel constituted indiscriminate attac! ks. Such ! attacks violate international humanitarian law. Most rockets fired by the armed groups did not seem to be directed at a specific military objective. Furthermore, many Palestinian armed groups directly and indirectly indicated their determination to - and took responsibility for - attacks on Israeli civilians or large population centers in Israel. Such acts clearly violate international humanitarian law, namely the principle of distinction.

In addition, such acts could also have the aim of spreading terror among the civilian population, which would further violate international humanitarian law. While certain Palestinian armed actors cited the limits of their military arsenals as a reason for failing to precisely attack military targets, the military capacity of the conflicting parties is irrelevant to their duty, under international humanitarian law, to take all feasible measures to avoid loss among civilians and damage to civilian property.