Watchdog demands IDF probe deaths of two Palestinian kids

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"An international watchdog group demanded that the Israeli military investigate the shooting to death of two Palestinian children in recent weeks, according to a statement issued Wednesday.

Human Rights Watch said the Israel Defense Forces judicial officer must launch a serious inquiry into the cases "to demonstrate its resolve to combat impunity."

On January 23, IDF soldiers shot and killed a 13-year-old Palestinian boy on a West Bank road used by settlers near the Palestinian village of Mughayer. Soldiers said he was among youths planning to throw rocks or plant an explosive along the road.

On January 26, IDF troops shot dead a 9-year-old girl near Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians said. Human rights groups charged that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately.

In calling for the inquiries, the group said international standards require the use of lethal force only when it is "strictly unavoidable in order to protect life." The statement said "eyewitness accounts and the pattern of lethal injuries on the two children indicate a serious breach of these standards."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/680512.html

[tatertop]

1. Too bad the truth never makes the US news

[Tom Joad]

2. On a daily basis, Israel attacks every Palestinian with systematic variety

Writer Amira Hass, talking bout the violence in Israel and Palestine, and the context of the Palestinian violence:

The attempt to explain to Israelis that such acts of vengeance are puny compared to the intensity of the Israeli assault on every individual, and against the entire Palestinian community, is doomed to failure. On a daily basis, Israel attacks every Palestinian with systematic variety. The aggregation is lethal, even if the killing of a nine-year-old girl or setting a dog on an elderly woman are not daily occurrences. It's that aggregation that undermines any attempt to conduct a normal life. It's being locked up in the West Bank's enclaves, so that simple routines like going to school, work, or visiting family are impossible. There's the unceasing expropriation of land for roads and security fences for settlements; the trees uprooted by the army, livelihoods that are cut off daily, and the insult of that; the army's prohibition, on security grounds, against accessing farm and grazing lands; the break-ins to houses in the middle of the night, which the Israeli public rarely if ever hears about; the hours of waiting at checkpoints; the frightened children; the aimed rifles.
___________________________________________

To say the violence of Palestinian resistance has a context is not to give it blanket approval. However, if it is never recognized where it comes from, the overwhelming violence of the occupying State, there will never by any hope of peace. Its not just the "occasional" killing of a 13 year old... there may be a week or so when that does not happen in all the West Bank. It is the overwhelming relentless, daily violence of dispossession, home demolitions, and destructions of entire villages (cut off its water supplies, its source of income, the village dies... not necessary to destroy each home). A very insidious but real violence that is not reported in the US.

[Englander]

3. From HRW;

'Israel: Military Must Account for Killings of Two Children

(Jerusalem, February 8, 2006) – The Israel Defense Forces’ top judicial officer should demonstrate his resolve to combat impunity by immediately ordering thorough and effective criminal investigations into the latest shooting deaths of Palestinian children by Israeli forces during policing operations, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Israeli military’s judge advocate general, Brigadier-General Avihai Mandelblit, in December told a gathering of Israeli nongovernmental organizations in Jerusalem that the number of criminal investigations was increasing under his tenure, which began in October 2004. He asserted that the total number of criminal investigations since September 2000 had now reached 200.

In June 2005, the judge advocate general’s office announced that it had opened only 131 criminal investigations into the unlawful death and injury of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces since the current intifada began in September 2000. During that same period, outside any combat situation, Israeli soldiers killed at least 1,722 Palestinians – more than one-third of whom were children – and injured thousands more, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. But since September 2000, the judge advocate general’s office has announced only 28 indictments and seven convictions of Israeli soldiers on charges related to unlawful killing or injury.

“The Israeli military’s failure to conduct effective investigations into civilian killings has fostered impunity in its ranks,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Increasing the number of investigations is a step in the right direction and must continue, but the ultimate test is whether they bring wrongdoers to justice.”

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/02/08/isrlpa12646.htm