In a scathing attack against Israel’s conduct against Hamas in Gaza, former US President Jimmy Carter, writing in The Guardian, together with notorious Israel critic Mary Robinson, not only convicts Israel of the usual litany of “war crimes” routinely leveled against any and all Israeli military actions. Carter stakes out new ground with his novel accusation that Israel deliberately started the war to prevent Hamas from completing its “promising moves toward peace.”
Not even Israel’s harshest critics have done much to challenge the narrative that Hamas started its most recent war against Israel; first by ordering the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June, which Carter does not mention at all, and secondly by Hamas’ firing of more than 3000 against Israeli civilian targets, at least 600 of which Israel now claims were fired from schools, hospitals or other recognized civilian facilities each instance an indictable war crime, which amazingly, Carter never directly mentions either in his diatribe against Israel.
Carter claims Israel started the war as an act of “deliberate obstruction of a [Hamas’] promising move towards peace, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April.” Carter described Hamas’ agreement to join forces with the Fatah faction that rules the Palestinian Authority as “a major concession by Hamas, opening Gaza to joint control under a consensus government that did not include any Hamas members.” “Tragically,” Carter continues, “Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has until now succeeded in preventing the new government’s deployment in Gaza.”
Carter and Robinson demand an immediate lifting of the joint Israeli/Egyptian blockade imposed on Gaza after Hamas seized control of the strip in a violent coup against PA forces in 2007, which they call an “illegal siege.” As it happens, the blockade is not only legal, it was authorized by none other the UN itself in Resolution 1371, which authorized Israel’s naval blockade to prevent material assistance from being provided to Hamas on the grounds that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
The former one-term president also demanded that Hamas be immediately granted international recognition and that Israel unconditionally resume “payments” to Hamas 44,000 Gaza based “civilian employees.”
Carter’s piece asserts: “there is no humane or legal justification for how the Israeli Defence Force is conducting this war, pulverising with bombs, missiles and artillery thousands of homes, schools and hospitals, displacing families and killing Palestinian non-combatants.”
Carter and Robinson complain that “only two Israeli civilians” have been killed, as opposed to the “overwhelming majority of civilians among the Palestinians killed.”
Carter does not cite that the source of his statistics regarding deaths and casualties is Hamas, which admits no deaths or injuries among its fighters. Late Tuesday, Israeli defense officials claimed it killed between 700 and 1,000 active Hamas terrorists, which would constitute between 50% and 75% of all reported deaths.
Nowhere in Carter’s 800-word screed does he condemn Hamas’ use of human shields, nor does he ever mention Hamas’ multi-billion dollar underground tunnel network built to perpetrate mass terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.