"Armies of the world would be rendered far less effective if they were forced to operate under the same restrictions as the IDF during last summer's Gaza campaign, a group of former military and defense leaders from nine countries claim in a new report released Friday.
Following a months-long investigation into the 50-day conflict, the High Level Military Group - made up of retired generals and defense officials from Germany, Colombia, India, Spain, Australia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Italy - found that Israel not only abided by the laws of armed conflict, but far surpassed their requirements, despite damning reports by the UN and non-governmental organizations that accused the IDF of potential war crimes.
The group had already defended Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, submitting their preliminary findings to the UN Human Rights Commission's probe into the operation, but the group's final 80-page report goes far beyond their initial assessment.
'Our findings were diametrically opposed to the UN report,' Col. Richard Kemp, one of the document's authors and the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told The Times of Israel on Thursday, blasting the lack of military expertise by the United Nations commission that investigated the conflict. 'The UN report was done too quickly and was done by the wrong people.'...
The UN and NGO reports were investigated by human rights experts, and not military personnel who are most familiar with the laws of armed conflict. Without that expertise, the commissions investigating the 2014 Operation Protective Edge arrived at biased and inaccurate conclusions, Kemp said...
Kemp, who also previously led the UK Joint Intelligence Committee's international terrorism team, has defended Israeli military actions against Gaza before, testifying before the UN's Goldstone commission on Israel's 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead. The rest of the group, however, had only brief or tangential connections with the IDF, and many came in to the group anticipating to find indications of Israeli crimes, Kemp said.
But the HLMG found practically none, laying the blame for the vast majority of civilian casualties - 50 percent of those killed in the conflict, according to some estimates - at the feet of Hamas instead, who they claim instituted a deliberate policy to cause as many Palestinian civilian deaths as possible in order to wage a PR war against Israel. The report lauded not only Israel's aforementioned operational measures to avoid civilian casualties, but also its overall strategic and organizational structure, which required the constant involvement of Military Advocate General representatives to ensure that the laws of warfare and rules of engagement were respected...
In addition to their public release of the document, the group already has plans to discuss their findings with the US Congress, and members of the HLMG will also speak in their home countries. Though there are not yet official plans in the works, the group also hopes to present their findings to the UN, the International Criminal Court and other global bodies, Kemp said..."