A/HRC/12/48 page 77 290. These and other crimes are also listed in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, article 8 (2) (a) (“grave breaches”) and 8 (2) (b) (“other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict”).172 291. War crimes are serious breaches of international humanitarian law that apply to armed conflicts and entail individual criminal responsibility under treaty or customary law. War crimes can be committed in the context of armed conflicts of an international character as well as those of a non-international character. This category of crimes includes and/or overlaps with the grave breaches as defined in the four Geneva Conventions. 292. War crimes comprise crimes against protected persons (including wilful killing, torture or other inhuman acts, taking hostages, and collective punishments); crimes against property (including extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, destroying or seizing property of the enemy, pillaging, and declaring abolished, suspended or inadmissible in a court of law the rights and actions of the nationals of the hostile party); crimes relating to the use of prohibited methods and means of warfare (including directing an attack against civilians or civilian objects, launching an attack directed against legitimate targets if such attack causes excessive incidental civilian casualties or damage to the environment, improper use of the protective emblems, the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, use of human shields and acts of terror). In addition, article 8 (2) (b) (iii) of the Rome Statute defines as a war crime the direct attack against protected personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission. 293. Crimes against humanity are crimes that shock the conscience of humanity. The Statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda provided for the prosecution of crimes against humanity. These crimes comprise murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecutions and other inhuman acts when they are part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population.173 Although under the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia crimes against humanity must be committed in armed conflict, such a requirement is not part of the customary law definition of the crime. D. International human rights law 294. Israel has ratified several of the most important international human rights treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ICCPR, ICESCR, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The possible application of the Rome Statute to the conflict in Gaza is still being discussed. The validity under its article 12 (3) of the Palestinian declaration accepting the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction is being evaluated by the Office of the Tribunal’s Prosecutor. 172 See International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Kunarac, case No. IT-96-23, Judgement of 12 June 2002, para. 85. 173