The National: Israel to drop Arabic names

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

NAZARETH, ISRAEL // Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase the Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land, according to critics in both Israel and the wider Arab world.
Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.
Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.
Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.
Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.
“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”
Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”
The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.
In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.
“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”
Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”
“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.
“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”
He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.
Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.
The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.
That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.
Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”
In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.
Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.
Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.
However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.
Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area. Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.
The main motorway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.

Source: Israel to drop Arabic names - The National Newspaper

The Associated Press: Israel cuts 1948 'catastrophe' from Arabic texts

"Israel cuts 1948 'catastrophe' from Arabic texts"
By MATTI FRIEDMAN (AP) – 2 days ago

JERUSALEM — The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.

The reference to "al-naqba," the Arabic word catastrophe, as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948 creation, was inserted by a dovish Israeli education minister in 2007.

The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the continuing divisions in Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify politically with their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, some Israeli Jews accuse Israeli Arabs of disloyalty to the country.

Israel's current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud Party, includes members who favor cracking down on Israeli Arabs by ordering loyalty oaths or even moving them out of Israel.

"No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," Education Minister Gideon Saar of Likud told Israel's parliament on Wednesday.

Israeli Arab lawmaker Hana Sweid accused the government of "naqba denial."

"It's a major attack on the identity of the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state of Israel, on their memories and their adherence to their identity," he told the Associated Press.

Teachers will be free to discuss the personal and national tragedies that befell Palestinians during the war, Saar said, but textbooks will be revised to remove the term, he added.

The decision applied to a third-grade textbook for Arab schoolchildren. Jewish textbooks make no mention of the term.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said Saar's decision showed insecurity.

"Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident. We need not be afraid of a word," Sarid said.

The 1948 war saw Arab nations invade the newly founded Jewish country after a United Nations decision to partition the British-controlled territory of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish forces won, seizing territories beyond what the U.N. had allotted to it, while Egypt and Jordan took what was left of the territories the U.N. intended for a Palestinian state.

More than 700,000 Palestinians are thought to have fled or been expelled from areas that came under Israeli control.

Official Israeli histories of the country's establishment, especially those written for schoolchildren, have typically focused on the heroism of Israeli forces and glossed over the Palestinian flight, attributing the mass exile to voluntary escape if mentioning it at all.

In recent years, several Israeli historians have published books claiming that while many Palestinians did flee of their own accord, many others were forced from their homes as fighting raged.

Palestinians demand the right to repatriate the surviving refugees and more than 4 million descendants to their original homes in Israel.

Israel rejects the demand, saying the refugees should receive compensation and be resettled where they now live or in a Palestinian state.

The Arabs who remained inside Israel now make up about 20 percent of the country's population of 7.3 million.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Source: The Associated Press: Israel cuts 1948 'catastrophe' from Arabic texts

The Independent - The families driven apart by Israel's red tape

By Donald Macintyre

Friday, 10 July 2009

The frequent claims by Gaza's 1.5 million residents that they live in a "big prison" have become a cliché. But they have been given fresh force by new Israeli procedures that make it virtually impossible for Palestinians to leave Gaza even to reunite with their spouses and children in the West Bank.

The Israeli government has recently eased movement within the West Bank for Palestinians. But a new and classified Israeli government document reveals that already heavy restrictions on Palestinian movement from Gaza to the West Bank have been tightened further. The document came to light after a Supreme Court challenge by the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked.

It says the Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai "established that in every case involving the settlement of Gaza residents in the Judaea and Samaria area [West Bank] one should adopt the most restrictive policy... [and he] clarified that a family relationship in and of itself does not qualify as a humanitarian reason that would justify settlement by Gaza residents [in the West Bank]".

HaMoked and another human rights organisation, Gisha, are convinced that security has nothing to do with a policy which they say undermines a two-state solution by "deepening and formalising" the separation between the two territories. While the military say the Gazans are among thousands living "illegally" in the West Bank, Gisha and HaMoked say the policy directly violates provisions in the 16-year-old Oslo accords to treat the West Bank and Gaza as a "single territorial unit" and ignores the "basic" rights of Palestinian civilians to live in either.

The criteria impose an – unspecified – quota on Gazans allowed to leave and mean that even a child with one dead parent cannot join the other in the West Bank if he has another relative in Gaza to look after him. Joel Greenberg, spokesman for HaMoked, calls it "a one-way ticket to an area Israel is well rid of, unlike the West Bank, where it has territorial claims".

A request for comment to Mr Vilnai's spokeswoman was eventually passed on to the Office for Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories. While declining to comment on the policy, it said that Samir Abu Yusef along with Kawkab and Nisrin Jilo [see right] had been barred from leaving Gaza for "security reasons". But Gisha said that no security allegations had ever been made against the three in their dealings with the military on their behalf. Sari Bashi, Gisha's director, added: "Where there are security allegations, that is the first, second, and only thing they mention."

Jamal Bardawil: 'I've never seen my son'

Jamal Bardawil supports his wife Hadil and their two children, Sami, almost two, and Isra, almost three, by working as an electrician from his sister's house in the West Bank. But he has never seen Sami, who, his mother says, calls the telephone "Baba"– daddy.

Mr Bardawil has signed a document undertaking not to return to the West Bank, so he can go back to Gaza. But yesterday he said he had reconsidered and is seeking instead a permit to allow him to visit his family and return to his job in the West Bank.

The Israeli human rights group HaMoked is looking into petitioning the Supreme Court for a ruling that he can do so, having failed to secure one to relocate his family. Unlike those who have been deported to Gaza, Mr Bardawil can at least stay in his mother's house, where his wife is living. But it is small consolation.

"There is no opportunity to work in Gaza," he says. "It's like a prison. I'll have nothing to do there. I'll get coupons and support from the UN [refugee agency] until they open the crossings." He claims the Israeli stance is that "we will pressure him until we defeat him psychologically and he will decide to go to Gaza."

Samir abu Yusef: 'If I became an informer, I'd be allowed to go back'

Until his world fell apart two years ago, Samir abu Yusef was doing well. Having left Gaza in 1994 amid the optimism generated by the Oslo accords to spend three years at an industrial training centre in Jericho, he had settled in Qalqilya, was married to a local woman, Kawther, and had four children, his own carpentry business and a house of his own.

It was coming home on 10 February 2007, after slipping into Israel on a job, that it all ended. Passing through the Jajuliya checkpoint on his way back to the city, he was told by border police to produce his ID card. A few hours later he was in the back of a military jeep speeding to the Erez crossing into Gaza. He has not seen his family – or had a day's work – since.

Arrested, Mr Abu Yusef begged to be allowed to go home. He says an intelligence agent told him that if he collaborated with Israeli security forces he could rejoin his family.

"He said: 'I don't want big things, just little ones like who's thieving and so on.'. But I knew this would only be the beginning. I refused." Even after he returned to his brothers' crowded home in Nusseirat refugee camp, Shin Bet kept calling him, inviting him to be an informer. "If I said yes I would be able to go back," he says.

His brother Qassem, 40, a member of the Fatah-dominated PA security forces who are still being paid from Ramallah, is – humiliatingly – his sole source of support. He says of Samir, his younger brother: "Sometimes we hear him crying at night." Describing how he took a call from his nine-year old son Bassem's school after the Gaza war started in January, Samir Abu Yusef says: "The head said the students should pray for the martyrs in Gaza. Bassem started crying and saying that his father was a martyr." The school asked Mr Abu Yusef to reassure him by telephone that he was still alive.

Meanwhile, his wife Kawther, 32, with two elderly parents to look after, depends on donations from neighbours and is facing unpaid bills and a debt of more than £1,500 at the couple's Qaliqilya home. Pointing out that he was fully supporting his family when he was still in the West Bank, Mr Abu Yusef says: "I want to appeal personally to [Middle East Quartet envoy] Tony Blair to help me get back home. I am not trying to live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. I just want to go back to Qalqilya."

Kawther Abu Yusef adds: "The Israelis don't want people in the West Bank; they want them in Gaza. They are using Gaza as a dumping place.!

Nisrin Jilo: 'They only know my voice'

Recently Nisrin Jilo dreamt that "I was playing with my children and they were sitting on my lap. I woke up but I wanted to get back to sleep so I could go back to the dream."

In reality Nisrin, 27, hasn't seen her children Wadi'ya, now four, and Rouand, 12, since she was summarily deported two years to Gaza after being stopped at an Israeli checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Qalqilya two years ago. Her offence: carrying a Palestinian ID showing her as a Gaza resident. Very poor, and having moved from house to house to lodge with various relatives in Gaza over the past two years, she can only afford to telephone the children twice a week. "They only know me from the phone," says Nisrin. "They don't know my face, only my voice."

Nisrin has no idea if or when she will ever see her children again. Although her family is originally from Gaza, her parents moved to the West Bank 14 years ago. Separated from her husband but happy amidst her extended family, Nisrin, along with her mother, Kawkab, and a young sister Fide, 15, travelled back that fateful day by taxi from a visit to a sick married sister in the East Jerusalem suburb of Aram.

On the return journey they arrived at the Jajuliya checkpoint. They were told they were going back to Gaza. "I said: 'We live in Qalqilya. My family own a house there. My mother and I pay our bills to the municipality.' I was crying because they were deporting me from my children. But they said they had orders from high. They put us in a jeep and took us to [the] Erez [crossing into Gaza]."

For Kawkab Jilo, 45, the deportation was equally traumatic. For while she is a grandmother, her three youngest children are all under 16. Mrs Jilo wept as she described a recent conversation with her youngest daughter, Sabrin, 11, who after good progress in school, has now failed her year-end exams. "She told me 'don't be angry I failed. I always think of you. When you get back I will pass'."

Back in Qalqilya, Sabrin's sister Suha, 15, explains that even when her mother phones from Gaza, "If we have a problem at a school I will not tell my mother because she is in Gaza and she will just worry. We don't have a person who tells what is right and what is wrong."

Could Nisrin bring the family, including her sick father, to a poverty-stricken and war-ravaged Gaza? She is incredulous. "We are 25 in Qalqilya and just three women here. Shall we bring the whole family because of three? We have nothing here."

* Ben Lynfield reported from the West Bank.

Source: Middle East, World - The Independent

Israeli soldiers reveal the brutal truth of Gaza attack - Middle East, World - The Independent

The Independent - By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Israeli troops were repeatedly encouraged by officers to prioritise their own safety over that of Palestinian civilians when they embarked on the ground invasion of Gaza in January, according to the first direct testimonies of soldiers who served in the operation.

The picture that emerges from the testimonies, which have been seen by The Independent, is one of massive fire power to cover advances and rules of engagement that were calculated to ensure, in the words attributed to one battalion commander, that "not a hair will fall of a soldier of mine. I am not willing to allow a soldier of mine to risk himself by hesitating. If you are not sure, shoot."
The first eye-witness accounts of the war by serving Israeli reservists and conscripts describes the Israeli use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields". They detail the killing of at least two civilians, the vandalism, looting and wholesale destruction of Palestinian houses, the use of deadly white phosphorus, bellicose religious advice from army rabbis and what another battalion commander described to his troops as "insane firepower with artillery and air force". The reports amount to the most formidable challenge by Israelis since the Gaza war to the military's own considered view that it conducted the operation according to international law and made "an enormous effort to focus its fire only against the terrorists whilst doing the utmost to avoid harming uninvolved civilians".
They are contained in testimonies from about 30 soldiers that were collected by Breaking the Silence, an army veterans organisation that seeks to "expose the Israeli public to the routine situations of everyday life in the occupied territories". Although the organisation has collected hundreds of testimonies from ex-soldiers before, this is the first time that it has done so from serving soldiers so soon after the events they describe.

They tell how:

* Unprecedentedly loose rules of engagement were put in place to protect Israeli troops. One soldier said his brigade commander and other officers made it clear that "any movement must entail gunfire". He added: "I don't remember if the brigade commander said this or someone else. I' m not sure. No one is supposed to be there. If you see any signs of movement at all, you shoot. These, essentially, were the rules of engagement. Shoot if you like if you are afraid or you see someone, shoot." Another soldier said his battalion commander had said the operation was not "a limited confrontation such as in Hebron, and not to hesitate if we suspected someone nor feel bad about destruction because it is all done for the safety of our own soldiers... if we see something suspect and shoot, better hit an innocent than hesitate to target an enemy". One soldier said the "awareness of each soldier going in is simply... a light finger on the trigger. You see something and you're not quite sure? You shoot".

* Houses were systematically demolished. Despite official accounts that homes were only destroyed for strictly "operational" reasons, one reservist, a veteran of the conflict in Gaza since before 2005, said "I never knew such fire power" used by tanks and helicopters for the "constant destruction" of houses. The soldier said that some houses had been destroyed for normal operational reasons, such as because they had been booby trapped or used by militants to fire from, or had contained tunnel openings. But he said others were destroyed for the "day after" – to make a "very large" area "sterile", to allow better "firing capacity, good visibility and control" once the operation was over. This meant, demolishing houses "not implicated in any way, whose single sin is that it is situated on a hill in the Gaza strip" .

* A civilian man between 50 and 60 who was unarmed but carrying a torch was shot dead after the unit's commander ordered his soldiers not to fire warning shots but to hold their fire until he was 50m away. The soldier said the company commander announced over the radio after the incident: "Here's an opener for tonight". The soldier said that the commander was challenged over why he had not authorised deterrent fire when the man was further away: "He didn't agree and couldn't give a damn, and finally the guys felt that even if they could take this up with the higher echelons it wouldn't be effective." Another soldier said his unit commander shot dead an old man hiding with his family under the stairs of a house. While the soldier said that the killing of the man was a mistake, it had happened as the unit entered the house using live fire.

* Palestinian human shields – or "johnnies" as they were termed by soldiers on the ground – were suborned to enter surrounded houses ahead of troops, including houses known to contain armed militants. One account corroborates the story of one such human shield that was exposed in The Independent, that of Majdi Abed Rabbo in Jabalya in northern Gaza, who was ordered three times to enter a house to report on the condition of three armed Hamas militants inside.

* Military rabbis prepared troops for battle. One soldier said an army rabbi had "aimed at inspiring the men with courage, cruelty aggressiveness, expressions as 'no pity. God protects you. Everything you do is sanctified'... there were specific scenarios discussed... but from the context it was pretty obvious he came to tell us how aggressive and determined we need to be, that we must win because this is a holy war". Leaflets distributed at military synagogues had stated that "the Palestinians are like the Philistines of old, newcomers who do not belong in the land, aliens planted on the soil which should clearly return to us".

* Mortars – rarely if ever used in Gaza before – were widely deployed. They included 120mm mortars of the sort that killed up to 40 civilians outside the UN el-Fakhoura school in Jabalya which was being used as a shelter, and in a nearby house. One soldier explained that while "with light arms you've got an 80 per cent chance of hitting the target with your first shot, with mortars it is much less". Another said: "I finally understood. We were firing at launcher crews in open spaces. But it didn't take much to aim at schools, hospitals and such. So I see I'm firing literally into a built-up area. I don't know to what degree it was still inhabited because the army made considerable attempts to get people to leave. But I understand that... [tails off]."

The testimonies appear to reinforce evidence from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and journalists who visited battle zones just after the war in January that white phosphorus was used for purposes other than "marking", "range-finding" and "smoke screening". Those purposes included to ignite homes suspected of being booby trapped.

Houses that troops occupied were vandalised. One testimony stated: "One of the soldiers... opened the child's bag... he took out notebooks and ripped them. One guy smashed cupboards for kicks out of boredom. There were guys arguing with the platoon commander before we left the house why he wouldn't let them smash the picture hanging there..." A reservist soldier said that there was a "big difference between the way we treated the contents of the house and the way the regulars did. The regulars wouldn't take care even of the most basic sanitary stuff like going to the toilet, basic hygiene. I mean you could see that they had defecated anywhere and left the stuff lying round".

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovitz, sought to challenge the motives and credibility of the report. She said "more than a dozen" military police investigations were under way into incidents that took place during Operation Cast Lead. While the IDF continued to operate according to "uncompromising ethical values", it was ready to investigate allegations of misconduct but not on the basis of anonymous testimonies which she could not be sure were from soldiers.

The Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said the report showed that the Gaza operation violated the "number one principle in international laws of war": that of distinguishing between the civilian population and combatants.

Yehuda Shaul, a founder of Breaking the Silence, said the group had names and details for all the testimonies – all of which had been taped – and that anonymity was to protect the testifiers from any disciplinary or criminal proceedings. The army already knew the name of at least one, he said.

Gaza invasion: Witnesses on the front line

On military briefings ahead of the invasion

"We talked about practical matters... but the basic approach to war was very brutal, that was my impression... He said something along the lines of 'don't let morality become an issue. That will come up later'. He had this strange language: 'Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later, now just shoot'... The basic approach was that there were no chances taken. If you face an area that is hidden by a building, you take down the building. Questions such as 'who lives in the building?' are not asked."

On problems with identifying targets for bombing

"It got to the point where we would try to report to field intelligence about a figure sticking out its head or a rocket being launched, and the girl [at field intelligence] would ask, 'Is it near this or that house?' We'd look at the aerial photo and say, 'Yes, but the house is no longer there'. 'Wait, is it facing a square?' 'No more square.'... Later I went in to the look-out war-room and asked how things worked, and the girl-soldiers there, the look-outs, resented the fact that they had no way to direct the planes, because all their reference points were razed... It's highly possible that now the pilot will bomb the wrong house."

On the rules of engagement

"[The Brigade commander] went so far as to say this was war and in war, no consideration of civilians was to be taken. You shoot anyone you see. I'm paraphrasing here, not literally quoting, but the gist of the matter was very clear."

On the rabbinate's role in the conflict

"The rabbi said we are actually conducting the war of 'the sons of light' against 'the sons of darkness'. This is in fact a statement with highly messianic language... It turns the other side as a generality into 'sons of darkness' while we become 'sons of light'. There is no differentiation which we would expect to find between civilians and others. Here is one people fighting another people, with all the messianic implications. But that's the point: this is also religious propaganda. In other words, the army is not a revival meeting. They do not put on a uniform in order to be Judaized."

On soldiers' responsibility

"Anything we did there, we'd answer ourselves: there's no other choice, but this is how we shirk our responsibility. You bring yourself to this kind of deterministic situation, a moment that I have not chosen, where I no longer have any responsibility for my own actions. Even if your choice is the right one, you must admit you chose it. You have to admit you chose to go into Gaza. As soon as you did, you've brought people into a moral twilight zone, you've forced them to handle dilemmas and part of that confrontation failed. As soon as you say 'there is no other choice', you're shirking your responsibility. Then you don't need to investigate, to look into things."

Amnesty International: Impunity for war crimes in Gaza and southern Israel a recipe for further civilian suffering

Gaza report video

© Amnesty International

Israeli forces killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza in attacks which breached the laws of war, Amnesty International concluded in a new report published on Thursday. Operation 'Cast Lead': 22 days of death and destruction, is the first comprehensive report to be published on the conflict, which took place earlier this year.
"Israel's failure to properly investigate its forces' conduct in Gaza, including war crimes, and its continuing refusal to cooperate with the UN international independent fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, is evidence of its intention to avoid public scrutiny and accountability," said Donatella Rovera, who headed a field research mission to Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict.
"The international community, led by the UN Security Council, must use all its leverage to ensure that Israel cooperates fully with the Goldstone inquiry, which now offers the best means to establish the truth."
The Amnesty International report documents Israel's use of battlefield weapons against a civilian population trapped in Gaza, with no means of escape and is based on evidence gathered by Amnesty International delegates, including a military expert, during field research in January and February.
The report shows that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups fired hundreds of rockets into southern Israel, killing three Israeli civilians, injuring scores and driving thousands from their homes. "Such unlawful attacks constitute war crimes and are unacceptable," added Donatella Rovera.
The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented. Some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians who took no part in the conflict were among the 1,400 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
Most were killed with high-precision weapons, relying on surveillance drones which have exceptionally good optics, allowing those observing to see their targets in detail. Others were killed with imprecise weapons, including artillery shells carrying white phosphorus – not previously used in Gaza - which should never be used in densely populated areas.
Amnesty International found that the victims of the attacks it investigated were not caught in the crossfire during battles between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, nor were they shielding militants or other military objects. Many were killed when their homes were bombed while they slept. Others were sitting in their yard or hanging the laundry on the roof. Children were struck while playing in their bedrooms or on the roof, or near their homes. Paramedics and ambulances were repeatedly attacked while attempting to rescue the wounded or recover the dead.
"The deaths of so many children and other civilians cannot be dismissed simply as 'collateral damage', as argued by Israel," said Donatella Rovera. "Many questions remain to be answered about these attacks and about the fact that the strikes continued unabated despite the rising civilian death toll."
More than 3,000 homes were destroyed and some 20,000 damaged in Israeli attacks which reduced entire neighbourhoods of Gaza to rubble and left an already dire economic situation in ruins. Much of the destruction was wanton and could not be justified on grounds of "military necessity".
The Israeli army has not responded to Amnesty International's repeated requests over the past five months for information on specific cases detailed in the report and for meetings to discuss the organization’s findings.
"For its part, Hamas has continued to justify the rocket attacks launched daily by its fighters and by other Palestinian armed groups into towns and villages in southern Israel during the 22-day conflict. Though less lethal, these attacks, using unguided rockets which cannot be directed at specific targets, violated international humanitarian law and cannot be justified under any circumstance," said Donatella Rovera.
In addition to locally made Qassam rockets, Palestinian militants often fired longer-range Grad-type rockets smuggled into Gaza via the tunnels on the Egyptian border, which reached deeper into Israel and placed many more Israeli civilians at risk.
"Five months on, neither side has shown any inclination to change its practices and abide by international humanitarian law, raising the prospect that civilians will again bear the brunt if fighting resumes," said Donatella Rovera.
Under international law, states have a responsibility to exercise universal jurisdiction and start criminal investigations in national courts, wherever there is sufficient evidence of war crimes or other crimes under international law, to arrest and bring to justice alleged perpetrators.
"Those responsible for war crimes and other serious violations must not be allowed to escape accountability and justice," said Donatella Rovera.
Among other recommendations, the report calls on states to suspend all transfers of military equipment, assistance and munitions to Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until there is no longer a substantial risk that such equipment will be used to commit serious violations of international law.
It calls on Israel to commit not to carry out direct, indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks on civilians; or use artillery, mortars and white phosphorus weapons in densely populated areas; and to end its blockade on the Gaza Strip, which is collectively punishing the entire population.
The report urges Hamas to renounce its policy of unlawful rocket attacks against civilian population centres in Israel and to prevent other armed groups from carrying out such attacks.

Download report (in PDF) here

Source: Amnesty International

International News | Pro-Palestinian bookstore attacked in Paris

Alarabiya - International News | Pro-Palestinian bookstore attacked in Paris

PARIS (AFP)

Masked vandals trashed a Paris bookstore run by pro-Palestinian activists on Friday, in an attack blamed by the owners on Jewish extremists.

A bystander told AFP he saw five men wearing hoods and tracksuits run into the store, armed with sticks and bottles of oil early Friday afternoon.

Olivia Zemr, manager of the store in the northwestern 17th district of Paris, said the attackers smashed the computers and cash till, pulled books off the shelves and emptied the oil on the floor.

She said they shouted before leaving that they were members of the Jewish Defense League, a radical militant group set up by a U.S. rabbi in 1968 allegedly to protect Jews from anti-Semitism.

The French section of the League was not available for comment.

The bookstore, known for its support for the Palestinian cause, has been attacked several times before, according to its owners.

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