http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L03161607

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Monday, November 4, 2002

Amnesty accuses Israel of war crimes in West Bank

By Mark Heinrich

JERUSALEM, Nov 4 (Reuters) - The human rights group Amnesty International accused Israel on Monday of war crimes through what it said was the unjustified killing and maltreatment of Palestinians during an army offensive in the West Bank.

The London-based group said few of the abuses inflicted last spring had been impartially investigated.

The army reoccupied Palestinian West Bank cities with the declared aim of rooting out militants behind a campaign of suicide bombings that have killed scores of Israelis.

"The relationship of the conflict to the deteriorating human rights situation has led to a growing understanding that there can be no peace in the region until human rights are respected," Amnesty International said in a 76-page report.

The report detailed what Amnesty called unlawful killings and abusive treatment of detainees in two West Bank cities where Palestinian militants put up the fiercest resistance to the army crackdown on their two-year-old uprising for statehood.

Cases described included a paralysed detainee beaten by soldiers, demolitions of homes in which a family of eight and a wheelchair-bound man died, and a woman in labour struggling to walk to hospital after troops stopped her ambulance.

Other incidents reported included released detainees forced to walk home through a battle zone, using civilians as human shields, some looting of flats, frequent blocking of ambulances and humanitarian assistance, and the destruction of religious, commercial and residential buildings without military necessity.

Amnesty has previously accused Israel of brutalising Palestinians under occupation, but in July condemned Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli civilians as crimes against humanity. It has denied Israeli accusations of pro-Palestinian bias.

"Amnesty believes some of the acts by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) described (here) amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes," said the report, entitled: "Shielded From Scrutiny: Israeli Violations in Jenin and Nablus".

"Virtually none of these (civilian) killings has been thoroughly and impartially investigated. The failure to (do so) in disputed circumstances and those that were clearly unlawful has created a climate where members of the Israeli army believe they may carry out such killings with impunity," it said.

Amnesty said it submitted all cases in the report to the army in June and July for a response but had received none.

The Israeli army said it would have no comment until it read the full report. In the past six months, it has denied a barrage of accusations by the United Nations and humanitarian activist groups that it had trampled on human rights in the West Bank.

It has voiced regret for civilian deaths but said they occurred during combat or operations to destroy buildings believed to be booby-trapped or serving as cover for militants. Residents were given adequate notice to get out, it said.

The army has said some ambulances were held up because of suspicions they were transporting militants or weapons, or because they refused to be searched. In September, the army said it was prosecuting 18 soldiers for plundering homes.

Amnesty said the sources of its new report were Israeli court records, medical files, and interviews with Palestinian victims and their families and local and international officials, with testimony cross-checked for accuracy.

Over four months ending June 30, the period of two army offensives and reoccupation of cities given self-rule under interim peace deals in 1994-95, the Israeli army killed nearly 500 Palestinians, according to Amnesty.

"While many Palestinians died during armed confrontations, many of these Israeli army killings appeared to be unlawful and over 70 of the victims were children," it said.

Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers killed over 250 Israelis, including 164 civilians, in the same period, it noted.

Amnesty cited cases of several civilians killed when the army used explosives to blast open doors of buildings without adequate warning -- "disproportionate use of force or gross negligence in protecting those not involved in fighting".

Amnesty urged Israel to adhere to humanitarian law and told the international community to "stop being an ineffective witness" to abuses and take meaningful action such as installing monitors in the region, an idea previously rejected by Israel.