Prescott accuses Israel of ‘war crime’

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is “brutally disproportionate and grossly indiscriminate” and must be regarded as a war crime, the former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott has said.

Any other country would be made an international “pariah” if it acted in the same way, Lord Prescott said, and he directly compared the situation in Gaza with a concentration camp, suggesting the Nazi Holocaust should “give Israelis a unique sense of perspective and empathy with the victims of a ghetto”.

“Imagine a country claiming the lives of nearly three times as many as were lost in the MH17 plane tragedy in less than three weeks,” the former Hull MP wrote in the Sunday Mirror.

“A nation which blasted a hospital, shelled and killed children from a gunboat as they played football on the beach and was responsible for 1,000 deaths, at least 165 of them children, in just two weeks.

“Surely it would be branded a pariah state, condemned by the United Nations, the US and the UK. The calls for regime change would be -deafening.

“But these howls of protest are muted. The condemnation softened. For this is Israel.”

The 20-day war has killed more than 1,060 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to Palestinian health officials. Israel has lost 43 soldiers, while two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker in Israel were killed by rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza.

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http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/general-news/prescott-accuses-israel-of-war-crime-1-6752455