Israel Fires Shells Into Gaza After ‘Gunfire’

The 2014 Israeli aggression on Gaza killed more than 2,200 Palestinians and 73 on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers, while causing economic losses close to three times the size of Gaza’s GDP.

The Palestinians formally asked the ICC previous year to investigate the Jewish state, which has not signed up to the ICC, for alleged war crimes.

The report concludes that examination of these costs and of other obstacles to trade and development is essential to place the Palestinian economy on the path to sustainable development and to achieve a just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as lasting peace in the Middle East. “There are 23 counts in all, including seven war crimes relating to last year’s Gaza war”.

Israel is alleged to have used force indiscriminately, while Hamas is accused of firing rockets at Israeli civilian population centres and of using Palestinians as human shields.

The decision to allow ICC investigators into the country is unprecedented, since Israel usually refuses to co-operate with external investigators.

If the ICC delegation visits, Israel will point to a new level of cooperation with external investigators, after it refused entry to official United Nations into the conduct of military operations in Gaza in 2008/9 and 2014.

The trip is at the request of ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Around 65,000 Palestinians are still displaced since Israel waged a war on the Gaza Strip in 2014, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Another 80 complaints were not investigated.

While Palestinian imports represent only 6 per cent of total imports handled by the Israeli customs and value added tax department, the fees collected by Israel to process Palestinian imports finance one third of the budget of the department.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has expressed concern about Israel’s “low rate of investigations opened into these serious allegations”, while some human rights groups in the country have said they will no longer submit complaints to “a system whose real function is measured by its ability to continue to successfully cover up”.