Human rights violations by Israel in occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, PA territories
Palestine-Israel, Politics, 1/23/2002

Many civilians were among the over seven hundred Palestinians and over two hundred Israelis who, by November 2001, had been killed in the violence that followed the eruption of clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in September 2000.

In addition, some 16,000 Palestinians and some 1,700 Israelis were injured in the violence.

The conflict was marked by attacks on civilians and civilian objects by both Israeli security forces and Palestinian armed groups.

Both Israeli and Palestinian authorities failed to take the necessary steps to stop the security forces under their control from committing abuses, and failed to adequately investigate and punish the perpetrators.

Israeli security forces were responsible for extensive abuses, including indiscriminate and excessive use of lethal force against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators; unlawful or suspicious killings by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers; disproportionate IDF gunfire in response to Palestinian attacks; inadequate IDF response to abuses by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians; and "closure" measures on Palestinian communities that amounted to collective punishment.

They also mounted a series of killings of suspected Palestinian militants under a controversial "liquidations" policy directed against those they claimed to be responsible for orchestrating attacks against Israelis.

Israel and the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip

The Israeli-Palestinian clashes continued throughout the first ten months of 2001. In December 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his Labor Party-led coalition lost office following an early election for prime minister called by Barak.

Ariel Sharon, leader of the Likud party, won a decisive victory, replacing Barak as prime minister, and fashioned a governing majority in alliance with Labor and other, mainly rightwing, parties.

The IDF resorted to excessive and indiscriminate use of lethal force, causing civilian deaths and serious injuries and damaging or destroying homes and other property.

In one case directly investigated by Human Rights Watch, on December 22, 2000, IDF soldiers used live ammunition against a stone-throwing crowd of Palestinian youth in Hebron district, killing 15-year-old Arafat al-Jabarin with several shots.

The soldiers, equipped with several armored cars and a tank, were located in a defensible position above and nearly 150 meters from the youths.

Given the distance and the elevation, the stone throwers did not pose the "grave threat to life" that both the United Nations (U.N.) Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials and the IDF's own open fire regulations require before allowing the use of lethal fire.

The subsequent IDF account of the incident did not allege any use of firearms by Palestinians, and said that the IDF had responded "with riot dispersal equipment.

" In another incident, on June 9, an IDF tank fired flechette shells in a populated area between Gaza City and the settlement of Netzarim.

The shells, which spread razor-sharp darts over a wide area, killed three Palestinian women and injured three others.

IDF officials initially said they fired in response to Palestinian gunfire from the area, but Prime Minister Sharon acknowledged on June 11 that the killing of the three women "should not have happened.

" IDF officials said that they opened an internal inquiry, but the results had not been made public as of this writing.

As the clashes continued, Palestinians fired at Israeli settlers and carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilians while the IDF made increasing use of heavy weaponry, including F-16 fighter jets, combat helicopters, tanks, and light rockets against Palestinian targets, including PA police stations, security offices, prisons, and other installations.

Under Prime Minister Sharon, Israel maintained the "liquidations" policy initiated by the previous Barak administration, targeting individuals whom it accused of planning or carrying out attacks on Israeli security forces or civilians.

The IDF used snipers, helicopter-fired missiles, tanks, and explosive devices to carry out the assassinations.

When first introduced, Israeli authorities justified the policy as necessary to prevent a "clear, specific and imminent terrorist threat," but then expanded it to include those considered responsible for planning or carrying out attacks on Israelis.

In some cases, however, it appeared that those targeted were killed in circumstances where Israeli forces could have arrested them.

According to Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, at least thirty-five Palestinians were targeted under the "liquidations" policy between November 2000 and October 2001.

In one case under the Barak government, on December 31, 2000, IDF snipers killed Thabet Thabet, the secretary general of Tulkarem's Fatah branch and director general of the PA's Health Ministry.

Israel subsequently accused him of being the regional head of a Palestinian squad responsible for shooting at Israelis. On January 9, Thabet's widow petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to order Prime Minister Ehud Barak to refrain from "executing people without trial.

" The court first accepted to hear the petition but then changed its decision when the government contended that the court had no jurisdiction in the matter.

Israeli security forces were responsible for a number of killings and shootings of Palestinian civilians under circumstances that warranted investigation and possible criminal prosecution.

In January, the Israeli government publicly categorized the clashes as constituting "armed conflict" and insisted that it was therefore under no obligation to carry out investigations of wrongful deaths at the hands of its security forces.

There was no investigation, for instance, of a February incident where soldiers opened fire on a minibus carrying sixteen Palestinian workers to their jobs, killing twenty-year-old Ziad Abu Swayyeh and injuring several others, one seriously.

The shootings took place when the minibus, after driving around an army roadblock, followed the soldiers' orders and turned around to go back to al-Khadr, near Bethlehem.

The IDF opened investigations in only a few cases that it characterized as "criminal" and "extreme," but did not contact or interview crucial witnesses to the shootings or inform the relatives of the victims.

One case the IDF military police did investigate was the wounding of Jad Allah al-Ja'bari, an elderly Palestinian municipal cleaner, after a journalist filmed most of the incident in which he was shot by an Israeli soldier near a checkpoint.

The IDF said that the soldiers responsible had received a "severe reprobation" for violating open-fire instructions and that a military police investigation found that, in addition, the soldiers had failed to follow normal arrest procedures and to provide immediate medical care, interfered with the work of an accredited journalist, and provided inaccurate accounts to their superiors about the incident.

According to B'Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Israeli settlers killed at least eleven Palestinians between September 2000 and September 2001 and injured dozens more.

Settlers attacked Palestinian homes, destroyed stores, automobiles and other property, uprooted trees, prevented farmers from reaching their fields, blocked major roads, stoned Palestinian cars, including ambulances, and targeted humanitarian workers, diplomats, and journalists.

Following the killing by a Palestinian gunman of an Israeli settler child, one-year-old Shalhevet Pass, in Hebron on March 26, some fifty armed settlers fired on the Palestinian Abu Sneineh neighborhood, burned cars and shops, caused other damage to Palestinian property, and wounded six Israeli border police.

The Israeli authorities rarely intervened to stop or prevent settler attacks against Palestinians or to investigate them. When they did, perpetrators received disproportionately light sentences if they were punished at all.

Citing security reasons, Israel imposed the most severe restrictions on West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians' freedom of movement since it first adopted its "closure" policy in 1993.

Israeli authorities sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip, restricting movement of Palestinians between and within those areas as well as into Israel, effectively confining them to their towns and villages for extended periods.

The IDF blocked or controlled access to towns and villages by placing cement blocks, boulders, earthen dams, and army checkpoints on roads.

The IDF also imposed curfews on certain Palestinian areas in response to stone throwing or shootings to protect settlers' movement along "bypass" roads.

The 30,000 Palestinian residents of the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron known as H2 were kept under a nearly continuous round-the-clock curfew, but no restrictions were placed on the five hundred Israeli settlers living in the H2 area.

Palestinian drivers complained that soldiers enforcing Israel's closure policy often beat and humiliated them and their passengers, slashed tires, shot at vehicles, and confiscated keys for lengthy periods.

Curfews, closures, and blockades had a devastating impact on Palestinians' lives, obstructing access to health care, schools and universities, businesses, and places of worship.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the closures damaged water, electricity, and sanitation services.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that delays at Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints contributed to a number of deaths of Palestinians in need of medical treatment.

In February, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) initiated a "Closure Relief Program" and said the policy of isolating whole villages for an extended period was "contrary to International Humanitarian Law."

The U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories reported that between September 2000 and October 2001 the IDF demolished more than three hundred Palestinian homes throughout the West Bank and Gaza, for alleged security or for punitive reasons, and uprooted 385,000 fruit and olive trees.

Israeli authorities also confiscated Palestinian lands in order to expand Israeli settlements and for the construction of bypass roads, as at Deir Qiddis village near Beit Sefer settlement in June.

Prime Minister Sharon authorized the construction of additional settlements and settler housing units in the West Bank, in violation of international humanitarian law.

The clashes involved Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel to an extent unprecedented in earlier periods of unrest affecting the Occupied Territories.

In early October 2000, Israeli police gunfire killed thirteen Arab citizens and injured hundreds during demonstrations in Arab towns and villages in northern Israel protesting Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In response, the Barak government set up a Public Commission of Inquiry headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodore Or. Four special anti-terrorist police snipers later testified that they were ordered to fire at unarmed demonstrators and those wielding slingshots in Nazareth and Um al Fahm, and northern district police commander Alik Ron stated that police had not been provided with sufficient non-lethal equipment and that police snipers used live bullets.

There were new reports of torture of detainees by Israeli security forces after October 2000.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), an Israeli nongovernmental organization (NGO), reported that Israeli security forces kicked detainees and beat them with rifle butts and other implements, deprived them of food and drink for long periods, exposed them to extreme heat and cold, and used other methods that Israel's High Court of Justice explicitly prohibited in a 1999 ruling,

Previous Stories:
  The Mitchell report, full text, part 1   (1/21/2002)
  Hundreds of Palestinians homeless after Israel razed houses   (1/10/2002)
  Amnesty international supports sending monitors to Palestine   (11/27/2001)
  678 palestinians killed, 384 homes demolished during uprising   (10/1/2001)
  African right activist condemns Israeli atrocities against Palestinians   (7/26/2001)
  Annan calls on Israel to halt policy of targeted assassinations   (7/7/2001)
  Amnesty international decries Israeli aggressions   (6/8/2001)

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