Israel takes flak over killer drones

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 1 (UPI) -- In a scathing report that could affect the United States' highly controversial use of armed drone aircraft in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of indiscriminate use of these craft in the winter invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The report, issued in Jerusalem Tuesday, focused on six missile attacks by Israeli unmanned combat aerial vehicles that the human rights group said killed 29 civilians, eight of them children, during the 22-day conflict in December and January.

"These attacks violated international humanitarian law," the report stated.

It questioned whether Israeli forces had taken "all feasible precautions" to prevent civilian casualties.

The Israeli military has never acknowledged using armed drones for airstrikes, but there have been widespread reports of such attacks by Palestinians in recent years.

The Israelis insist that they only attacked military targets during the Gaza fighting and went to great lengths to warn civilians of impending operations, dropping 500,000 leaflets and even telephoning neighbors of known Hamas militants to get out of the area.

The Israelis also questioned the accuracy of the Human Rights Watch allegations, the latest in a series of accusations about how the Israeli military conducted Operation Cast Lead in the densely populated Gaza Strip that borders Egypt.

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based Human Rights Watch and a weapons targeting officer at the Pentagon in 1997-2003, alleged that the Israeli pilots who guided the unmanned aircraft by remote control fired the missiles before ensuring that their targets posed any actual threat to Israeli forces.

"We should not find so many civilian casualties from these incidents," he told a news conference in Arab East Jerusalem.

Palestinians claim some 1,400 people, more than 900 of them civilians, perished during the conflict. Israel claims the death toll was 1,166 -- 709 of which were militants fighting for the fundamentalist Hamas movement that controls the Gaza Strip.

"Israel's targeting choices are unacceptable and unlawful," Garlasco said, particularly since armed drones "provide the most precise platform in the military arsenal and that Israel is the world leader in drone technology …

"There is no fog of war with such drones. Yet, the Israeli army failed to distinguish between military objectives and civilians."

He concluded that the report "has a look at the future. It's a cautionary tale about the U.S.'s continued use of (drones) in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Hundreds of civilians have allegedly been killed or wounded in these attacks over the last year.

Garlasco estimated there were 42 drone strikes during the Gaza conflict that killed 87 Palestinian civilians. Human Rights Watch only investigated six over a 10-day period, examining missile debris and interviewing witnesses.

Three allegedly hit Palestinian children playing on rooftops. The other three targeted an elementary school serving as a refugee center, a group of students at a bus stop, and a metal shop near a refugee camp.

Human Rights Watch said that their investigators found a particular kind of shrapnel and a neat dispersion of missile fragments that pointed to the use of Spike air-to-ground missiles.

The Israeli-made Spike was developed in the late 1990s. During the development stages, Israeli forces tested the weapon in occupied South Lebanon, killing several civilians.

The report claimed that in each of the Gaza attacks investigated, the operators of the drones should have been able to determine from video links from high-resolution cameras aboard the craft that no armed men were to be seen in the areas of the attacks.

Human Rights Watch wants Israel to conduct its own investigation, release the videotapes from the drones and punish those operators who failed to ascertain the presence of civilians in target zones.

A U.N. team is currently investigating alleged war crimes by Israel and Hamas during the winter fighting. Israel, which has been at odds with the United Nations for decades, has refused to cooperate with the probe, claiming the investigation is inherently biased against the Jewish state.

It is headed by a South African judge of Jewish descent, Richard Goldstone, who was the chief prosecutor on the U.N. international criminal tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in 1994-96. He is currently in Gaza with a 15-strong team holding unprecedented public hearings into the war crimes allegations.