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News :: Children : Civil & Human Rights : Housing : International Relations : Israel / Palestine : Urban Development |
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Amnesty International Criticizes Israel |
Current rating: 0 |
by Lara Sukhtian
(No verified email address) |
18 May 2004
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The report said the demolition and destruction are "grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes," calling on Israel to halt the practices immediately. Amnesty also said the house demolitions are linked to Israeli intentions to take over West Bank and Gaza land. |
JERUSALEM - Israel is guilty of war crimes in its destruction of thousands of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the human rights group Amnesty International charged in a report Tuesday (http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150402004).
Release of the report coincided with an Israeli operation in the Rafah refugee camp on the Israel-Egypt border, where Israel was poised to knock down more houses to widen a buffer zone in its battle against weapons-smuggling tunnels.
The report said the demolition and destruction are "grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes," calling on Israel to halt the practices immediately. Amnesty also said the house demolitions are linked to Israeli intentions to take over West Bank and Gaza land.
According to the report, Israel has destroyed more than 3,000 Palestinian homes, most of them in the Gaza Strip, since Palestinian Israeli fighting broke out more than three years ago. The report also found that 10 percent of Gaza's agricultural land has been destroyed and more than 226,000 trees uprooted there in 2002 and 2003.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment but have stated in the past that house demolitions are necessary for security reasons. The Israeli army says that Palestinian militants often use Palestinian homes and agricultural land as cover to launch attacks. Also, they have discovered tunnel entrances under Rafah structures.
Amnesty countered that the destruction of homes, land and other property in the Palestinian territories is disproportionate to Israel's security needs.
Amnesty also accused Israel of collective punishment, demolishing homes and property of Palestinians who are not involved, even according to Israel, in attacks against Israel.
"This is the case with the majority of land and home destruction," said Donatella Rovera, from the Middle East program of the London-based human rights group and a co-author of the report.
Israel's practice of blowing up the homes of the families of suicide bombers is one form of punishment Amnesty criticized in the report. It said that since September 2000, when the current conflict erupted, there have been at least 600 such cases.
Along with calling on Israel to stop demolitions, the 65-page report also said Palestinian authorities should take "all possible measures" to stop attacks against Israelis and to keep militants from initiating armed confrontations from civilian areas.
© Copyright 2004 Associated Press
http://www.ap.org |
See also:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150402004
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Re: Amnesty International Criticizes Israel |
by haaretz via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
19 May 2004
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Last update - 04:22 19/05/2004
Two magic phrases
By Amira Hass
There are two magic phrases that the government uses to enlist soldiers, pilots and their families for the assault on Rafah: "armed men" and "smuggling tunnels." The sound of those two threatening phrases overcomes the sounds of gunfire by the air force and armored corps, the humming of the unmanned aircraft overhead, the whistle of the missiles, the long bursts of machine gun fire, the bombs and the shelling. And then the sirens of the ambulances.
In the last three and a half years, the residents of Rafah have experienced all of this, far more frequently and in far greater volume than any other Palestinian community in Gaza or the West Bank. Between 1 A.M. and 5 A.M. yesterday, the missiles, shooting from the air and bombings, took 11 Palestinian lives. Three were killed at 1:05 A.M. by two missiles in the Yibneh refugee camp; five were killed on their way to dawn prayers at around 4 A.M., at the entrance to the Al Bilal Mosque on the outskirts of Tel al Sultan; and three were killed during the Israel Defense Forces takeover of Tel al Sultan.
As these lines are being written, early Tuesday morning, not all the details are known yet about the casualties. The hospital says that most were civilian. The early news reports in Israel used the magic phrase "armed men." But whoever ordered a missile fired at the entrance to a mosque a few minutes after the muezzin called the faithful to prayers - just as people began gathering for the prayers - knew that there would not only be armed men there, if indeed there were any at all. And those who ordered missiles fired at the Yibneh camp knew very well that not all the residents had evacuated themselves, despite fears that the IDF was on its way to demolish their homes.
Not counting yesterday's casualties, there have been 320 people killed in Rafah - which is estimated to have about 150,000 residents. Eighty-five of those killed were children under the age of 18. Twenty-seven were women. Altogether, at least 200 of those killed were civilians. The rest were "armed men" and members of the Palestinian security services, whether they were fighting against the Israelis or were simply on duty, killed at their posts by virtue of being PA security forces on duty.
The army and the settlements are clear targets for the armed Palestinians in Gaza. The army conducts all-out war to protect the settlements. Therefore, virtually all that is left for the armed men to do is to clash with Israeli soldiers. They thereby improve their guerrilla warfare skills - though IDF commanders know that the capabilities of the "armed men" in Rafah and the equipment available to them are still very limited, despite the soldiers killed last week, and despite the bragging of some Rafah residents about fighting for every street and alleyway. The scenes of carts and trucks evacuating homes proves how much the vast majority - how natural - wants to live and is afraid to die. Nonetheless, the government sics the soldiers and tanks and helicopters on the residents of Rafah. And particularly civilians.
What is so infuriating to the IDF about the relatively few armed men (compared to the numbers of people killed in the district)? Is it that they have very few weapons compared to Israel? That they stubbornly clash with soldiers? That they prove that they are able to learn from their tactical mistakes and from those of others? That despite the competition between the organizations, they manage to work together? That it is easy to depict some of them as heroes? That maybe they get thrown out of some neighborhoods in Rafah, but in others they are considered genuine representatives, as long as Israel does not intend to put an end to the occupation? That they are so few against so many?
Or is it the tunnels? Merchants invented the system. The tunnels are not only for weapons and drugs, but for medicine, basic food commodities and cigarettes, at prices much more suitable for poverty-stricken Rafah. They are a way to break an economic siege. The weapons in the hands of the armed men of Rafah prove that the tunnels are not being used to smuggle sophisticated weapons. Nonetheless, the tunnels have turned into a scarecrow that justifies every strike at civilian lives and civilian property. Or is the IDF angered by the fact that Palestinian brains and needs have led to inventions that enable them to build the tunnels despite all the risks and the sophisticated Israeli equipment for uncovering them?
Neither the armed men nor the weapons smuggled through the tunnels are a strategic threat to Israel. Rarely do they manage to strike successfully at the soldiers and cause real pain. Usually, they are merely a nuisance for the military patrols that routinely fire into Rafah, whether they have been fired on or not. But the danger posed by the armed men and the tunnels is so inflated that the statistics of destruction and death sown by Israel in Rafah go largely ignored - in Israel. In Rafah, on the other hand, it feeds the conclusion reached the other day by a religious lawyer. "Everyone in Israel - opposition, left, Labor - bears responsibility for what their government is doing here."
(c) 2004, Haaretz |
