Israel and military justice

Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip in 2014 cost the lives of 2,200 Palestinians, including around 1,500 civilians, according to the United Nations, and 73 Israelis, 6 of them civilians and 67 soldiers. One of the bloodiest cases that that war left unsolved was the murder with an Israeli military drone of four Palestinian children between the ages of 9 and 11 on a beach in Gaza. The journalists installed in hotels near that same beach and other testimonies only saw children playing soccer. The case was shelved without charges being filed and several journalists (from the French channel TF 1, the Qatari

, and the correspondents of the British

and the German

) who witnessed the events. Since then, the family of the children killed has pursued reopening the case before the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to rule in the coming days after hearing the allegations presented last Monday by three organizations for the defense of human rights (one of them, Adalah, based in Haifa, Israel, and two others based in Gaza). First, it was the military justice that filed the case in 2015, alleging that the operators of the artillery drone mistook the children for Hamas militiamen in a regular area of ​​operations, and then the decision was ratified by the Israeli Attorney General's Office in 2019, as happens habitually.The contradictions in a secret military report revealed by the Israeli NGO Adalah may be the argument for the Supreme Court to decide to reopen the case and prosecute those responsible for the two missiles that killed four children from a Palestinian fishermen family on the afternoon of July 16 from 2014.

The episode has become one of the most shocking symbols of a series of Israeli military actions that have hit Palestinian civilians. In the fight against Hamas not everything goes, especially when the lives of four children have been cut short by a tragic mistake that should not go unpunished. The ratification of the filing of the case would once again fail to comply with the unavoidable demands of a democratic state that has a judicial system capable of acting without hesitation before power, investigating and convicting the highest political representatives. Inhibition or permissiveness in the face of possible war crimes, on the other hand, lowers the quality of a justice that, when it does not routinely file similar cases, sentences to very low sentences and, often, nothing more than symbolic. Even if the area had been identified as a military target,international humanitarian law requires verification of the presence of potential civilian victims. Keeping the file on the case can only fuel the impunity of the Israeli military forces. The last instance to purge responsibilities, according to the NGO Palestinian Center for Human Rights, will have to be the International Criminal Court, which has begun to investigate possible war crimes committed by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.which has begun to investigate possible war crimes committed by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.which has begun to investigate possible war crimes committed by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.