MIDDLE EAST: One month after the war between Israel and Hizbullah ended, a year after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the International Federation for Human Rights, known by its French initials FIDH, has offered to help Lebanese and Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes file lawsuits in European courts.
Founded in 1922, the FIDH is a grouping of 141 human rights organisations from around the world. Its appeal for the punishment of Israeli war crimes coincided with a new report by Amnesty International condemning as war crimes Hizbullah attacks that resulted in the deaths of 43 Israeli civilians.
The FIDH agrees that Hizbullah's missile attacks were war crimes. "Bombarding civilian populations is a war crime, whoever carries out the bombardment, and whoever the civilians who are hit," said Michel Tubiana, a prominent French lawyer and a vice-president of the FIDH," but you must keep a sense of perspective."
Mr Tubiana continued: "What happened in Lebanon was the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, which amounted to collective punishment and which served no military purpose."
Close to 1,200 Lebanese were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. "The disproportion in what happened on either side of the border . . . was such that there were, in reality, mass war crimes committed by the Israeli authorities," Mr Tubiana said.
Because neither Lebanon nor Israel is a party to the convention establishing the International Criminal Court, neither may sue the other for war crimes. If Lebanon did recognise the court, Israel might use it to pursue Hizbullah. Therefore, the FIDH is encouraging Lebanese and Palestinians individuals who also hold European nationality to file lawsuits in European courts against Israeli authorities. "If a French person is slapped in Amazonia, they can sue in a French court," Mr Tubiana explained. "The principle of competence is similar throughout Europe."
A lawsuit has already been filed in Germany over the Lebanon war. "This question of the impunity of Israeli authorities keeps coming up," Mr Tubiana said.
A year ago this week, Maj Gen Doron Almog, a retired Israeli army officer, refused to disembark from an El Al flight at Heathrow after learning that a British judge had issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the destruction of 59 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip. An attempt to prosecute the former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in Belgium for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres ended when the US secretary for defence Donald Rumsfeld threatened to withdraw Nato headquarters from Belgium.
Yet Mr Tubiana insists, "the end of impunity is near". When the FIDH first sent fact-finding missions to the occupied territories, they were shown signed Israeli military orders for the destruction of houses - "collective punishment, prohibited by the Geneva Convention", he said.
"Then we started seeing written orders that were not signed. Now the Israeli supreme court accepts verbal orders to destroy houses."
Lawyer Raji Sourani is the president of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip and a vice-president of the FIDH. He said Cpl Gilad Shalit was captured inside the Gaza Strip on June 25th "by Palestinian resistance people in uniform". He quoted Prof John Dugard, a UN special rapporteur, saying that Cpl Shalit's is "a classical prisoner of war case under international law".
"The Palestinian people are not divisible," said Hassan Balawi, a Palestinian diplomat. "The Israelis stepped up assassinations of Palestinian leaders in the West Bank. They retained control of the air space, sea coast and borders of the Gaza Strip. This is still occupation."
Mr Sourani said 307 Palestinians, 80 per cent of them civilians and one-third of them children, have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since June. Sixty per cent of Gaza is without electricity. All six bridges and all main roads have been destroyed.
"The Israelis call Gaza their laboratory," Mr Sourani continued. "They applied what they were doing in Gaza to Lebanon, on a larger scale." He denounced Europe for participating in "a conspiracy of silence", vowing: "We will not forgive or forget those who committed war crimes against civilians. They will be held accountable."