Case of Gaza family killed in their sleep taken to International Criminal Court | The Electronic Intifada
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Killed in their sleep
“On 20 August 2014 at 4:45 AM, Israel attacked our home in Deir al-Balah whilst my family was fast asleep. My son and two stepsons were killed in the attack, as well as my nine-months pregnant daughter-in-law and her three children,” al-Louh says in a statement from Al-Haq, whose director Shawan Jabarin handed the file to Bensouda in The Hague.
The evidence addresses specific attacks on Palestinian homes, hospitals, schools and high-rise buildings.
It was submitted by Al-Haq, Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Aldameer and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights under a provision of the court’s founding Rome Statute that permits the prosecutor to launch investigations on her own initiative on the basis of information she receives.
This can include evidence submitted by states, human rights organizations and international bodies.
Monday’s submission is the first of its kind, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorney Katherine Gallagher accompanied the Palestinian delegation to the ICC.
If Bensouda’s preliminary analysis finds there is a “reasonable basis to proceed,” the prosecutor must seek permission from a panel of judges, known as a pre-trial chamber, to open a formal investigation.
Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza beginning in early July 2014, left more than 2,200 Palestinians dead, including 551 children, according to the report of an independent UN inquiry published in June.
Israel injured thousands more, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and devastated large areas of Gaza.
That inquiry concluded that the death and destruction was the consequence of a “policy, approved at least tacitly by decision-makers at the highest levels of the Government of Israel.”