Up in arms over civilian deaths
By Uzi Benziman
Haaretz, November 26, 2004
Human rights groups claim over 1,500 innocent Palestinians have been killed in the past four years, and that the army must be brought to account. The IDF: The situation in the territories exempts it from investigation into such cases.
Schoolgirl Iman Alhamas, whose killing by an Israel Defense Forces company commander at the Girit outpost near Rafah was recorded and broadcast this week on Channel 2, arousing a brief public uproar, is not alone: According to data from the human rights group B'Tselem, in the past four years (from September 29, 2000 to October 15, 2004), 2,950 Palestinians have been killed, 592 of them minors (under the age of 18). At least 1,625 of those killed did not take part in the fighting against Israel. A petition now before the High Court of Justice, which was submitted by B'Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), puts forward eight cases of Palestinians who were killed by the IDF under circumstances that would appear to necessitate an urgent investigation.
According to the petition, IDF troops took Amjad Abdel Hadi Jabbur from his home in Salem during the night between August 1 and August 2, 2002. He was led, with his hands bound behind his back, toward military vehicles that were parked about 50 meters away. Two soldiers stood on either side of him and held him by the shoulders. All of a sudden, the soldiers moved away from him and ordered him to stop moving. One of the soldiers shot in the air and another soldier shot directly at Jabbur from a distance of about 15 meters. Jabbur was killed on the spot. His wife and children were standing outside the house and watched what happened. The IDF version is that Jabbur was suspected of involvement in terrorist activity and that he was shot at when he tried to escape. The testimony of neighbors who saw what occurred conflicts with the description given by the IDF: They say Jabbur was handcuffed and did not try to run away.
Seven shekels
B'Tselem has collected testimonies regarding the circumstances of the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians. One of these was the death of Ihab Abdel Karim Ahmed Shatat, a 9-year-old boy from Beit Hanun. His mother had sent him to buy some groceries at a nearby store and he ran into a crowd of children who were throwing rocks at three tanks and a bulldozer at the southern entrance to Beit Hanun. It was on Saturday, July 3 of this year, at around noon. The rock-throwers hid behind some chicken coops in the area while Shatat kept on walking toward the tanks. He was struck by a hail of bullets that came from the direction of the tanks and fell on Saladin Street. When the shooting stopped, two Palestinian first aid workers hurried over to him. According to their testimony, they put him on a stretcher and rushed him to the hospital. On the way there, his muscles relaxed, his fist opened and one five-shekel coin and two one-shekel coins fell out. When the two workers returned to the scene of the incident after delivering the boy's body to the hospital, they saw a man and a woman searching for their son. The woman said she'd sent her son to the store and had given him seven shekels.
The killing of Iman Alhamas managed, for a few days, to breach the sealed wall with which Israelis have surrounded themselves for the past four years - because it was particularly flagrant (an event that appeared as killing for the sake of it) and because someone deemed it necessary to tell the media about it and even to leak the recorded details. The same thing happened last week with the publication of the embarrassing pictures (in Yedioth Ahronoth) showing IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian corpses. The hundreds of other incidents requiring an exacting investigation of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of the IDF do not receive any attention because there are seemingly less clear-cut.
Only seemingly. Because even in situations in which it is possible to attribute the harming of unarmed Palestinians to errors, or to battle conditions, or to reasonable suspicions, military practice is what dictates these harsh results, since it tramples on human values and considerations of conscience. This practice derived from the conclusions drawn by the IDF as a result of the unrestrained conduct of the Palestinian uprising, but it needs urgent revisiting since it reflects not only necessary caution, but also cold-heartedness, anxiety, blind obeying of orders, a blurring of the boundaries between the permissible and the forbidden, and an overly light trigger finger.
Permissive punitive policy
The large number of unarmed Palestinians killed derives, in part, from the permissive punitive policy employed since the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada: In the first intifada, the IDF investigated every incident in which a Palestinian was killed, unless that person was actually participating in an act of combat at the time. But since October 2000, the military advocate general ruled that the Investigating Military Police would only investigate incidents in which soldiers "seriously deviated from the rules of engagement and caused casualties."
According to the new procedures, the military unit involved in the killing of an unarmed Palestinian is itself to carry out an internal investigation and forward its findings to the military advocate general, which then decides whether to instruct the Investigating Military Police to investigate or not. The result: From September 2000 through August 2004, only 88 Investigating Military Police investigations were opened in relation to shootings contrary to the rules of engagement that caused the death or injury of Palestinians, and only 22 of these led to indictments (the data comes from the IDF spokesman). In only one case was an IDF soldier convicted of causing the death of an unarmed Palestinian.
The petition filed by B'Tselem and ACRI seeks to obligate the IDF to have the Investigating Military Police investigate every incident brought to its knowledge regarding the death of a Palestinian civilian who did not take part in combat. The petition cites the state's duty to respect civil rights and the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which instructs the authorities to act to protect the life of every human being, and the international law that obligates the state to act for the sake of ensuring a human being's right to live. The IDF argues that the security situation in the territories is "an armed conflict that does not qualify as war" and thus is exempt from the requirement of a criminal investigation in the majority of cases in which civilians are killed.
The killing of Iman Alhamas underscores the dubiousness of a procedure that depends on military units investigating themselves; if some soldiers from the company involved in the incident hadn't spoken out, the girl's death would have been filed away with the records of the killings of over 1,500 other unarmed Palestinians. In most cases, no outcry comes from within the IDF because the troops are acting within a violent environment, guided from above, that essentially imparts a license to treat the civilian population harshly.
The state has put itself in the clutches of this tragedy because of its refusal to cede the territories: It feels it has full justification to embitter the lives of the Palestinians in order to protect the lives of its citizens and soldiers from the savagery of terrorism (over 1,000 Israelis killed since the start of the intifada). But this justification sometimes becomes self-righteousness that aims to mask the release of the inner beast.
