By IINA,
Gaza City : South African Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu denounced the international community’s silence and complicity over the situation in the besieged Gaza Strip. “My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all,” Tutu said on Thursday at the end of a three-day UN fact-finding mission to the impoverished Palestinian territory. “Gaza needs the engagement of the outside world, especially its peacemakers,” said the Anglican archbishop, who played a leading role in the struggle against South African Apartheid.
During his two-day visit to the Gaza Strip, Tutu met relatives of 19 civilians killed in the Israeli shelling of two houses in Beit Hanoun and is due to report his findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Tutu condemned the massacre, saying: “We are in a state of shock after what we heard from the survivors of Beit Hanoun massacre.” In November 2006, Israeli troops blasted several Palestinian houses in the northern Gaza Strip city with artillery shells and killed 19 members of one family. Witnesses said the missiles fell on seven houses that were full of women and children.
“I think what we’ve seen shows plenty of evidence of at least the possibility of war crimes that needs much further independent investigation,” said British Professor Christine Chinkin, who traveled to Gaza with Tutu. “I would certainly say the concept of collective punishment in a situation of occupation constitutes the notion of war crimes and possibly of a crime against humanity,” she said in reference to the Israeli-imposed embargo.
The mission had originally tried to arrive in Gaza one month after the attack, but the Israeli government prevented them three times.
According to Israel’s Haaretz daily, the mission representatives asked the Israeli delegates to the UN in Geneva a number of times to make arrangements for a visit, but they never responded. Tutu then decided to settle for a visit to Beit Hanoun. Tutu arrived in Gaza on Tuesday after traveling through Egypt, and entered the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing.
Tutu said he came to Gaza after 18 months following Israel’s continued refusal to allow him to visit the Strip to investigate the massacre.
Following an internal investigation, Israel concluded that shelling the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system,” and announced in February that no charges would be brought against Israeli forces involved in the incident.
Tutu met deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and said the meeting was an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader that the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights. He told journalists that he asked Haniyeh to stop the firing of rockets into Israel. Tutu urged both sides in the Gaza conflict to sit down and negotiate. Israel refuses to talk directly to Hamas, but Egypt has been mediating between the two in a bid to achieve a truce in and around the Gaza Strip.