JERUSALEM — The graves are dug, the wounded tended, but the battle over what happened in the Gaza Strip during Israel's 22-day offensive remains unfinished.
International organizations, citing videos and witnesses, say Israel may have committed war crimes in Gaza's villages and city alleys. The Israel Defense Forces deny such allegations, issuing their own video clips and assessments.
Ninety-four percent of Israelis supported the campaign to stop Hamas from its long- standing practice of indiscriminately firing hundreds of rockets a week into southern Israel. Human rights organizations say the Palestinian militant group's targeting of towns such as Sderot and Ashkelon also constitutes war crimes, as does the practice by Hamas leaders, regarded by the West and a number of Arab countries as terrorists, of using civilians as human shields.
The legal implications of the deaths of at least 1,300 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, will be debated, with much of the wrangling likely to concern such issues as proportionality, targeting and how careful efforts to not harm the innocent can go horribly wrong when tank shells stray from their coordinates.
Moral questions also linger among Israeli peace activists troubled by the relative lack of public introspection over the destruction and civilian deaths wrought by their army's immense firepower during the fighting in the cramped territory. They say Hamas' abuses do not erase Israel's responsibility for such incidents as the shelling of a United Nations school that killed dozens of civilians sheltered there. Even if Hamas had to be weakened, they wonder how their nation, where memories of the Holocaust are so thoroughly embedded, could look past the plight of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in a dense war zone they couldn't escape.
"We are witnessing a moral corrosion that is destroying everything at a fantastic pace," said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with Volunteers for Human Rights in Tel Aviv. "We've reached a threshold of insensitivity that we had never reached in the past."
The offensive "on Gaza may be squeezing Hamas, but it is destroying Israel," Ari Shavit wrote in the left-leaning Haaretz in the days before the operation ended. "Destroying its soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America."
