This is a guest post by AJC’s Ed Rettig in Israel.
In late January, a Spanish magistrate decided to launch an investigation against senior Israeli leaders for crimes against humanity. Charges center on the July 2002 killing of Hamas military commander Salah Shehadeh (pictured,) perpetrator in chief of the Pi Glilot terror attack.
Many will have forgotten the Pi Glilot attack. Unlike the notorious Park Hotel, Mumbai, or the World Trade Center atrocities, no one died at Pi Glilot. This was not because of any sense of mercy or compassion on the part of Hamas, though, or any proportionality in their choice of targets.
The public’s short memory is unfortunate. The May 2002 terror assault is not just a key to understanding the Shehadeh killing. It should be at the center of Israeli vindication of its use of force against Palestinian terror in general. When we understand what nearly happened at Pi Glilot, the discussion of proportionality looks different. Astonishingly, Israel is not focused on this event, either in its response to the Spanish case so far as is publicly known, or to any other aspect of the “lawfare” assault it faces.
The Guardian reported the death of Shehadeh at the time, noting the civilian losses resulting from his killing alongside his military significance: “Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed the house of the military commander of Hamas in Gaza City last night, burying him and at least 11 other Palestinians, including seven children, beneath the rubble of a four-storey block of flats, and wounding 120 others. Last night’s assassination of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh is the most serious blow to the military wing of Hamas since the start of the Palestinian uprising nearly two years ago. Shehadeh was among the founders of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassem Brigades, and spent a decade in Israeli jails.”
Israel used a one ton bomb with the resulting unintended casualties including Shehadeh’s wife and three children. The decision to use large ordinance generated widespread public debate in Israel. Notably, several reserve Air Force pilots joined the critical voices. The debate was complicated by a subsequent failed attempt to bomb a gathering of the heads of Hamas using a much smaller bomb that proved inadequate.
Charging a war crime, the key argument Palestinian supporters make is that the decision to use a one ton bomb was disproportional. Under current international law, and for much of public opinion, responding to their charge requires determination of the threat posed by Shehadeh’s activities had he lived. In theory, the greater the threat posed by Shehadeh, the more “proportional” the decision to use a weapon that would kill him, even at the cost of the unintended civilian casualties.
We learn the scope of the threat from an unbelievable near miss. In a spectacular terror attack just months before his death, Shehadeh’s operatives failed by a hairs-breadth to kill thousands of Israelis. This was the attack on Pi Glilot, the facility north of Tel Aviv where petroleum for the coastal region used to be stored. A frighteningly small mistake resulted in the failure of Hamas to perpetrate one of the most devastating terror attacks in recent history. Losses would have been three times those of 9/11.
Intending to affix and explode a bomb on a petrol tanker that went to Pi-Glilot to refuel, Shehadeh’s operatives (who evidently did not read Hebrew) mistakenly attached it to a diesel tank-truck. Diesel burns but does not explode. When they detonated the bomb after the truck entered Pi Glilot, it burst into flames that fire fighters quickly extinguished. Had Shehadeh’s Hamas operatives attached the bomb to a gasoline tank-truck, the explosion would have ignited the storage facility creating a fire storm. The kill radius would have run south to Tel Aviv University, north, west and east deep into Herzlia and Ramat Hasharon.
Tel-Aviv Police estimated ten thousand dead in the explosion and several times that number wounded.
The Pi Glilot attack is not a secret. It even appears on Wikipedia. Numerous news outlets reported it at the time. Both in the legal sense and in the arena of public debate, it provides a powerful argument for decisive Israeli action against the disproportional threat posed by senior terror commanders.
Why is “Pi Glilot” not a staple of Israel’s public defense of its actions? Surely the threat of further acts of terror, when our enemies have shown that they are happy to kill 10,000 people, illustrates rather clearly the seriousness of the threat under which we live and the fundamental proportionality of our responses.
“Israel used a one ton bomb with the resulting unintended casualties including Shehadeh’s wife and three children”
unintended?
this Spanish investigation was a sham + the hamas arguments are mere hypocrisy, I agree with the critics here, but can you throw a one ton bomb on a house without expecting some civilian casualties?
“but can you throw a one ton bomb on a house without expecting some civilian casualties?”
I am sorry, why the leader of a terrorist organization lives on a house in the middle of civilians and not in a hole underground? Hamas is responsible for the unintended civilians deaths, because for their part, those deaths were intended. They were human shields. They worked as planned.
Indeed Pi Glilot would have been a massacre of a size unimaginable. But nothing would have been enough for the antisemitic europeans. They would have demanded “restraint”.
I wrote a published letter to the NY Times in 2002 condemning the civilian deaths in the Shehadeh strike. Shimon Peres, Moshe Katsav, Ephraim Sneh and Ariel Sharon all voiced dismay over the attack and insisted it should not have happened that way. So what’s being defended here was not even defended at the time by top Israeli officials.
David isn’t the real issue of the post the hypocrisy of a Spanish magistrate launching “an investigation against senior Israeli leaders for crimes against humanity?”
If as you say, “Shimon Peres, Moshe Katsav, Ephraim Sneh and Ariel Sharon all voiced dismay over the attack and insisted it should not have happened that way,” then who is going to be charged and for what?
When the US decided to go to war against Milosevic we killed many more civilians and yet no one was charged and I didn’t see the Spanish magistrate launch an investigation.
“Civilians killed by NATO airstrike”
“Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. NATO acknowledged killing at most 1,500 civilians. Human Rights Watch counted a minimum of 488 civilian deaths (90 to 150 of them killed from cluster bomb use) in 90 separate incidents. Attacks in Kosovo overall were more deadly - a third of the incidents account for more than half of the deaths.[45]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War#Civilians_killed_by_NATO_airstrikes
Here is a rundown of the bombing campaign:
“Civilian casualties during Operation Allied Force”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_civilian_areas_during_Operation_Allied_Force
Why are some military campaigns immune from war crime charges while others are not?
To me the question of the campaign’s aim should be uppermost on our minds when discussing it.
Anyway, whatever the merits of the case, no Spanish magistrate should have the authority to indict citizens of other countries. The last thing we need is an international judicial war.
Shalom David, I very much respect your perspective (and getting a letter printed in the NY Times expressing it). Perhaps the difference in our perspectives flows from the difference in our geography. Had Shehadah succeeded, the Pi Glilot attack would have killed my mother and father, my son and daughter in law (you may want to count my grandson who would never have been born), my sister, brother in law and three nieces, and my closest friend. All are civilians. Three were children. All were asleep in the kill zone at the time.
There would have been ten thousand (ten thousand!) people like that.
Don’t tell me you agree with those who, based on the potential for another Pi Glilot that might not have ended so benignly, suggest that killing Shehadeh was a legitimate military goal and that it justified the use of large weapons that would be sure to get the job done, even if in addition to Shehadeh, his wife and children and several of his guards died.
Just tell me that the attempt to weigh the rights and wrongs of this event keeps you up at night. Tell me that maybe things aren’t as morally clear cut (as simplistic?) as you imagined them.
Shabbat shalom,
Ed
Thank you for responding, Ed. Weighing rights and wrongs does keep me up at night, yes. My wife’s stepfather is an Israeli in NYC, and he has two grown children and many grandchildren in Israel. The issue is not abstract for me, nor was it in 2002 when I wrote my letter. The reasoning behind attacking someone like Shehadeh is not a mystery to me. But in that case I do not believe the ends justified the means, and it seems there were even hawkish Israeli officials who reached the same conclusion. Thanks again - DA