Israel to probe 'targeted killing'

Israel has accepted calls to investigate a 2002 air strike on a Gaza City building, where a one-ton bomb killed not only a top Hamas operative and his bodyguard, but also 13 civilians, the justice ministry announced today.

A ministry statement said a commission of inquiry would be set up, which would could submit “findings and conclusions” on whether the bombing was justified, proportional and appropriate. However, the commission could not itself bring criminal charges.

The night bombing in a crowded residential neighbourhood took out its target, suicide-bombing mastermind Salah Shehadeh, but also killed his wife and other sleeping civilians, among them nine children.

It brought harsh international condemnation of Israel and its practice of “targeted killings” of suspected Palestinian militants.

Human rights groups called for criminal charges against Israeli officers, including the air force commander at the time, Lt Gen. Dan Halutz, who defended the use of such a powerful bomb as “militarily and morally” correct, despite the civilian casualties.

Halutz later became the chief of staff of the Israeli military but resigned earlier this year after a government commission found fault with his role in Israel’s largely inconclusive war in Lebanon last summer.

Air strikes are one of the means Israel has employed in its fight against Palestinian militants, who have killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings since 2000 and have carried out thousands of other attacks, including almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza at Israel.

In one newspaper interview at the time, when asked what a pilot feels as he drops a one-ton bomb into a civilian neighbourhood, Halutz was quoted as replying: “A slight shuddering of the wings.”

The raid, and others where civilians were harmed, prompted an unprecedented protest by 27 air force pilots who signed a petition saying air strikes on crowded Palestinian areas were “illegal and immoral”.

In 2005, the former general in charge of military operations in Gaza, Doron Almog, was warned by Israeli diplomats not to disembark from an aircraft that had landed in London after a tip-off that British police were waiting to arrest him on war crimes charges arising from the Shehadeh bombing.

The warrant against him was later cancelled, but there were concerns that Halutz could also face prosecution in European countries.

In a hearing this week on a petition over 2002 Gaza strike, filed by the Israeli rights group Yesh Gvul, the state prosecutor’s office said it was dropping its previous opposition to an inquiry commission.

“The state agrees that the circumstances surrounding the matter of the harm to innocent civilians during the implementation of the action in the Shehadeh case will be considered by an objective investigative commission that will be named for such a purpose by the authorised state authorities,” a Justice ministry statement said today.

Yesh Gvul called the prosecutor’s decision “brave”.

“We hope that the committee will indeed be set up and will carry out its investigation in an unprejudiced and unbiased manner,” the group said.

Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the military’s practice of “targeted killings” of suspected Palestinian militants in a ruling last year.