JERUSALEM, 1 July 2004 — The scope and gravity of Israeli human rights violations in the Palestinian territories has reached unprecedented levels, an annual report by a leading Israeli rights group said yesterday.
Troops operating in the Gaza Strip had killed dozens of innocent civilians while the building of the West Bank separation barrier was in violation of both human rights and international law, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said.
Arab Israeli citizens, who make up a fifth of the Jewish state’s population, were also victims of a discriminatory land policy, while the disabled were being prevented from integrating into society through a lack of access to public places, ACRI said.
“The scope and gravity of human rights violations in the occupied territories reached an unprecedented scale in the last year,” the report said.
“IDF (army) operations in Rafah during the month of May 2004 were accompanied by blatant violations of the residents’ human rights.
“Soldiers opened fire indiscriminately, prevented the evacuation of the injured, killed dozens of people, some of whom were armed, but many more of whom were innocent children, women and men.”
More than 40 Palestinians were killed during last month’s raid in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, the biggest in the territory since the start of the Palestinian intifada, as the army bulldozed hundreds of homes in a bid to smash a network of tunnels used to smuggle weapons.
Nearly a quarter of the victims were killed when the army used a helicopter and a tank in a bid to disperse the crowds protesting against the offensive.
ACRI also said that the West Bank barrier “disregarded international law and human rights.”
“The state’s obligation to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens cannot be used as a justification for the gross violation of Palestinian residents’ rights that are directly infringed by the barrier’s route.”
Jerusalem Rabbi Stirs Controversy
Israeli Army radio reported yesterday that the rabbi of Jerusalem’s Old City said that any Jew who gives away part of Biblical Israel to Gentiles can be the target of a religious license to kill.
“I am a Torah authority, and it is my role to rule according to my understanding,” Rabbi Avigdor Neventzal told a gathering of Jewish settlers in the West Bank on Tuesday.
“According to Jewish law, anyone who turns over territories that are part of the Land of Israel to non-Jews is subject to ‘Din Rodef’, but I hope none of my students carries out an act of this sort,” said the rabbi.
A Din Rodef is effectively a religious category that refers to a Jew who is endangering others’ lives and can be killed in a pre-emptive act if necessary.
The rabbi’s comments come after the Israeli Cabinet agreed earlier this month to approve plans to pull troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the northern West Bank that are considered part of “Eretz (Greater) Israel.”
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the rabbi’s comments for inciting violence. “This is something that must not be done — we are a law-abiding country and if we make difficult choices from a national standpoint, we accept them in a democratic and law-abiding manner,” he told public radio.
Zehava Galon, a deputy for the left-wing Meretz party, demanded a police inquiry into the comments, “as we cannot allow another murder such as happened with Yitzhak Rabin.”
