Zionist use of huge firepower against Gaza flayed by UN

(MENAFN- Arab News) GENEVA: A widely anticipated United Nations report decried Monday the 'unprecedented' devastation and human suffering during Israel's aggression against Gaza last year.
The Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict announced it had gathered 'substantial information' and 'credible allegations' that both sides had committed war crimes during the conflict which killed more than 2140 Palestinians most of them civilians and 73 people on the Israeli side mostly soldiers.
'The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented and will impact generations to come' said the chair of the commission New York judge Mary McGowan Davis.
The report criticized both sides but especially decried the 'huge firepower' Israel had used in Gaza with more than 6000 airstrikes and 50000 artillery shells fired during the 51-day operation.
The bombings of residential buildings had especially dire consequences wiping out entire families with 551 children killed a choked-up McGowen Davis pointed out to reporters.
Hundreds of Palestinian civilians had been killed in their own homes and the report provided heart-wrenching testimony from a member of the Al Najjar family who lost 19 of his relatives in an attack in Khan Younes on July 26 including his mother and all of his children.
'We all died that day even those who survived' he said.
According to the report which will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council on June 29 at least 142 families lost three or more members in an attack on residential buildings during last summer's war resulting in 742 deaths.
'The fact that Israel did not revise its practice of airstrikes even after their dire effects on civilians became apparent raises questions of whether this was part of a broader policy which was at least tacitly approved at the highest level of government' the commission said in a statement.
The investigators voiced particular concern that a sense of 'impunity prevails across the board for violations ... allegedly committed by Israeli forces whether it be in the context of active hostilities in Gaza or killings torture and ill-treatment in the West Bank.'
They urged Israel to 'break with its recent lamentable track record in holding wrongdoers accountable.'
The commission was not granted entry to Israel or the conflict area and relied instead on more than 280 confidential interviews and some 500 written submissions for its findings.
The report had been scheduled to be published during the council's main annual session in March but the investigators obtained a delay after the head of the team quit under Israeli pressure.
Meanwhile Gaza's Hamas rulers rejected the report that its fighters may have committed war crimes.
Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said Monday that its rockets and mortars were aimed at Israeli military sites not at civilians. The group criticized the UN investigators for what he said was a false balance between victims and killers.