B’Tselem: IDF war crimes probes are a whitewash

Source: Jerusalem Post

B'Tselem: The IDF can’t keep calling targeting failures ‘mistakes’ if it doesn’t try to fix them

The IDF’s war crimes probes in the 2014 Gaza war are a thinly veiled attempt to appear to investigate while providing a whitewash mechanism to clear all the soldiers, commanders and politicians involved of wrongdoing, a B’Tselem report said on Tuesday.

Two years after the war ended, the human rights group has concluded that the only way justice will be done for what it estimates were 1,391 Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF during the war, will be if the International Criminal Court prosecutor intervenes.

One central claim of the report is that while the IDF’s five reports explaining which cases have been criminally investigated and the reasons for not issuing indictments could show a genuine push to review war crimes allegations if each case is looked at in isolation, the broader picture is problematic.

The report notes that in case after case where the IDF killed large and often double-digits numbers of Palestinian civilians in attacks on residential buildings or other non-military areas, the IDF legal division decided there was no criminal case because the tragedies were not intentional, but due to mistakes.

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/BTselem-IDF-war-crimes-probes-are-a-whitewash-468184