Amar Sharrub, who is a member of Seeds for Peace http://www.seedsofpeace.org/ , reported that he talked on the cellphone many times over the two days his second brother was allowed to die, because the Israeli officer denied Israeli medics repeated pleas to go help the wounded as per international law and protocol mandates. (The officer also refused permission for an ambulance to enter the area.)
Here is exactly what Sharrub, a recent U.S. college graduate from Vermont, shared on DN: “They [Israeli troops across from his family’s farm] were shooting from a house that was about thirty or forty yards away from the car. He doesn’t know any one of them in person. B ut the soldiers took a group of the residents and other citizens. They took them as hostages or human shields in that house. And some of these hostages actually understood Hebrew. They spoke and understood Hebrew, and they overheard the conversation between the soldiers. The [Israeli] soldiers told the officer, when they saw the car, that this car, they [Israeli soldiers] know the car, and they know that the passengers are civilians, but the officer ordered them to shoot and shoot to kill. Later on, as part of this unit, there were two army medics, two army doctors, who asked the officer for permission to go help the victims, to go help the injured, but the officer refused, because he knew they were civilians, and he didn’t want to get exposed. He didn’t want the story to get out, because he thought he might get in trouble for that.”
ISRAELI STATE AS CLEARLY AMERICAN LAWBREAKER
On DN, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies http://www.ips-dc.org/ , commented on the numerous international violations and crimes against humanity involved in the death of Sharrub’s brothers, and sufferings of Amer Sharrub’s father, who died with his son in his arms.
Bennis noted that “according to US law, the Arms Export Control Act, it is prohibited for Israel or for any country receiving US military equipment—but in this case Israel —it is prohibited to use that equipment, that military equipment, that ammunition, those weapons, outside of very narrow constraints. All of this violates those narrow constraints.”
Moreover, Bennis remarked: “The Israelis have a very particular obligation in Gaza and the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as the occupying power. Under the Geneva Conventions, as the occupying power, Israel has the obligation to protect the civilian population. And that has a whole range of specific obligations, starting with no collective punishment, no use of prohibited weapons. The whole range of attacks that we have seen during this period of the three-week war in Gaza constituted a whole host of violations of different articles of the Geneva Conventions, starting with Article 33, that prohibits as an absolute any collective punishment, meaning that the siege of Gaza, which was creating a humanitarian disaster in Gaza even before the military assault began, was itself a violation of the prohibition that says Israel cannot punish anyone in Gaza, let alone the entire population of a million-and-a-half people, half of whom are children under seventeen, cannot punish them for any act they were not personally responsible for.”
In the case of the Sharrub family members who were shot and died on the eve of Israel’s supposed unilateral cease-fire, Bennis summarizes the key points as follows: “So the notion that they could fire on a civilian car, in this case with a father and his two sons, knowing they were civilians who were guilty of nothing, who were accused of nothing, that they could fire on that car, because they felt threatened or for any other reason, is absolutely a violation. Then there’s another violation inherent in the refusal of allowing medical care, refusing to protect the wounded. So the fact that there were medics on the scene who asked, maybe begged, the Israeli commander to treat the wounded, as they are obligated to do under international law, those medics were trying to do what international law says they must do, and they were prevented from doing so by their commander. That makes their commander guilty of another separate war crime, a crime of the violation of international humanitarian law, that requires them to provide aid and medical help to the wounded. So there’s a host of violations here.”
MY EXPERIENCE AS A LONG-TERM STUDENT OF HOLOCAUST
I have been studying Modern Western European history for nearly four full decades.
I am currently in Germany and am surrounded by books, such as Tadeusz Sobolewicz’s BUT I SURVIVED ,http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=3&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=31&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=36&vmcchk=1&Itemid=36
Angelika Ebbinghaus’ VICTIMS AND PERSECUTERS, http://bama.ua.edu/~emartin/publications/mdart.htm
Gudruen Schwarz, THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST CAMPS, http://www.swissbankclaims.com/PDFs_Eng/697499.pdf
and Peter Reichel’s POLITIK MIT DER ERINNERUNG http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3121515.ece
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