– Ilia Efimovitch/dpa – Archive
MADRID, December 11 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) criticized the NGO Amnesty International (AI) on Thursday for having “adopted” Israel’s discourse after the publication of a report which denounces war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Palestinian militias during and after the attacks launched on October 7, 2023.
Hamas claimed that the NGO’s latest “biased” report contained “errors and contradictions”, since many buildings in communities near the border with the Gaza Strip were destroyed in the October 7 attacks by Israeli forces themselves and many civilians died under army fire, according to Israeli investigations.
“The report’s repetition of the occupation’s lies and accusations regarding rape, sexual violence and prisoner mistreatment confirms, beyond doubt, that the report’s objective is to incite and distort reality, adopting the occupation’s narrative,” he said in a statement.
It is for this reason that he urged the NGO to “withdraw” a 173-page report which he described as “erroneous and unprofessional”. Likewise, he asked Amnesty not to “agree with the occupation’s attempts to demonize the Palestinian people and their legitimate resistance.”
“The occupying government, since the first days of the outbreak of the war in Gaza, has prevented international organizations and UN agencies from entering Gaza, and has also prevented independent fact-finding teams from reaching the ground to examine events and document violations,” he said.
In this sense, Hamas argued that this makes “any report constructed outside the scene” “incomplete and deficient”, and prevents an investigation that reveals “what is really happening on the ground”.
The latest report released by Amnesty details that “heavily armed” Palestinian militiamen shot and threw grenades at civilian homes, as well as air raid shelters, while “pursuing those who tried to flee across fields and roads” during the attacks.
“In several cases, they summarily executed civilians after kidnapping them,” the text said, adding that despite Hamas’ claims that they only attacked military targets, “the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians and the majority of the locations attacked were residential communities or other places where civilians gathered, namely two music festivals and a beach.”
“The Palestinian attackers – fighters in military uniform and armed or unarmed men, dressed in civilian clothes – subjected the people they captured on October 7, 2023 to physical, sexual or psychological violence, both in Israel and in Gaza. They also mistreated the bodies of those killed,” the text adds.
The NGO underlines in the report that, according to Israeli investigations, up to twelve people in kibbutz Beeri and three in kibbutz Nahal Oz were “assassinated by Israeli forces in the event of false identification or in application of the Hannibal directive”, a protocol aimed at preventing the capture of soldiers by enemy forces.
“However, in the vast majority of cases, those responsible for the deaths in the attacks documented by Amnesty International were Palestinian fighters,” says the document, which responds to Hamas’s arguments and adds that the Israeli army “was not present when the majority of the deaths took place.”
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