TEHRAN- Amid decades of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian and its endless list of war crimes in the occupied territories, the international community has displayed its hypocritical, double standard approach by not holding the regime accountable.

This year alone, the Israeli military conducted a three-day blitz on the besieged Gaza Strip between 5 and 8 August that killed dozens of civilians, including over a dozen children.

This is separate from the more than 130 Palestinians the regime's forces have murdered in the occupied West Bank.

Fresh evidence has emerged from Amnesty International which shows Israel committed war crimes during its brutal onslaught on Gaza this summer.

The rights groups are demanding the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the unlawful attacks conducted by the regime. 

Amnesty International says its new research used photographs of weapons fragments, satellite imagery analysis and testimony from dozens of interviews. The global organization reconstructed the circumstances around specific attacks carried out by Israeli regime forces. 

The briefing, titled "They were just kids": Evidence of war crimes during Israel’s August 2022 Gaza offensive”, sets out why these attacks amount to war crimes.  

It’s not the first time Israel has massacred children and other civilians in Gaza. It usually does so under the pretext of a rocket being fired from the besieged enclave. These rockets have always been retaliatory operations in response for Israeli airstrikes. 

The Western press prefers to use tit-for-tat attacks but Israel is on record as the instigator of all attacks on the Gaza Strip.

On 5 August 2022, Israel launched a three-day massacre on the occupied Gaza, which it claimed was a "pre-emptive" military operation. In other words, not a single projectile had been fired by the Palestinian resistance fighters.

The terror regime focused its attack on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement and was forced to sign an embarrassing ceasefire after three days, as it could not withstand the strength of one of the slightly lesser powerful resistance groups in Gaza. Hamas was not involved this time.

Nevertheless, the indiscriminate Israeli attacks on what is widely labelled as the world's largest open air prison brought more deeply distressing and a disturbing experience for the Gazans, especially children.

According to Amnesty International in one attack, an Israeli drone fired at children at a cemetery killing five of them.

“Israel’s latest offensive on Gaza lasted only three days, but that was ample time to unleash fresh trauma and destruction on the besieged population. The three deadly attacks we examined must be investigated as war crimes; all victims of unlawful attacks and their families deserve justice and reparations,” said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. 

“These violations were perpetrated in the context of Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade on Gaza, which is a key tool of its apartheid regime. Palestinians in Gaza are dominated, oppressed and segregated, trapped in a 15-year nightmare where recurrent unlawful attacks punctuate a worsening humanitarian crisis. As well as investigating war crimes committed in Gaza, the ICC should consider the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” 

Since 2012, Israeli rulers have denied international rights groups access to the  Gaza Strip, so Amnesty International collaborated with a fieldworker who visited 17 attack sites and collected evidence such as photographs of weapons remnants. The organization’s weapons expert and evidence Lab analysed evidence collected on the ground, as well as satellite imagery and other open-source material such as footage of attacks.

According to the UN, 49 Palestinians were killed as a result of the Israeli bombardment. Many of them were children. The reports that emerged in the weeks following the Israeli attack shows more Palestinian children succumbed to their wounds.

In one attack that Amnesty investigated occurred around the evening of August 7, when a missile fired by a warplane hit Al-Falluja cemetery in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. The attack killed five children: Nadhmi Abu Karsh, 15; and cousins Jamil Najmiddine Nejem, four, Jamil Ihab Nejem, 14, Hamed Haidar Nejem, 16, and Muhammad Salah Nejem, 16. Amir Abu al-Mi’za, 8, was seriously injured and has shrapnel stuck near his spinal cord. 

The children all lived in the severely overcrowded Jabalia refugee camp. Haidar Nejem, Hamed Nejem’s father, told the rights group that they often played in the cemetery where there was more space. 

But on that day, fifteen-year-old Nadhmi Abu Karsh was visiting his mother’s grave when the strike occurred. His father Fayez said: 

“Suddenly, we heard the sound of a missile exploding very close to us. I rushed to the cemetery like almost everyone else in the neighbourhood. People started to collect body parts, carrying shreds. Parents could not recognize the bodies of their own children. They did not know if the bits they were holding belonged to their sons.” 

Amnesty International’s weapons expert determined that finely machined metal pieces photographed by the fieldworker at the site were consistent with fragments from an Israeli guided missile. Local residents reported hearing the sound of a drone flying overhead shortly before the attack.  

So Israel deliberately killed these children and this is not the first time Israel deliberately murders children during its regular offensives on the Gaza Strip.

This policy has been used for a long time now and is aimed at turning the Palestinian residents of the besieged coastal strip against the Palestinian resistance that is defending the tiny enclave.

Experts agree that this Israeli strategy hasn't worked and will not succeed. 

In another case, Israeli drones hovered over a civilian home before a tank fired a shell that blew the house to pieces killing Duniana al-Amour, a 22-year-old fine arts student who lived with her parents. Amnesty International says its evidence shows there was no armed Palestinian resistance forces in the area at the time.

Amnesty International’s latest research just adds to the growing list of evidence of the regime's war crimes against the Palestinians.

Not only Israel does not allow human rights organizations to Gaza it also prevents UN-appointed investigators, including the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied West Bank as well as UN special rapporteurs access to these areas to investigate violations of international law.

The silence of the West towards Israeli massacres is disturbing. Not only is Israel getting away with war crimes and many other atrocities, the U.S. and its Western allies are also arming, funding and training the regime. 

This double standard approach is a stain on the international community, in particular the UN Security Council, which is failing to fulfill its mandate. 

The fact that Israel is not being held accountable for its war crimes while unfounded accusations are levelled against other countries. Such accusations are quickly followed by Western sanctions and other punitive measures. This shows there is an urgent need for a change in world order. 

A new world order that is just, fair; one that recognizes terrorists as they are and does not classify them as good and bad.

And a world order that allows legitimate resistance against regimes committing war crimes.

How many children have been left orphans as a result of Israeli and American invasions and wars in West Asia? 

How many parents have lost their kids as a result of Israeli and U.S. wars in West Asia? Is there no justice for these innocent civilians, and more importantly for how long will the U.S. and Israel get away with murdering civilians in other countries.