Israel Slammed By Rights Groups (And Arrests A Former Member Of Congress)

Israel, on Wednesday, was slammed by not one but two of the world's leading human rights groups over its conduct in last January's military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

First, Human Rights Watch blasted Israel for its use of unmanned drone aircraft armed with air-to-ground rockets, which HRW said was responsible for the deaths of 29 civilians, eight of them children. Drone aircraft were said to be responsible for incidents where Palestinian children were killed while playing on a rooftop and another where a group of students were killed while waiting for a bus. Because of the high-resolution cameras that drone aircraft use to view the ground below them, HRW investigators said that Israeli operators should have realized they were targeting civilians and not militants in those situations.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International accused Israel of "wanton destruction" in their Gaza campaign, saying that much of the damage done could not be justified under the rules of war. Thousands of buildings in Gaza were destroyed or heavily damaged in the fighting, while estimates are that between 1,100 and 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Amnesty also found no evidence to support Israeli claims that Hamas militants were using civilians as "human shields", but did basically accuse Israel of doing just that by forcing Palestinians civilians to stay in buildings that were taken over by Israeli troops.

Amnesty International did also accuse Hamas of their own war crimes for deliberately targeting civilians by launching rockets and mortars into towns in Southern Israel along the border with Gaza.

And you would think if a former member of Congress were arrested in a foreign country, it might make the evening news. But Israel's detention of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has gone all but unnoticed (after all it has only been a week since Michael Jackson died), even though Israeli forces detained her on Tuesday. McKinney was one of 20 human rights activists onboard a boat loaded with humanitarian supplies that tried to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The ship was stopped and its passengers, McKinney included, detained by the Israelis.

The Green Party, which organized the boat trip, is demanding the immediate release of all the activists, a demand the US Congress so far has failed to echo.