THE HAGUE: Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki said there was clear evidence of war crimes by Israel during its offensive in Gaza as he met International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors on Tuesday to push for an investigation.

Mr Malki visited The Hague shortly after Israel and the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement that dominates Gaza entered a 72-hour truce mediated by Egypt in an effort to secure an extended ceasefire.

Last week, the United Nations launched an inquiry into human rights violations and crimes alleged to have been committed by Israel during its offensive, given the far higher toll of civilian deaths and destruction on the Palestinian side.

Know more: Israel violating laws of war: HRW

“Everything that has happened in the last 28 days is clear evidence of war crimes committed by Israel, amounting to crimes against humanity,” Mr Malki said.

Malki told reporters that the Palestinian Authority (PA) wanted to give the ICC jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes by both sides in the Gaza conflagration and that he had discussed a timeline with prosecutors to join the court. Unless the Palestinians do so, no investigation is possible.

Mr Malki said the PA’s status as an observer state at the United Nations, granted by the General Assembly in 2012, qualified it to become an ICC member and that the decision on whether to apply could happen “very soon”.

But he pointed to possible complications by saying this could go ahead only with the cooperation of Hamas, which is shunned by the West as a designated terrorist group and is a strong political rival of the Western-backed PA, which governs only in parts of the West Bank not occupied by Israel.

By joining the court, the Palestinian territories would automatically open themselves up to war crimes committed both by adversaries and by themselves within their borders, if any.

Children killed

More than 400 children have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, and almost a thousand times as many are traumatised and face an “extraordinarily bleak” future, according to a top Unicef official in Gaza.

Pernille Ironside, head of the field office run by the UN children’s agency in Gaza, said rebuilding children’s lives would be part of a much larger effort to reconstruct the Palestinian enclave once the fighting has stopped for good.

By Aug 4, 408 Palestinian children were reported to have been killed, 31 per cent of all civilian casualties. More than 70 per cent of the 251 boys and 157 girls killed were 12 or younger.

Even before the latest violence, Gaza’s children were schooled in shifts because of a lack of schools and graduated into a job market with 59 per cent youth unemployment.

“If you’re over the age of seven, you’ve already lived through two previous wars,” and the latest escalation was far worse than those in 2008-9 and 2012, Ms Ironside said.

“It is an extraordinary thing to live through, and especially to survive and witness the use of incredibly damaging weapons that tend to slice people with terrible amputations and maimings, shredding people apart in front of children’s eyes and in front of their parents as well,” she said.

Unicef estimates about 373,000 children have had some kind of direct traumatic experience and require immediate psycho-social support, she said.

She estimated that just sheltering families whose homes had been destroyed would cost $40-50 million in the next year, which would be a small fraction of the total reconstruction cost.

“I would estimate we’re looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And certainly the question needs to be closely considered, who will pay for it: Is it the occupying power who inflicted it? Or is it the international community who are going to pay the bill again?”

But she said neither the international community nor the Palestinians would accept the rebuilding of Gaza on the same terms as before, and suggested Israel’s tight control on building supplies coming into Gaza needed to be relaxed.

Mission accomplished?

Israel withdrew ground forces from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and started a 72-hour ceasefire.

Israeli armour and infantry left Gaza ahead of the truce, with a military spokesman saying their main goal of destroying cross-border infiltration tunnels dug by Islamist militants had been completed. “Mission accomplished,” the military tweeted.

Troops and tanks would be “redeployed in defensive positions outside the Gaza Strip and we will maintain those defensive positions”, spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said, reflecting Israeli readiness to resume fighting.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Hamas, said Israel’s offensive in the densely populated, coastal enclave was a “100 per cent failure”.

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2014