United Nations investigators said on Monday Israel violated a range of human rights during its invasion of Gaza, including targeting civilians and using a child as a human shield, while news of T-shirts trivilizing the 22-day Gaza conflict were played down by Gaza military officials. “Civilian targets, particularly homes and their occupants, appear to have taken the brunt of the attacks, but schools and medical facilities have also been hit,” said one report by Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. The UN expert on the Palestinian terroritories, Richard Falk said there was reason to conclude the Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip constitute a war-crime. Falk said in order to determine if the war was legal, it was necessary to assess if the Israeli forces could differentiate between civilian and military targets in Gaza. “If it is not possible to do so, then launching the attacks is inherently unlawful, and would..constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law,” Falk wrote in report for the UN Human Rights Council. “On the basis of the preliminary evidence available, there is reason to reach this conclusion,” he added, pointing out that attacks were targeted at densely populated areas. Coomaraswamy visited the region in early February. She cited a long series of incidents to back her charges. In one at Tal al Hawa south-west of Gaza City, Israeli soldiers forced an 11-year-old boy to walk in front of them for hours even after they had been shot at. “If you want to know whether I think that in doing so we killed innocents, the answer is, unequivocally, yes,” Tzvika Fogel, a reserve brigadier-general, said. ‘Tasteless' T-shirts Israel's military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle's cross-hairs with the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills,” and another of a gun-toting child with the words, “The smaller they are, the harder it is.” The military said the T-shirts were “tasteless” humor and condemned the soldiers involved. The military said they were worn by an unknown number of enlisted men in different units. In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said it “reflects the brutal mentality among the Zionist soldiers and the Zionist society.
