Did Israel Execute Jihadists in Gaza?
While official investigations are stalled, The Daily Beast reveals important new details about the apparent summary execution of Palestinian combatants.
Jesse Rosenfeld, World News
09.07.1
GAZA CITY, Gaza—More than a month after The Daily Beast reported evidence suggesting Israeli soldiers carried out the summary execution of six men amid fierce combat in late July, there are no signs that the Israeli government is investigating the matter. It has declined to respond to repeated inquiries. The independent organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which the Israeli authorities have barred from Gaza, are unable to follow up in detail. And a United Nations investigation of abuses on both sides is barely under way.
The Daily Beast has continued its own investigation, however. And the picture that’s emerging tends to confirm the story of a summary execution, on the one hand, while undermining subsequent reports by some in the international press who suggest the dead men, left to rot in the bathroom of a battered house, were merely innocent bystanders. Instead, they appear to have been hardened guerrilla fighters from Islamic Jihad who were trying to ambush Israeli soldiers when they themselves were caught, captured, herded into an abandoned bathroom and gunned down in an incident that, if confirmed, would be a war crime.
After repeated efforts, I was finally able to make contact with a member of Islamic Jihad who said he fought in the battle of Khuzaa and who presented a detailed picture of what happened from his organization’s perspective.
As we sipped Arabic coffee in a Gaza City hotel, the well-coiffed and slightly awkward man in his late twenties, who chose to call himself Abu Muhammad, talked about 23 ferocious days of combat, and about the last radio communication he heard with the six fighters before they were captured and killed.
From July 16 to August 8, Abu Muhammad said, he and the others were hidden below Khuzaa in a series of tunnels that he says are connected to other underground passages linking Gaza from north to south. He maintains that Israel, which made these a prime target, only managed to destroy a fraction of them during the war.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/07/did-israel-execute-jihadists-in-gaza.html
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