The Hebrew newspaper Haaretz said today, Monday, that Israel carried out the assassination operations against the leaders of the Islamic Jihad movement, despite its prior knowledge of its results, which would lead to harming civilians and killing innocent people, but it chose to carry it out.

According to the Hebrew newspaper, despite the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's talk about carrying out an "exemplary" operation, he did not mention the martyrdom of 10 Palestinian civilians, including children, who were relatives of Islamic Jihad leaders.

She pointed out that the danger of harming Palestinian civilians exists in any military operation, especially in such cases by carrying out targeted assassinations, which is the old renewed policy in which innocent people always fall, noting that there is no official source in Israel that has not recognized the high probability of civilian casualties. was known in advance.

The newspaper quoted the statements of the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, Herzi Halevi, who said after the last operation, if it was possible, we would have hit the "terror targets" without harming others, and we are making every effort for that. as claimed.

The newspaper mentioned the former legal adviser to the Shin Bet, Eli Yakhar, who wrote last week in an article in the same Hebrew newspaper, that "the repercussions of the operation were clear ... there is a black flag flying over these assassinations."

Eliav Lieblich, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, says that the recent operation did not justify its repercussions as required and understood in the laws of war in international law, indicating that these operations were carried out at a time when no fire was fired on Israel, and in order to thwart an immediate threat.

Lieblich said: "Israel chose the time and place of the operation at a time when there were no actual manifestations of war, and the talk is about people who were replaced by other people immediately."

Giora Eiland, who previously headed for years the National Security Authority and the Operations Department of the Israeli army, says: "The damage caused by the attack may be considered reasonable in general, in the event that there is no reasonable possibility to postpone the operation."

The newspaper pointed out that two Israeli organizations, "There Are Borders" and the "Committee against Torture", asked a few days ago, the legal advisor to the Israeli government, Gali Bahharv Mayara, to form an independent committee to examine the harm to civilians by the army in the assassinations that were carried out.

The two organizations, as presented on their behalf by lawyers Michael Sfard and Schneier Klein, believe that the Israeli government is obligated to do so, in implementation of a decision issued by the Supreme Court in 2006 in the wake of the assassination of Salah Shehadeh of Hamas.

The Office of the Legal Counsel replied that the request would be considered and responded to.

Haaretz says that after the assassination of Shehadeh in 2002, which claimed the lives of 14 Palestinian civilians after throwing a one-ton bomb on a building in Gaza, and after international condemnations and accusations of the Israeli army at the time of committing a war crime, which the latter rejected and considered the targeted assassinations to be legal, a decision was issued by the president. The Supreme Court at the time, Aharon Barak, legitimized the policy of assassinations under certain conditions, including that the aim should be to prevent harm to Israel, after obtaining reliable information, and to avoid harming civilians, except in the absence of other means to deal with this threat.

Lawyer Sfard says that in previous cases, children and women were injured in similar operations, and the Israeli army claimed that it did not estimate what happened correctly, but this time it was different, and that there was an important change, and that is why we have been fighting against liquidations for 20 years, but we We were worried about this operation, because for the first time, according to what was published, the Israeli army knew in advance that it would harm innocent children and women.

It appears from the investigation of a committee formed following the decision of the Supreme Court, specifically in 2011, that in the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, there were major failures in planning the assassination, and that there was a criminal suspicion by an officer in the security apparatus or by the political echelon.

According to Haaretz newspaper, according to the results of the investigation that year, the nature of the security apparatus’s operations changed dramatically in everything related to assassinations carried out by the Air Force, but it seems that those lessons have disappeared in the recent rounds of fighting, and there has been a decrease in the use of targeted assassinations from the air. And the development of technological means to prevent major harm to innocent people in similar cases in the future, which appeared in the last round.

In recent years, Israel has used the term "target bank", which is a list of targets that it aims to hit by the Air Force and other forces, and it does not only include personalities, but has been extended since the term of Aviv Kochavi as Chief of Staff to include infrastructure, homes, military targets and real estate of the Palestinian factions.

Most of the operations carried out in the sector since the withdrawal in 2005 began with the assassination of a leading figure from the factions, and were carried out with an element of initiative and surprise, as happened with Ahmed al-Ja’bari in 2012, before he, like a number of others, hurried to hide.

These attacks are managed from a joint operations room for the Air Force, intelligence, and the military prosecution, and in these rooms there are often heads of the security apparatus and representatives of the political level, and sometimes the prime minister comes to take quick decisions to put an operation into effect, as Netanyahu did in 2019 At the assassination of Bahaa Abu al-Atta, a leader in the Islamic Jihad.

The newspaper says that intelligence information about any target, whether a person or a building, is collected over a long period, until a decision is made to start carrying out the attack, after reaching the very accurate golden information about the location of the target and the technical conditions that may affect the ability to hit the place, and this is checked. With a group of legal advisors, there is a discussion about that as well as about the extent of their involvement in planning to carry out attacks, and not as a response or punishment for their responsibility for operations carried out in the past.

The newspaper notes that since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2006, the Military Prosecutor General ordered an investigation in every case in which innocent people were killed, noting that after the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the Military Prosecutor received about 500 complaints related to about 360 incidents, and at that time Avichai ordered Mandelblit, who was in charge of the Public Prosecution Office, opened an investigation into some prominent cases that received international media coverage or reached various judicial bodies, including the events of "Black Friday" in Rafah, and the bombing of Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital. The presence of evidence that raises suspicion of a criminal offense.

And in Operation "Black Belt" in 2019, 9 Palestinians from the al-Sawarka family in Gaza, five of them children, were killed in a place that the Israeli army believed was for Islamic Jihad. The family was there, and despite that, no legal or punitive measures were taken.

In the request submitted to the legal advisor, the assassination of Salah Shehadeh was the last operation in which an impartial investigation committee was formed, and therefore a similar committee was again requested in the last operation.

The former deputy legal advisor for international affairs, Roei Scheindorf, says that the decision of the Supreme Court in 2006 does not apply to developments in the situation in Gaza, and that the decision touched on the period before the withdrawal from there, and that the current attack on the leadership of jihad is completely different, because Israel considers itself in a state of active confrontation. With the jihad and no longer control the land in Gaza.

And he considered that the assassination of the Jihad leaders came in response to the rocket fire, and therefore it is not considered a focused liquidation operation, but it is according to the Israeli army’s logic that it is a response to the fire from the Strip, considering that it is currently possible to open an investigation into operations related to the West Bank due to the Israeli control over it, and because of the casualties. There are civilians, but there is no connection with what is happening in the Gaza Strip.

In the opinion of Eyal Gross, a professor at Tel Aviv University, that the request to form an investigation committee is still possible, and that it is still certain that strikes can be avoided as long as there is disproportionate harm.

On the other hand, Lieblich said that Israel is obligated to investigate the harm to civilians, not related to the court's decision, but rather due to the rules of international law. It is likely that international experts will investigate what happened recently if Israel did not do so.

Tal Steiner, Director General of the Committee Against Torture, says that if an independent committee is not formed to examine the legality of operations in Gaza, Israel will attest to itself that it does not want to preserve the rules of international law and the laws of war, and it will open the door to the intervention of foreign institutions in order to investigate Justice for the victims of its immoral policies.