HR group slams Israeli drone strikes on Gaza

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS/CAIRO: Israeli armed drones killed scores of Palestinian civilians during the Gaza war despite their cutting-edge targeting technology, the US-based Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

In a new report based on forensic analysis and eyewitness testimony, the group says that at least 87 Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli drones during the 22-day offensive on the Hamas-ruled territory launched in December.

“It is absolutely unacceptable, clearly unlawful and not what we expect from the world’s most moral military,” Marc Garlasco, the author of the report, told reporters in Jerusalem. “It looks as if they had almost an itchy trigger finger,” said Garlasco, who was previously a Pentagon intelligence official in charge of strikes on high-value targets during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

He added that the unmanned drones, which can hover over an area for more than 24 hours at a time and are equipped with precision cameras, are “the most precise, the most distinguishing of all weapons that any military has in its arsenal”.

“We were quite surprised during our mission in Gaza to actually find so many civilians killed by these weapons,” he added, saying the level of civilian deaths from drone strikes in Gaza was “nowhere near the level” seen in southern Lebanon during the 2006 war with Hizbullah.

The Israeli military slammed the report and insisted it made every effort to spare civilians during the fighting.

“(The military) made use of advanced technology, tactics and>>>