Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – International Criminal Court must hold to account culprits and everyone who supported them, says head of UK-based The Cordoba Foundation
Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron and the actions it has taken in the Gaza Strip are “undoubtedly a war crime on so many levels,” according to a prominent British academic.
“It’s not even one war crime. It is a series of war crimes,” Anas Altikriti, CEO and founder of UK-based research and advisory group The Cordoba Foundation, told Anadolu.
The lack of distinction between civilian and non-civilian targets in Israeli attacks is just one level of the war crimes being committed, he explained.
“The Israeli occupier has cut off necessities of life on a strip of land where 2.5 million people, half of whom are children under the age of 15, reside,” he said.
“The fact that people were warned that if they didn’t vacate the northern section of the Gaza Strip they would be targeted, that is a crime of displacement.”
Then there is the bombing of the southern parts of Gaza, which were “supposed to be the safe part, where the occupier told the Palestinians to go,” he added.
“The bombing of installations, of civilian installations and hospitals, of schools, the killing of press individuals: How many camera people, how many correspondents, how many have been targeted and killed? The UN (agency) headquarters. That is a war crime.”
Altikriti said Article 4 of the Geneva Convention and so many other treaties can be cited for the current situation, “but the fact of the matter is that what we have seen … an absolute, fully integrated war crime” over the past month and more.
This must be brought to the International Criminal Court (ICC), he stressed, with the culprits and “everyone who supported the culprits, everyone who egged on and encouraged the culprits, standing trial.”
“We have a big problem and I think that what has been happening for the past month, the genocide that we have been witnessing, is a symptom of that problem,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have an international community that seems to be not really serious about implementing international law – the law which is supposed to be guarding, supposed to be preserving, supposed to be implementing.
The international community “is allowing an act of genocide to be committed,” he asserted.
