19 sept 2005
Special report: `“No need to receive open-fire orders`
“Another pediatric, and a baker where shot in the face by the Paratroopers Unit, we broke into homes all day long, and killed children".
An Introduction of a report published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reads. These words are part of a song the Israeli military units which operated in Nablus since the beginning of 2004, keep singing.
“By the end of this month, the sever clashes will finish their fifth year, yet the army does not believe that it needs written orders to open fire", the report reads.
Since the beginning of Al Aqsa Intifada late 2000, soldiers started receiving verbal orders to open fire at the Palestinians; these orders differ from one area to another, from one officer to another.
The report also included the case of the five residents who were killed in Tulkarem refugee camp recently, the army claimed they were armed, but it appeared that they were unarmed and not members of any faction.
Several petitions were filed to the Israeli High Court of Justice regarding these orders; the army admits that 70 women were killed, 11 children under the age of two, 90 children 3-12 years old, and 203 children 12-17 years old were among the Palestinians killed as a result of this policy."
The army said that the orders differ from one area to another, and that direct orders given to the soldiers in the past proved to be ineffective, and involve mistakes, therefore firing orders became the responsibility of field officers.
An military officer of one of the operating units said that his squad killed six innocent civilians, “We killed them and laughed at them, we killed a baker, a women, and old man, and others, they were all killed by illegal orders", he said, “We received dozens of shoot-to-kill orders, to shoot and kill any moving object".
“In Nablus, we used to break into the homes which are attached to each other; we used to explode the walls in order to cross from one home to another, one of our snipers noticed a Palestinian man walking in a street at 2 A.M, he was unarmed, but we were instructed to kill him, because he might be someone who is monitoring our movements, and we did, we killed him".
The same officer said that in another incident, their next victim was a baker, Ala Ed-Deen from Nablus.
“We saw him carrying a bag in his hand; we received direct orders to kill him although he was far away from us and there was no way to tell if he is armed, he wasn't armed after all, he was carrying clothes".
The officer also said that he and soldiers of his unit received several similar orders in the Gaza Strip.
Soldier “K" said that a military unit, backed up by tanks, invaded Dir Al Balah in the Gaza Strip; the unit received direct orders to “kill any moving object".
“We noticed a resident running, he was unarmed, but we shot him and stood close to his corpse and emptied our magazines in his body, we were happy to have this sort of excitement".
Soldier “E" from the paratroopers division, said that he and his unit received similar orders in Jenin.
“Our orders were clear, an ordinary civilian should not be present in the street at night, he should be killed instantly", the soldier said.
Soldier “R" also said that he and his unit did not know anything about Jihad Al Nathour, 24, who walks in the street of Nablus at dawn during Ramadan month, with a drum in his hand calling the residents for prayers.
“We saw him in the street with a drum in his hand, he ran away as we ordered him to stop", the soldier said, “we managed to kill him in an alley in Nablus, we hurled grenades at him, and then we shot him in the head to make sure he is dead".
Also, “R" added that while his unit was firing at civilians in Nablus, a 24-year-old woman was shot in her head, and an old man was injured in his stomach.
The Israeli military prosecutor said that the army cannot punish the soldiers who killed Al Nathour, “There was a mistake" he said, “the soldiers could not know what was he carrying, when he ran away they fired at him, but I did not receive any report of a confirm kill case".
Soldiers “M", member of the Givati brigade which was operating near Ghani Tal settlement, in the Gaza Strip, said that there is a long line separating the settlement from Khan Younis.
“Palestinian children used to play football, whenever their ball was accidentally kicked at our side we used to fire warning shots at them, it was like cat and mouse game", M said, “Once, a nine-year-old child was running after the ball, we shot him in his knee, and now he will live disabled for the rest of his life".
Member of the paratrooper division “R" said that he heard through the wireless that a child was shot injured in Nablus, “The commander said that he accidentally shot the child in his leg, he wanted to shoot him in his chest!", R said, “He directly shot him because he considered him a threat, and a resident who practices incitement".
The child was identified as Hani Qandoul, 13 years old; he was killed during an operation in the city which left five Palestinian children dead.
Another soldier from the “Shildagh" division, which was operating in Rafah, said that in June 2004, his unit “was bored because Palestinian resistance groups did not fire at them on that day".
“We did not see any armed fighter, no shootings were reported in the area", the soldiers said, “so, we decided to level homes and hothouses there".
“Our orders were clear, every Palestinian on the rooftop of his home should be killed, he might be monitoring us after all", the soldier added, “every resident in the street is a possible suspect, and he might be there to place some explosives, so he should be killed".
“Once we saw a Palestinian resident on the rooftop of his home, we received orders to kill him, so three snipers fired at him, and killed him", the soldier stated, “we shot him in his chest, our snipers are well trained, and they wanted to show how good they are in hitting their targets", he added.
Also, a soldier known as “K" from the Nahal Haridi brigade said that his brigade was positioned near Ramallah, to guard the settlement of Psagot, and to monitor Al Biereh city.
“The situation was relatively calm, we were instructed to fire back at any source of fire, we were at least 600 meters away from Palestinian populated areas", K said, “We were fired at, but couldn't see the source of fire clearly, so we started shooting at a Palestinian home, we targeted the windows, the doors, and everywhere".
Another Givati soldier said that he unit was operating near Rafah in June 2004.
“We used to train by firing at an abandoned home, we used to throw grenades too, and sometimes we used rocket launchers", he said, “Whenever we missed our target, our shells and bullets hit Palestinian populated areas, each firing round included 20 grenades".
“Several civilians were hit, homes and Palestinian properties, but these trainings were officials approved by the army's higher command.
An Introduction of a report published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reads. These words are part of a song the Israeli military units which operated in Nablus since the beginning of 2004, keep singing.
“By the end of this month, the sever clashes will finish their fifth year, yet the army does not believe that it needs written orders to open fire", the report reads.
Since the beginning of Al Aqsa Intifada late 2000, soldiers started receiving verbal orders to open fire at the Palestinians; these orders differ from one area to another, from one officer to another.
The report also included the case of the five residents who were killed in Tulkarem refugee camp recently, the army claimed they were armed, but it appeared that they were unarmed and not members of any faction.
Several petitions were filed to the Israeli High Court of Justice regarding these orders; the army admits that 70 women were killed, 11 children under the age of two, 90 children 3-12 years old, and 203 children 12-17 years old were among the Palestinians killed as a result of this policy."
The army said that the orders differ from one area to another, and that direct orders given to the soldiers in the past proved to be ineffective, and involve mistakes, therefore firing orders became the responsibility of field officers.
An military officer of one of the operating units said that his squad killed six innocent civilians, “We killed them and laughed at them, we killed a baker, a women, and old man, and others, they were all killed by illegal orders", he said, “We received dozens of shoot-to-kill orders, to shoot and kill any moving object".
“In Nablus, we used to break into the homes which are attached to each other; we used to explode the walls in order to cross from one home to another, one of our snipers noticed a Palestinian man walking in a street at 2 A.M, he was unarmed, but we were instructed to kill him, because he might be someone who is monitoring our movements, and we did, we killed him".
The same officer said that in another incident, their next victim was a baker, Ala Ed-Deen from Nablus.
“We saw him carrying a bag in his hand; we received direct orders to kill him although he was far away from us and there was no way to tell if he is armed, he wasn't armed after all, he was carrying clothes".
The officer also said that he and soldiers of his unit received several similar orders in the Gaza Strip.
Soldier “K" said that a military unit, backed up by tanks, invaded Dir Al Balah in the Gaza Strip; the unit received direct orders to “kill any moving object".
“We noticed a resident running, he was unarmed, but we shot him and stood close to his corpse and emptied our magazines in his body, we were happy to have this sort of excitement".
Soldier “E" from the paratroopers division, said that he and his unit received similar orders in Jenin.
“Our orders were clear, an ordinary civilian should not be present in the street at night, he should be killed instantly", the soldier said.
Soldier “R" also said that he and his unit did not know anything about Jihad Al Nathour, 24, who walks in the street of Nablus at dawn during Ramadan month, with a drum in his hand calling the residents for prayers.
“We saw him in the street with a drum in his hand, he ran away as we ordered him to stop", the soldier said, “we managed to kill him in an alley in Nablus, we hurled grenades at him, and then we shot him in the head to make sure he is dead".
Also, “R" added that while his unit was firing at civilians in Nablus, a 24-year-old woman was shot in her head, and an old man was injured in his stomach.
The Israeli military prosecutor said that the army cannot punish the soldiers who killed Al Nathour, “There was a mistake" he said, “the soldiers could not know what was he carrying, when he ran away they fired at him, but I did not receive any report of a confirm kill case".
Soldiers “M", member of the Givati brigade which was operating near Ghani Tal settlement, in the Gaza Strip, said that there is a long line separating the settlement from Khan Younis.
“Palestinian children used to play football, whenever their ball was accidentally kicked at our side we used to fire warning shots at them, it was like cat and mouse game", M said, “Once, a nine-year-old child was running after the ball, we shot him in his knee, and now he will live disabled for the rest of his life".
Member of the paratrooper division “R" said that he heard through the wireless that a child was shot injured in Nablus, “The commander said that he accidentally shot the child in his leg, he wanted to shoot him in his chest!", R said, “He directly shot him because he considered him a threat, and a resident who practices incitement".
The child was identified as Hani Qandoul, 13 years old; he was killed during an operation in the city which left five Palestinian children dead.
Another soldier from the “Shildagh" division, which was operating in Rafah, said that in June 2004, his unit “was bored because Palestinian resistance groups did not fire at them on that day".
“We did not see any armed fighter, no shootings were reported in the area", the soldiers said, “so, we decided to level homes and hothouses there".
“Our orders were clear, every Palestinian on the rooftop of his home should be killed, he might be monitoring us after all", the soldier added, “every resident in the street is a possible suspect, and he might be there to place some explosives, so he should be killed".
“Once we saw a Palestinian resident on the rooftop of his home, we received orders to kill him, so three snipers fired at him, and killed him", the soldier stated, “we shot him in his chest, our snipers are well trained, and they wanted to show how good they are in hitting their targets", he added.
Also, a soldier known as “K" from the Nahal Haridi brigade said that his brigade was positioned near Ramallah, to guard the settlement of Psagot, and to monitor Al Biereh city.
“The situation was relatively calm, we were instructed to fire back at any source of fire, we were at least 600 meters away from Palestinian populated areas", K said, “We were fired at, but couldn't see the source of fire clearly, so we started shooting at a Palestinian home, we targeted the windows, the doors, and everywhere".
Another Givati soldier said that he unit was operating near Rafah in June 2004.
“We used to train by firing at an abandoned home, we used to throw grenades too, and sometimes we used rocket launchers", he said, “Whenever we missed our target, our shells and bullets hit Palestinian populated areas, each firing round included 20 grenades".
“Several civilians were hit, homes and Palestinian properties, but these trainings were officials approved by the army's higher command.
16 sept 2005
Israeli Invasions into the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip Shooting and Hitting
By Israeli journalist Shahr Ginossar
Yediot Ahronot (Seven Days supplement)
Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall
Occupation Magazine
‘Another paediatrician and another baker
Got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit
All day we search houses and kill children’
From a song of a paratroopers’ unit that participated in Operation Calm Waters in Nablus, beginning of 2004
“I’ll break your camera,” the officer threatened the startled soldiers. “It’s the unit’s camera,” mumbled one of them. “Then I’m the shit of the unit,” said the officer angrily. It is one thing to criticize a military operation; but to document it on video?
This heated exchange took place in whispers, because the camera was set up in the living room of a Palestinian family in Nablus, in a house that the unit had taken over during Operation Calm Waters at the beginning of 2004. The soldiers, some of whom had already killed unarmed civilians over the course of the operation, had composed a macabre song. Before the commander arrived, the camera had already managed to record them hoarsely singing: “Another paediatrician and another baker got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit. All day we search houses and kill children.” Afterwards one of them explained: “The contempt for human life bothered me a lot. Battalion commanders, company commanders and brigade commanders can do whatever comes to their heads without anybody checking, it’s really the Wild West.”
The end of the month will mark five years since the outbreak of violent confrontation in the Territories, and the IDF still does not believe in writing regulations for opening fire. Maybe the killing of dozens of innocent civilians, the “Wild West” as that soldier described it, would have been diminished if the soldiers had been given regular open-fire regulations. And if in the past there was an official booklet for open-fire regulations that was passed to every soldier who served in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has been buried since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000. The soldiers receive the regulations orally from the commanders in the field, and they vary from sector to sector, unit to unit, commander to commander. This grey area allows for the winking and turning away of eyes, whether from negligence or from contempt for the value of Palestinian life.
The latest reminder was received three weeks ago in the Tul Karem refugee camp. Five Palestinians were killed, and the statement of the IDF spokesman dryly noted that “An IDF force came across a number of armed fugitives who belonged to the Islamic Jihad organization.” The commander of the Nahal Brigade, Col. Roni Numa, clarified: “None of those killed was an innocent passer-by. Exchanges of fire took place between the force and the terrorists, fire-bombs and charges were thrown in their direction.” Later it turned out that none of the Palestinians was armed, it is doubtful if any of them was a dangerous fugitive, and in any case there were no “exchanges of fire.” Following the media controversy over the affair an army investigation was conducted – itself an atypical proceeding.
The deadly consequences of the policy of ambiguity regarding shooting at civilians reached the High Court of Justice, which ruled at that time in an appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
Wild West
Then what are the official open-fire regulations? In December 2004 MK Zehava Golan (Meretz) addressed Security Minister Shaul Mofaz and proposed that written open-fire regulations be distributed to the soldiers, as was done in the past, “so as to ensure that an oral tradition not develop.” At the beginning of the year came a reply from the office of the army’s High Command: “Due to the changes that are made to the open-fire regulations from time to time, and due to the differences between the sectors, we find that to bring the regulations to the knowledge of the soldiers in the form of a booklet as in the past is not efficient and may even cause mistakes. Therefore the distribution of the regulations will be carried out through the commanders.”
This explanation met with a different reality, in which many “mistakes” took place, as combat soldiers in elite units are beginning to reveal. The soldiers who were interviewed for this article emphasize that the regulations were made judiciously, not under pressure, and were transmitted only orally to the level of the troops. Sometimes their meanings were changed on the way down. “It is obvious why the IDF refuses to publish the regulations in writing, opines Avihai Sharon, 24, until recently a sergeant in the Golani Brigade. “Nobody could openly stand behind some of them, which became routine in all the sectors. That’s too bad, because according to the declarations, the army is interested in preventing harm to innocent people. Transparency could reduce harm. At least it would clarify what is forbidden. Among us in the Golani, no one knew, and regarding our routine practices for opening fire, to call it the Wild West is a big understatement.”
The results of the shooting are not completely clear to the army. The IDF said in its reply to the judges, that “in addition to those who are fighting against us, many innocent civilians are harmed.” How many innocents? “From the numeric data in the IDF’s possession we cannot vouch for their precision and trustworthiness,” was written in the reply, and the IDF does not deny data about massive harm to civilians. The chief military prosecutor, Lieutenant-Colonel Liron Libman is convinced that it only a matter of exceptional cases. The judges felt otherwise, and ordered the IDF by next month to set up a mechanism to investigate shootings that kill civilians. This is to prevent the military prosecutor from investigating only internal debriefings that the IDF passes along to him.
The following stories exemplify the opaque situation in which the soldiers find themselves. Some of the facts came from a source in a soldiers’ group called “Breaking the Silence” [shovrim shtika] and were checked by the editorial staff of “7 Days” with eyewitnesses, the IDF spokesman and the Btselem human rights group.
Kill anybody who’s walking on the street
“My team killed six innocent people, or probably innocent,” says “R”, a commander in an elite paratroopers’ unit. “We would joke about it and give them code names: the baker, the woman, the child, the old man, the drummer. Some of them by mistake, but as I see it, they were simply executed on illegal orders.
“There were many nights on which we received orders that whoever we see on the street between two and four in the morning is sentenced to death [dino mavet]. Those were the exact words. We were in Nablus and we started to advance using the ‘worm’ procedure so as not to be exposed. The houses were adjacent and had shared walls. Blow a hole in a wall, pass through a house, blow a hole in a wall, pass through a house. We advanced slowly, until at the end we stopped and came across what is called a ‘controlling house.’
“We set up sniper positions in the windows and waited. One of the marksmen identified a man on the roof. Two roofs from us, a distance of up to seventy metres, at two in the morning, an unarmed man walking on the roof. I saw with my own eyes that the man was not armed. That was also what we reported on the radio. The company commander said ‘take him down.’ Just like that, on the radio, he made a decision and settled on that. You think about that, in the United States there is a death penalty, there are a thousand appeals and convictions and judges. Here a 26-year-old man, my company commander, gave the order from afar to kill him, and the sniper fired and killed him. The company commander defined him as a ‘lookout’.” But what is a ‘lookout’? How does he know what he is? He doesn’t know.
“The next man was the baker. We entered the Old City in Nablus, and as usual the open-fire regulations were that every man walking on the street at night is sentenced to death. The team commander said that it was from the brigade commander. The pretext of course was that there was information from Shabak [the General Security Service, Israel’s internal intelligence agency – trans.]. Really. Shabak knows if Ahmad the baker or Salim the carpenter has to get up to go to work? We did the ‘straw widow’ procedure – enter a house, concentrate the family into one room, then set up sharpshooters’ positions in the windows. In the morning we send out vehicles as bait in the hope of attracting the armed men against us, then we shoot them. The idea is to take down the armed men.
“That night we took over a house in an excellent position, and about four in the morning the sharpshooters’ position identified a man walking with a bag. I saw him on Jami’at al-Kabir Street with the bag in his hand. I went down to report, and the sniper, a friend of mine, was on duty. I reported to the commander who reports to the company commander. The order was ‘take him down.’ And so a man fell, 70 metres from his house.”
Two residents were witnesses to this incident, which happened under the window of As’ad Hanun, age 50, from Nablus. “I woke up to the sound of a shot,” she said a few months ago to members of Btselem. “After the shot I heard yelling from the street, ‘brother, I’m wounded, people, I’m wounded.’ The voice sounded very close and I was afraid to look out. After a few minutes I opened the window. The street was dark and I did not see the wounded man, but I saw the neighbours’ son. I asked him who was wounded, and he answered that it was a young man and he was in front of him. Immediately I went down to try to help. The wounded man was sitting on the ground and wearing a white hat.”
A soldier from the unit, who watched from the house opposite, continues. “Right away the jeep from the command post came, and the company commander got down and carried out a barbaric kill-verification just like that, with grenades, and he even sprayed the body with bullets. It’s a good thing that the IDF spokesman denies that there’s such a procedure. Then they went and checked what he had in the bag. What do you think was there? Bread.”
“I saw an Israeli jeep approaching,” the neighbour also related. “I was afraid they’d shoot so I went back into the alley. In the meantime the street was lit up with flares that the army lit; afterwards I heard about 10-12 consecutive shots. I did not see who was shooting, but I heard the wounded man yelling. After the last shot I heard the sound of an explosion and after that I heard nothing, no shooting and no yelling. It was clear that he was dead because he did not show any sign of life.” The neighbour identified the killed man as ‘Ala al-Din, an employee of the a-Silawi bakery. “In the bag,” she corrects, “were work clothes, not bread.”
“K”, a soldier in the armoured corps, testifies that he received a similar order in the Gaza Strip. “We went out in a tank from the base after mortars were fired at the settlements and we drove on the Tancher Highway until we entered Deir al-Balah. On the radio the battalion commander announced the open-fire orders: every person we see on the street, shoot to kill. Without asking questions. I remember that when we went in, somebody was running there, unarmed, and right away we shot him without any particular reason until he was definitely dead. That is to say, he fell into the bushes and afterwards we emptied a great many bullets into him. In the company we were not excited about killing, but we were happy that there was action [“action” said in English – trans.]. We didn’t think in terms of right or not.”
“A”, a commander in another paratroopers’ unit, served in Jenin and says that he received orders along the lines of “no innocent person has any reason to walk around on the street during the night hours.” As he says, “in every big city there are people who walk on the street, even at three in the morning. So is it right to kill them from a distance?”
The reply of the military prosecutor, Lt.-Col. Liron Libman: “There are definite rules that we shoot only at combatants. The words appear in the rules and are supposed to pass to the soldiers through their commanders. According to international law it is permitted to shoot to kill not only when they shoot at you. There is a concept called anticipatory self-defence.”
The drummer
As dawn approached, one night during the month of Ramadan, a Nablus resident walked the streets with a drum to wake up the occupants before the fast. “No one told us that in the morning in Ramadan there was a custom like that,” says “R”. “We saw him with something in his hand, and like in most of the times an expedited arrest procedure was carried out. That is, we yell ‘stop, stop’ quickly, according to the protocol, right away we shoot in the air, and if he doesn’t stop, we shoot to kill. No shooting at the legs.”
The terrified drummer started to flee and entered an alley, relates “R”, and they entered into pursuit of him until in the end they killed him in one of the alleys. “They did a kill-verification on him according to the procedures they knew, grenades and afterwards a bullet in the head. Only then did it emerge that what he was holding in his hand was a drum. Only afterwards, in the investigation, did we learn that they wake people up that way during Ramadan. OK, so we, the simple soldiers, didn’t know. But even at the Brigade HQ nobody knew? Could be that they should have been more careful, or moderated the open-fire regulations.”
According to the IDF spokesman, the “drummer” was Jihad al-Natur, 24 years old when he died. An officer at the Judge Advocate-General’s office stated in reply that the death of the “drummer” was investigated, “and one of the lessons was that it is also important to know about Ramadan and the drums.”
The military prosecutor says that it was a mishap. “The force came across some people who were holding something that looked unusual to them, there was fear of attack, they warned and called to stop, and the people started to flee. It turned out that another force was mistakenly positioned in front of the first force, and it could even have ended up with the death of a soldier. Mistakes can happen during operations, but we conducted a serious check. We did not say, OK, never mind, a Palestinian has been killed.” Judicial proceedings? There is no place for that, according to Libman, “because the soldiers subjectively acted under the assumption that they had been attacked. We have not heard of kill-verification. I am hearing the allegation for the first time, and I cannot comment.”
Live fire at the knees of a child
The unit of “M”, a soldier in the Giv’ati Brigade, was stationed close to the Ganei-Tal settlement. “They call it ‘easy’ when they shoot live bullets at the knees of a child. There is a long line that separates the Jewish settlements from Khan Younis [in the Gaza Strip] and in parts of it there is no fence. In front of Ganei-Tal was a dune, which was a dead zone regarding our ability to observe it. In order that they not penetrate into the settlements, we created a situation in which the Palestinians knew exactly how far they could go from the edge of the neighbourhood.
“The top of the dune was a garbage dump next to which children played every day. When the ball falls, we execute deterrent fire to keep them back, first in the air and then maximum 50 metres from them so they go back. That was the procedure. For a long period it was like cat-and-mouse and it lasted a long time, until one day my assistant company commander decided that he had had enough, that it was not effective, that the children played there too much. He told us, ‘next time, call me.’ He came, and fired from a modified M-16 rifle with a telescopic sight, at the leg of one of the children. A boy who definitely had nothing on him, there wasn’t even a suspicion that he had anything, besides the fact that he had crossed some imaginary line. To shoot a nine- or ten-year-old boy who was playing football and innocently chasing the ball, and make him disabled for his whole life, in my eyes that is more than problematic. The children ran away as long as their breath was in them, and adults came to evacuate the boy who was lying there. They understood the aggressive message. For a few days at least, the children were afraid to cross the line.”
“R”, from the paratroopers, who spoke before about the ““lookout”” and the “baker,” describes – this time testifying to what he heard on the communications system – what happened to the “child.” It happened when the Brigade Commander in Nablus was replaced, and “there was an operation that we jokingly called ‘the Brigade Commander’s horror show.’ At the last stage there were roadblock operations with plastic [barriers] that we called ‘New Jerseys.’ All the time the children, the ones who throw stones, would come and move them. It was a total mess. Then the battalion commander gave everyone an order on the radio: whoever touches a ‘New Jersey,’ shoot him in the legs. Live fire.
“In my Abir [military vehicle], we said right away, ‘is he cracked or what?’ Somebody touches a barrier and you shoot him in the legs? For sure he’s just showing off. But no. That battalion commander was actually a good guy. It was very important to him to set a personal example. At the checkpoint, where I was not personally but there were friends of mine there, the man saw a boy and aimed at his legs, but you know how it is with the commanders, they have so many meetings they don’t have time to calibrate their weapons. He missed the leg and hit the boy in the chest. I was not there, but when we returned from the operation to the base everybody was talking about it. They all said that the battalion commander shot a boy and were talking like he was a ‘murderer of children.’ Was the boy killed? I assume nobody went and checked for a pulse, but very few children survive a bullet in the chest.”
In the unit they give a confused explanation. “The battalion commander did not miss but deliberately shot to kill,” said one of the officers confidently. “We talked to him and he checked the incident personally. His gun was definitely calibrated, and everything was done with the intention to kill. It was a Fatah activist, Hani Qandul, 17. He was supervising a serious disturbance that was endangering the soldiers. So he was shot dead. The orders permit the shooting to death of a chief instigator.”
But Qandul’s ID card reveals that he was only 13 and a half when he died. Was this the dangerous activist that the battalion commander deliberately shot to death? It turns out that Hani Qandul was killed on another occasion; an eyewitness described it to a Btselem investigator, a short time after the incident. “Hani, who was 18, stood 20 metres from us, with his seven-year-old brother. Suddenly I heard shooting (…) I saw Hani fall to the ground.”
If so, the battalion commander killed Qandul in May 2004. And what about the “child” that the soldier “R” speaks of? “We don’t know of a shooting like that or of a child who was killed,” it was reported from the unit. “If there was an order to shoot at the legs, it was the result of intelligence information of intention to endanger the soldiers.” Operation Calm Waters ended with the deaths of five minors.
The Military Prosecutor responds: “Too bad the soldier told you that. If he had reported to us, it would have been possible to comment with more precision. I have not heard specifically about ‘easy.’ ”
Everyone who is standing on a roof
“A”, an officer in a “Kingfisher” [Shaldag] unit, was posted in Rafah during Operation Rainbow in May of last year, and “I had direct access to the brigade commander. I was in Command Group 2 of Pinky (Pinhas Zwartz, commander of the Southern Brigade at the time – S. G.). At the beginning of the operation I commanded a team, and a friend of mine commanded another team, and the mission was to do ‘straw widows’ [to occupy Palestinian homes] and to put snipers on the upper floors of the houses.
“When we entered, we saw that there was really no danger. It was an uncongested built-up area with greenhouses, in front were our tanks and a D-9 [Caterpillar bulldozer] that was destroying houses and greenhouses. We were there more than 24 hours and we didn’t see any armed people, and it was quite boring for everybody, if one can say that. But the whole time, about every hour or two hours, they called us from the command post to ask why we were not shooting. But our feeling of danger was very low. No one shot at us, we were not in a state of anxiety.
“The open-fire regulations were clear enough: every Palestinian on a roof is supposedly a ‘lookout,’ and the snipers shoot him right away. And every civilian on the street who bends towards the ground is suspected of setting explosives and they shoot him. At one point we saw somebody standing on a roof. Just standing, without binoculars. There was no reason to assume that he was on the lookout rather than just going up for a breath of air. I got authorization to shoot – and we hesitated. I agreed to second it. To this day I ask myself why.
“The procedure was that the three snipers shoot together. He got two bullets in the chest and died on the spot. Afterwards we heard ambulances. Hand on heart I had a feeling that it was not OK, but the guys pressured me and I backed down. I failed. That time I did not withstand the pressure from above and from below. There were three snipers who had spent a lot of time training and wanted to put their skills into practice. At the end of the day an officer from the brigade operations branch did a cursory investigation, about two minutes. The question of whether the shooting was justified at all did not come up. Afterwards I and four other officers who saw similar incidents were so surprised, that we decided to write a letter to the corps commander, with a copy to the Chief of Staff, what is really going on.” At the end of Operation Rainbow the IDF spokesman announced that dozens of armed men were killed as well as 14 civilians.
At the Southern Command they know that the order to open fire on every person on a roof is not legal. The matter had been clarified a half year before, when a soldier in the Paratroopers refused a similar order. “I served in Netzarim, in which there are dozens of guard posts,” relates Zafrir Goldberg. “At the briefing they explained the open-fire regulations and I was shocked. I talked to the company commander, and he said that he was sorry, but those were the regulations. I also talked to an officer in the Intelligence Branch and the assistant battalion commander.” The Association for Civil Rights contacted the Judge Advocate-General and warned about a “patently illegal order.” At the beginning of January 2004 the Judge Advocate-General replied: “We have instructed the command elements to ensure that the briefings given to soldiers do not include such an order.”
The reply of the military prosecutor: “International law permits attacking any combatant, including those who are observing and guiding. The question is how to determine whether someone is a lookout and not someone who went up to hang laundry. I do not know the specific incidents, but theoretically it could be that a soldier who shoots does not see the whole picture. The requirement for authorization from a higher level teaches a certain degree of caution. A soldier who identifies an armed terrorist shoots without authorization.”
The do not identify. They shoot
The unit of “K”, a soldier in the Haredi Nahal Brigade, was positioned above Ramallah in order to dominate the al-Bireh neighbourhood. According to him, “In our position it was relatively quiet, occasionally there was shooting in our direction from a Kalashnikov. It was ineffective fire because of the distance and because the shooters were below. But it was clear that according to the regulations we were not to be passive but were supposed to shoot back and ‘return fire to the sources of fire.’ The problem was there was no chance of identifying the sources of fire, and in practice we returned ‘general’ fire, in the direction of the houses.
“At first, whenever there was fire towards our position, we immediately went into the return-fire procedure: we fired wildly towards the neighbourhood. We sent down a rain of MAG [machine-gun] bullets and thousands of M-16 rounds without identifying a source of fire. It was clear to me that it was not logical. I went to the company commander and told him that it was a waste of money. Isn’t it pointless? I didn’t explain to him that there were residents and children living there, because everyone understood that. I only said that it cost a fortune. I suggested that they bring snipers who would try to take them down one by one.
“The first houses were about 600 metres from us. The source of the shooting was further back, 900 metres from us. There was no chance that they would hit us with a Kalashnikov, and for sure there was no chance of hitting them with return fire. After a month and a half the situation changed: when they didn’t shoot at us, we got bored. So the soldiers decided that we wouldn’t wait for them to start. They said something like today it’s our turn to start, and we’ll shoot first.
“We called it ‘initiated’ [yezuma]. It was a kind of routine that the whole company knew, that happened dozens of times. Everybody recognized the word ‘initiated’, and the meaning – just start freely spraying bullets towards al-Bireh. Just shooting, and when possible, towards the windows when they were open. Obviously if anybody complained, we would say that the Palestinians fired first. Every day they would empty several ‘bruces’ (wooden ammunition boxes – S. G.) of ammunition. There were times when I saw ambulances go in, but I didn’t know what happened. On at least one occasion I know that we wounded a girl, because I saw an ambulance, and a day later there was a report in the newspaper that the IDF returned fire to sources of fire in al-Bireh, and that there was a girl whose leg we took off.
“The staff knew everything and gave us to understand that there was no problem. For example, when we had to calibrate our weapons, the Company Commander encouraged us to aim at the fluorescent lights of the mosque. I’m sure that the Brigade Commander knew about it as well, because at least once they reported to him, after an officer from another unit visited the position and reported to him. He heard shots, and asked the soldier what he was doing. The soldier said that they had shot at him, and the officer said, ‘hold it, I heard, don’t lie.’ He reported it to the brigade commander, and they talked about it for several days, but nothing happened. That whole period we were in contact with the people from the Pisgot settlement, whom we were guarding, and after a week they told us that the matter was closed, that an officer like him won’t last long in the brigade.”
The IDF spokesman, in an initial reply: “Commanders of the unit were replaced and retired and it is hard to get comments from them.” IDF spokesman in a second reply: “According to the commanders, they were not there at that time.” Lt.-Col. Libman: “There are no open-fire rules ‘just to shoot’. There are regulations that deal with shooting at an unidentified source of fire, which are subordinate to the basic rule that you do not shoot at a place where you endanger a civilian population. The regulation is supposed to be transmitted to the soldiers at briefings and before all actions and it makes clear what is forbidden.”
“M”, from the Giv’ati Brigade, tells of those unwritten procedures, when he served in a position in front of Rafah in May 2004. At the edge of the neighbourhood was an abandoned house from which armed men occasionally opened fire, and the soldiers returned fire, including with a 40 mm grenade-launcher. “The problem is that the way to shoot well with a grenade-launcher is the way they used to do it with mortars in the armoured corps. First you miss, identify where it landed, and adjust and improve accordingly. Every hundred metres of divergence is a few millimetres to move the gun. In a discharge there are about 20 grenades. Every time you shoot to the right of the building, you hit the neighbourhood. That’s also how they calibrate the machine-gun. It’s clear that it’s impossible to hit right away, and of course there were live grenades that fell in the middle of the neighbourhood. I remember times we saw ambulances going in after our shooting. Why did they go in? I don’t believe that somebody in the neighbourhood had a heart attack right then. Logically we simply hit people. That shooting was done regularly and received all the authorizations from above, at least up to the division commander.”
Shooting at the population also happened in Nablus, as related by soldiers from a paratroopers’ unit. “R” recalls a young woman of 24 who was shot in the neck, due to what he describes as his and his friends’ “irresponsible shooting” towards houses, and an old man who took a bullet in the belly, that he himself apparently fired in similar circumstances. He too describes a reality in which they believe in the sentence: “You must return fire to the sources of fire,” even when nobody identifies them. “In practice everybody shoots freely in 360 degrees at [rooftop] water reservoirs and at everybody whom maybe they identify in the windows.”
“To say that we were under pressure is nonsense,” says “R” in reply to the necessary question. “In my opinion most of the shots that I and my friends fired were not because of nervousness and fear, but from the desire to put an X on our guns. Everyone who was a combat soldier knows how much he wants that X on the gun. Without that you’re not a man. I have one in my team with five X’s, and he doesn’t care. They tell you, ‘listen, they’re not naןve. What was she standing at the window for?’ or ‘an unfortunate mishap.’ In my opinion it’s just the result of irresponsible shooting. Needless and senseless killing.”
The Chief Military Prosecutor: “come and testify”
"Allegations of reckless or illegal shooting are not correct,” says the chief military prosecutor, Lt.-Col. Liron Libman. “It’s only a case of exceptional incidents at the local level. In fact there was a dilemma about whether to distribute the regulations in writing. But the reality is not like in the past. Precisely because we had expanded the range of tools available to commanders, we did not want a soldier to get a paper from which he would understand that we allow him everything that is allowed to commanders. We wanted him to hear from the commander exactly what is permitted to him. Talking and deliberating out loud are assimilated and get absorbed more than a piece of paper. If we passed out a piece of paper, they could claim that we were just covering our tails. The regulations in fact are not transmitted in a booklet, but they are transmitted to the soldiers in briefings, before every operational action. In addition, rules of conduct in the Territories are distributed in writing, from which it emerges clearly that it is forbidden to harm civilians. We act in accordance with international law and also according to the practices of other states in similar conflicts.
“You ask how despite the fact that there are rules, people diverge from them? You are asking me precisely why I will always have work as a prosecutor. Because people are people. And there are 139 investigations of incidents of shooting, including some convictions. The more relevant question is if it is on an unreasonable scale, and here you are walking on less firm ground. Thousands are serving in the Territories, with a great intensity of actions against terrorism, shooting at soldiers, at civilians who are circulating in the Territories, suicide terrorists with explosive belts who are caught at checkpoints and other places. Every innocent life is precious, but if you check how many have been harmed, check if the exceptions are unreasonable. And I, in the place where I am, do not think so. There are exceptions, our job is to find them, do deal with them, but I think that the common soldier and commander have heads on their shoulders, have sound minds, have consciences and act according to the rules.
“It is important for soldiers to come to us with testimony about apparently criminal acts. I see in it an important report that will be investigated. It is important to us not to be detached and to say that everything is OK. We are in daily contact with human rights organizations. Every incident is checked with the commanders in the field, who investigate if there was an IDF force on the scene and how it acted. There are cases in which the IDF simply was not in the area, and in the investigations there are sometimes replies that explain why the injury to innocents, as distressing as it is, was unavoidable. And sometimes people are put on trial. “The judicial process is very hard in those investigations. It is a trial with all its intricacies, with all the rights accorded to the accused, according to the rules of evidence, and it is not simple. We request cooperation from the Palestinians, sometimes with success. There are cases in which those killed or wounded arrive at an Israeli hospital, and then the prosecution has more of a chance.”
Yediot Ahronot (Seven Days supplement)
Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall
Occupation Magazine
‘Another paediatrician and another baker
Got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit
All day we search houses and kill children’
From a song of a paratroopers’ unit that participated in Operation Calm Waters in Nablus, beginning of 2004
“I’ll break your camera,” the officer threatened the startled soldiers. “It’s the unit’s camera,” mumbled one of them. “Then I’m the shit of the unit,” said the officer angrily. It is one thing to criticize a military operation; but to document it on video?
This heated exchange took place in whispers, because the camera was set up in the living room of a Palestinian family in Nablus, in a house that the unit had taken over during Operation Calm Waters at the beginning of 2004. The soldiers, some of whom had already killed unarmed civilians over the course of the operation, had composed a macabre song. Before the commander arrived, the camera had already managed to record them hoarsely singing: “Another paediatrician and another baker got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit. All day we search houses and kill children.” Afterwards one of them explained: “The contempt for human life bothered me a lot. Battalion commanders, company commanders and brigade commanders can do whatever comes to their heads without anybody checking, it’s really the Wild West.”
The end of the month will mark five years since the outbreak of violent confrontation in the Territories, and the IDF still does not believe in writing regulations for opening fire. Maybe the killing of dozens of innocent civilians, the “Wild West” as that soldier described it, would have been diminished if the soldiers had been given regular open-fire regulations. And if in the past there was an official booklet for open-fire regulations that was passed to every soldier who served in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has been buried since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000. The soldiers receive the regulations orally from the commanders in the field, and they vary from sector to sector, unit to unit, commander to commander. This grey area allows for the winking and turning away of eyes, whether from negligence or from contempt for the value of Palestinian life.
The latest reminder was received three weeks ago in the Tul Karem refugee camp. Five Palestinians were killed, and the statement of the IDF spokesman dryly noted that “An IDF force came across a number of armed fugitives who belonged to the Islamic Jihad organization.” The commander of the Nahal Brigade, Col. Roni Numa, clarified: “None of those killed was an innocent passer-by. Exchanges of fire took place between the force and the terrorists, fire-bombs and charges were thrown in their direction.” Later it turned out that none of the Palestinians was armed, it is doubtful if any of them was a dangerous fugitive, and in any case there were no “exchanges of fire.” Following the media controversy over the affair an army investigation was conducted – itself an atypical proceeding.
The deadly consequences of the policy of ambiguity regarding shooting at civilians reached the High Court of Justice, which ruled at that time in an appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
Wild West
Then what are the official open-fire regulations? In December 2004 MK Zehava Golan (Meretz) addressed Security Minister Shaul Mofaz and proposed that written open-fire regulations be distributed to the soldiers, as was done in the past, “so as to ensure that an oral tradition not develop.” At the beginning of the year came a reply from the office of the army’s High Command: “Due to the changes that are made to the open-fire regulations from time to time, and due to the differences between the sectors, we find that to bring the regulations to the knowledge of the soldiers in the form of a booklet as in the past is not efficient and may even cause mistakes. Therefore the distribution of the regulations will be carried out through the commanders.”
This explanation met with a different reality, in which many “mistakes” took place, as combat soldiers in elite units are beginning to reveal. The soldiers who were interviewed for this article emphasize that the regulations were made judiciously, not under pressure, and were transmitted only orally to the level of the troops. Sometimes their meanings were changed on the way down. “It is obvious why the IDF refuses to publish the regulations in writing, opines Avihai Sharon, 24, until recently a sergeant in the Golani Brigade. “Nobody could openly stand behind some of them, which became routine in all the sectors. That’s too bad, because according to the declarations, the army is interested in preventing harm to innocent people. Transparency could reduce harm. At least it would clarify what is forbidden. Among us in the Golani, no one knew, and regarding our routine practices for opening fire, to call it the Wild West is a big understatement.”
The results of the shooting are not completely clear to the army. The IDF said in its reply to the judges, that “in addition to those who are fighting against us, many innocent civilians are harmed.” How many innocents? “From the numeric data in the IDF’s possession we cannot vouch for their precision and trustworthiness,” was written in the reply, and the IDF does not deny data about massive harm to civilians. The chief military prosecutor, Lieutenant-Colonel Liron Libman is convinced that it only a matter of exceptional cases. The judges felt otherwise, and ordered the IDF by next month to set up a mechanism to investigate shootings that kill civilians. This is to prevent the military prosecutor from investigating only internal debriefings that the IDF passes along to him.
The following stories exemplify the opaque situation in which the soldiers find themselves. Some of the facts came from a source in a soldiers’ group called “Breaking the Silence” [shovrim shtika] and were checked by the editorial staff of “7 Days” with eyewitnesses, the IDF spokesman and the Btselem human rights group.
Kill anybody who’s walking on the street
“My team killed six innocent people, or probably innocent,” says “R”, a commander in an elite paratroopers’ unit. “We would joke about it and give them code names: the baker, the woman, the child, the old man, the drummer. Some of them by mistake, but as I see it, they were simply executed on illegal orders.
“There were many nights on which we received orders that whoever we see on the street between two and four in the morning is sentenced to death [dino mavet]. Those were the exact words. We were in Nablus and we started to advance using the ‘worm’ procedure so as not to be exposed. The houses were adjacent and had shared walls. Blow a hole in a wall, pass through a house, blow a hole in a wall, pass through a house. We advanced slowly, until at the end we stopped and came across what is called a ‘controlling house.’
“We set up sniper positions in the windows and waited. One of the marksmen identified a man on the roof. Two roofs from us, a distance of up to seventy metres, at two in the morning, an unarmed man walking on the roof. I saw with my own eyes that the man was not armed. That was also what we reported on the radio. The company commander said ‘take him down.’ Just like that, on the radio, he made a decision and settled on that. You think about that, in the United States there is a death penalty, there are a thousand appeals and convictions and judges. Here a 26-year-old man, my company commander, gave the order from afar to kill him, and the sniper fired and killed him. The company commander defined him as a ‘lookout’.” But what is a ‘lookout’? How does he know what he is? He doesn’t know.
“The next man was the baker. We entered the Old City in Nablus, and as usual the open-fire regulations were that every man walking on the street at night is sentenced to death. The team commander said that it was from the brigade commander. The pretext of course was that there was information from Shabak [the General Security Service, Israel’s internal intelligence agency – trans.]. Really. Shabak knows if Ahmad the baker or Salim the carpenter has to get up to go to work? We did the ‘straw widow’ procedure – enter a house, concentrate the family into one room, then set up sharpshooters’ positions in the windows. In the morning we send out vehicles as bait in the hope of attracting the armed men against us, then we shoot them. The idea is to take down the armed men.
“That night we took over a house in an excellent position, and about four in the morning the sharpshooters’ position identified a man walking with a bag. I saw him on Jami’at al-Kabir Street with the bag in his hand. I went down to report, and the sniper, a friend of mine, was on duty. I reported to the commander who reports to the company commander. The order was ‘take him down.’ And so a man fell, 70 metres from his house.”
Two residents were witnesses to this incident, which happened under the window of As’ad Hanun, age 50, from Nablus. “I woke up to the sound of a shot,” she said a few months ago to members of Btselem. “After the shot I heard yelling from the street, ‘brother, I’m wounded, people, I’m wounded.’ The voice sounded very close and I was afraid to look out. After a few minutes I opened the window. The street was dark and I did not see the wounded man, but I saw the neighbours’ son. I asked him who was wounded, and he answered that it was a young man and he was in front of him. Immediately I went down to try to help. The wounded man was sitting on the ground and wearing a white hat.”
A soldier from the unit, who watched from the house opposite, continues. “Right away the jeep from the command post came, and the company commander got down and carried out a barbaric kill-verification just like that, with grenades, and he even sprayed the body with bullets. It’s a good thing that the IDF spokesman denies that there’s such a procedure. Then they went and checked what he had in the bag. What do you think was there? Bread.”
“I saw an Israeli jeep approaching,” the neighbour also related. “I was afraid they’d shoot so I went back into the alley. In the meantime the street was lit up with flares that the army lit; afterwards I heard about 10-12 consecutive shots. I did not see who was shooting, but I heard the wounded man yelling. After the last shot I heard the sound of an explosion and after that I heard nothing, no shooting and no yelling. It was clear that he was dead because he did not show any sign of life.” The neighbour identified the killed man as ‘Ala al-Din, an employee of the a-Silawi bakery. “In the bag,” she corrects, “were work clothes, not bread.”
“K”, a soldier in the armoured corps, testifies that he received a similar order in the Gaza Strip. “We went out in a tank from the base after mortars were fired at the settlements and we drove on the Tancher Highway until we entered Deir al-Balah. On the radio the battalion commander announced the open-fire orders: every person we see on the street, shoot to kill. Without asking questions. I remember that when we went in, somebody was running there, unarmed, and right away we shot him without any particular reason until he was definitely dead. That is to say, he fell into the bushes and afterwards we emptied a great many bullets into him. In the company we were not excited about killing, but we were happy that there was action [“action” said in English – trans.]. We didn’t think in terms of right or not.”
“A”, a commander in another paratroopers’ unit, served in Jenin and says that he received orders along the lines of “no innocent person has any reason to walk around on the street during the night hours.” As he says, “in every big city there are people who walk on the street, even at three in the morning. So is it right to kill them from a distance?”
The reply of the military prosecutor, Lt.-Col. Liron Libman: “There are definite rules that we shoot only at combatants. The words appear in the rules and are supposed to pass to the soldiers through their commanders. According to international law it is permitted to shoot to kill not only when they shoot at you. There is a concept called anticipatory self-defence.”
The drummer
As dawn approached, one night during the month of Ramadan, a Nablus resident walked the streets with a drum to wake up the occupants before the fast. “No one told us that in the morning in Ramadan there was a custom like that,” says “R”. “We saw him with something in his hand, and like in most of the times an expedited arrest procedure was carried out. That is, we yell ‘stop, stop’ quickly, according to the protocol, right away we shoot in the air, and if he doesn’t stop, we shoot to kill. No shooting at the legs.”
The terrified drummer started to flee and entered an alley, relates “R”, and they entered into pursuit of him until in the end they killed him in one of the alleys. “They did a kill-verification on him according to the procedures they knew, grenades and afterwards a bullet in the head. Only then did it emerge that what he was holding in his hand was a drum. Only afterwards, in the investigation, did we learn that they wake people up that way during Ramadan. OK, so we, the simple soldiers, didn’t know. But even at the Brigade HQ nobody knew? Could be that they should have been more careful, or moderated the open-fire regulations.”
According to the IDF spokesman, the “drummer” was Jihad al-Natur, 24 years old when he died. An officer at the Judge Advocate-General’s office stated in reply that the death of the “drummer” was investigated, “and one of the lessons was that it is also important to know about Ramadan and the drums.”
The military prosecutor says that it was a mishap. “The force came across some people who were holding something that looked unusual to them, there was fear of attack, they warned and called to stop, and the people started to flee. It turned out that another force was mistakenly positioned in front of the first force, and it could even have ended up with the death of a soldier. Mistakes can happen during operations, but we conducted a serious check. We did not say, OK, never mind, a Palestinian has been killed.” Judicial proceedings? There is no place for that, according to Libman, “because the soldiers subjectively acted under the assumption that they had been attacked. We have not heard of kill-verification. I am hearing the allegation for the first time, and I cannot comment.”
Live fire at the knees of a child
The unit of “M”, a soldier in the Giv’ati Brigade, was stationed close to the Ganei-Tal settlement. “They call it ‘easy’ when they shoot live bullets at the knees of a child. There is a long line that separates the Jewish settlements from Khan Younis [in the Gaza Strip] and in parts of it there is no fence. In front of Ganei-Tal was a dune, which was a dead zone regarding our ability to observe it. In order that they not penetrate into the settlements, we created a situation in which the Palestinians knew exactly how far they could go from the edge of the neighbourhood.
“The top of the dune was a garbage dump next to which children played every day. When the ball falls, we execute deterrent fire to keep them back, first in the air and then maximum 50 metres from them so they go back. That was the procedure. For a long period it was like cat-and-mouse and it lasted a long time, until one day my assistant company commander decided that he had had enough, that it was not effective, that the children played there too much. He told us, ‘next time, call me.’ He came, and fired from a modified M-16 rifle with a telescopic sight, at the leg of one of the children. A boy who definitely had nothing on him, there wasn’t even a suspicion that he had anything, besides the fact that he had crossed some imaginary line. To shoot a nine- or ten-year-old boy who was playing football and innocently chasing the ball, and make him disabled for his whole life, in my eyes that is more than problematic. The children ran away as long as their breath was in them, and adults came to evacuate the boy who was lying there. They understood the aggressive message. For a few days at least, the children were afraid to cross the line.”
“R”, from the paratroopers, who spoke before about the ““lookout”” and the “baker,” describes – this time testifying to what he heard on the communications system – what happened to the “child.” It happened when the Brigade Commander in Nablus was replaced, and “there was an operation that we jokingly called ‘the Brigade Commander’s horror show.’ At the last stage there were roadblock operations with plastic [barriers] that we called ‘New Jerseys.’ All the time the children, the ones who throw stones, would come and move them. It was a total mess. Then the battalion commander gave everyone an order on the radio: whoever touches a ‘New Jersey,’ shoot him in the legs. Live fire.
“In my Abir [military vehicle], we said right away, ‘is he cracked or what?’ Somebody touches a barrier and you shoot him in the legs? For sure he’s just showing off. But no. That battalion commander was actually a good guy. It was very important to him to set a personal example. At the checkpoint, where I was not personally but there were friends of mine there, the man saw a boy and aimed at his legs, but you know how it is with the commanders, they have so many meetings they don’t have time to calibrate their weapons. He missed the leg and hit the boy in the chest. I was not there, but when we returned from the operation to the base everybody was talking about it. They all said that the battalion commander shot a boy and were talking like he was a ‘murderer of children.’ Was the boy killed? I assume nobody went and checked for a pulse, but very few children survive a bullet in the chest.”
In the unit they give a confused explanation. “The battalion commander did not miss but deliberately shot to kill,” said one of the officers confidently. “We talked to him and he checked the incident personally. His gun was definitely calibrated, and everything was done with the intention to kill. It was a Fatah activist, Hani Qandul, 17. He was supervising a serious disturbance that was endangering the soldiers. So he was shot dead. The orders permit the shooting to death of a chief instigator.”
But Qandul’s ID card reveals that he was only 13 and a half when he died. Was this the dangerous activist that the battalion commander deliberately shot to death? It turns out that Hani Qandul was killed on another occasion; an eyewitness described it to a Btselem investigator, a short time after the incident. “Hani, who was 18, stood 20 metres from us, with his seven-year-old brother. Suddenly I heard shooting (…) I saw Hani fall to the ground.”
If so, the battalion commander killed Qandul in May 2004. And what about the “child” that the soldier “R” speaks of? “We don’t know of a shooting like that or of a child who was killed,” it was reported from the unit. “If there was an order to shoot at the legs, it was the result of intelligence information of intention to endanger the soldiers.” Operation Calm Waters ended with the deaths of five minors.
The Military Prosecutor responds: “Too bad the soldier told you that. If he had reported to us, it would have been possible to comment with more precision. I have not heard specifically about ‘easy.’ ”
Everyone who is standing on a roof
“A”, an officer in a “Kingfisher” [Shaldag] unit, was posted in Rafah during Operation Rainbow in May of last year, and “I had direct access to the brigade commander. I was in Command Group 2 of Pinky (Pinhas Zwartz, commander of the Southern Brigade at the time – S. G.). At the beginning of the operation I commanded a team, and a friend of mine commanded another team, and the mission was to do ‘straw widows’ [to occupy Palestinian homes] and to put snipers on the upper floors of the houses.
“When we entered, we saw that there was really no danger. It was an uncongested built-up area with greenhouses, in front were our tanks and a D-9 [Caterpillar bulldozer] that was destroying houses and greenhouses. We were there more than 24 hours and we didn’t see any armed people, and it was quite boring for everybody, if one can say that. But the whole time, about every hour or two hours, they called us from the command post to ask why we were not shooting. But our feeling of danger was very low. No one shot at us, we were not in a state of anxiety.
“The open-fire regulations were clear enough: every Palestinian on a roof is supposedly a ‘lookout,’ and the snipers shoot him right away. And every civilian on the street who bends towards the ground is suspected of setting explosives and they shoot him. At one point we saw somebody standing on a roof. Just standing, without binoculars. There was no reason to assume that he was on the lookout rather than just going up for a breath of air. I got authorization to shoot – and we hesitated. I agreed to second it. To this day I ask myself why.
“The procedure was that the three snipers shoot together. He got two bullets in the chest and died on the spot. Afterwards we heard ambulances. Hand on heart I had a feeling that it was not OK, but the guys pressured me and I backed down. I failed. That time I did not withstand the pressure from above and from below. There were three snipers who had spent a lot of time training and wanted to put their skills into practice. At the end of the day an officer from the brigade operations branch did a cursory investigation, about two minutes. The question of whether the shooting was justified at all did not come up. Afterwards I and four other officers who saw similar incidents were so surprised, that we decided to write a letter to the corps commander, with a copy to the Chief of Staff, what is really going on.” At the end of Operation Rainbow the IDF spokesman announced that dozens of armed men were killed as well as 14 civilians.
At the Southern Command they know that the order to open fire on every person on a roof is not legal. The matter had been clarified a half year before, when a soldier in the Paratroopers refused a similar order. “I served in Netzarim, in which there are dozens of guard posts,” relates Zafrir Goldberg. “At the briefing they explained the open-fire regulations and I was shocked. I talked to the company commander, and he said that he was sorry, but those were the regulations. I also talked to an officer in the Intelligence Branch and the assistant battalion commander.” The Association for Civil Rights contacted the Judge Advocate-General and warned about a “patently illegal order.” At the beginning of January 2004 the Judge Advocate-General replied: “We have instructed the command elements to ensure that the briefings given to soldiers do not include such an order.”
The reply of the military prosecutor: “International law permits attacking any combatant, including those who are observing and guiding. The question is how to determine whether someone is a lookout and not someone who went up to hang laundry. I do not know the specific incidents, but theoretically it could be that a soldier who shoots does not see the whole picture. The requirement for authorization from a higher level teaches a certain degree of caution. A soldier who identifies an armed terrorist shoots without authorization.”
The do not identify. They shoot
The unit of “K”, a soldier in the Haredi Nahal Brigade, was positioned above Ramallah in order to dominate the al-Bireh neighbourhood. According to him, “In our position it was relatively quiet, occasionally there was shooting in our direction from a Kalashnikov. It was ineffective fire because of the distance and because the shooters were below. But it was clear that according to the regulations we were not to be passive but were supposed to shoot back and ‘return fire to the sources of fire.’ The problem was there was no chance of identifying the sources of fire, and in practice we returned ‘general’ fire, in the direction of the houses.
“At first, whenever there was fire towards our position, we immediately went into the return-fire procedure: we fired wildly towards the neighbourhood. We sent down a rain of MAG [machine-gun] bullets and thousands of M-16 rounds without identifying a source of fire. It was clear to me that it was not logical. I went to the company commander and told him that it was a waste of money. Isn’t it pointless? I didn’t explain to him that there were residents and children living there, because everyone understood that. I only said that it cost a fortune. I suggested that they bring snipers who would try to take them down one by one.
“The first houses were about 600 metres from us. The source of the shooting was further back, 900 metres from us. There was no chance that they would hit us with a Kalashnikov, and for sure there was no chance of hitting them with return fire. After a month and a half the situation changed: when they didn’t shoot at us, we got bored. So the soldiers decided that we wouldn’t wait for them to start. They said something like today it’s our turn to start, and we’ll shoot first.
“We called it ‘initiated’ [yezuma]. It was a kind of routine that the whole company knew, that happened dozens of times. Everybody recognized the word ‘initiated’, and the meaning – just start freely spraying bullets towards al-Bireh. Just shooting, and when possible, towards the windows when they were open. Obviously if anybody complained, we would say that the Palestinians fired first. Every day they would empty several ‘bruces’ (wooden ammunition boxes – S. G.) of ammunition. There were times when I saw ambulances go in, but I didn’t know what happened. On at least one occasion I know that we wounded a girl, because I saw an ambulance, and a day later there was a report in the newspaper that the IDF returned fire to sources of fire in al-Bireh, and that there was a girl whose leg we took off.
“The staff knew everything and gave us to understand that there was no problem. For example, when we had to calibrate our weapons, the Company Commander encouraged us to aim at the fluorescent lights of the mosque. I’m sure that the Brigade Commander knew about it as well, because at least once they reported to him, after an officer from another unit visited the position and reported to him. He heard shots, and asked the soldier what he was doing. The soldier said that they had shot at him, and the officer said, ‘hold it, I heard, don’t lie.’ He reported it to the brigade commander, and they talked about it for several days, but nothing happened. That whole period we were in contact with the people from the Pisgot settlement, whom we were guarding, and after a week they told us that the matter was closed, that an officer like him won’t last long in the brigade.”
The IDF spokesman, in an initial reply: “Commanders of the unit were replaced and retired and it is hard to get comments from them.” IDF spokesman in a second reply: “According to the commanders, they were not there at that time.” Lt.-Col. Libman: “There are no open-fire rules ‘just to shoot’. There are regulations that deal with shooting at an unidentified source of fire, which are subordinate to the basic rule that you do not shoot at a place where you endanger a civilian population. The regulation is supposed to be transmitted to the soldiers at briefings and before all actions and it makes clear what is forbidden.”
“M”, from the Giv’ati Brigade, tells of those unwritten procedures, when he served in a position in front of Rafah in May 2004. At the edge of the neighbourhood was an abandoned house from which armed men occasionally opened fire, and the soldiers returned fire, including with a 40 mm grenade-launcher. “The problem is that the way to shoot well with a grenade-launcher is the way they used to do it with mortars in the armoured corps. First you miss, identify where it landed, and adjust and improve accordingly. Every hundred metres of divergence is a few millimetres to move the gun. In a discharge there are about 20 grenades. Every time you shoot to the right of the building, you hit the neighbourhood. That’s also how they calibrate the machine-gun. It’s clear that it’s impossible to hit right away, and of course there were live grenades that fell in the middle of the neighbourhood. I remember times we saw ambulances going in after our shooting. Why did they go in? I don’t believe that somebody in the neighbourhood had a heart attack right then. Logically we simply hit people. That shooting was done regularly and received all the authorizations from above, at least up to the division commander.”
Shooting at the population also happened in Nablus, as related by soldiers from a paratroopers’ unit. “R” recalls a young woman of 24 who was shot in the neck, due to what he describes as his and his friends’ “irresponsible shooting” towards houses, and an old man who took a bullet in the belly, that he himself apparently fired in similar circumstances. He too describes a reality in which they believe in the sentence: “You must return fire to the sources of fire,” even when nobody identifies them. “In practice everybody shoots freely in 360 degrees at [rooftop] water reservoirs and at everybody whom maybe they identify in the windows.”
“To say that we were under pressure is nonsense,” says “R” in reply to the necessary question. “In my opinion most of the shots that I and my friends fired were not because of nervousness and fear, but from the desire to put an X on our guns. Everyone who was a combat soldier knows how much he wants that X on the gun. Without that you’re not a man. I have one in my team with five X’s, and he doesn’t care. They tell you, ‘listen, they’re not naןve. What was she standing at the window for?’ or ‘an unfortunate mishap.’ In my opinion it’s just the result of irresponsible shooting. Needless and senseless killing.”
The Chief Military Prosecutor: “come and testify”
"Allegations of reckless or illegal shooting are not correct,” says the chief military prosecutor, Lt.-Col. Liron Libman. “It’s only a case of exceptional incidents at the local level. In fact there was a dilemma about whether to distribute the regulations in writing. But the reality is not like in the past. Precisely because we had expanded the range of tools available to commanders, we did not want a soldier to get a paper from which he would understand that we allow him everything that is allowed to commanders. We wanted him to hear from the commander exactly what is permitted to him. Talking and deliberating out loud are assimilated and get absorbed more than a piece of paper. If we passed out a piece of paper, they could claim that we were just covering our tails. The regulations in fact are not transmitted in a booklet, but they are transmitted to the soldiers in briefings, before every operational action. In addition, rules of conduct in the Territories are distributed in writing, from which it emerges clearly that it is forbidden to harm civilians. We act in accordance with international law and also according to the practices of other states in similar conflicts.
“You ask how despite the fact that there are rules, people diverge from them? You are asking me precisely why I will always have work as a prosecutor. Because people are people. And there are 139 investigations of incidents of shooting, including some convictions. The more relevant question is if it is on an unreasonable scale, and here you are walking on less firm ground. Thousands are serving in the Territories, with a great intensity of actions against terrorism, shooting at soldiers, at civilians who are circulating in the Territories, suicide terrorists with explosive belts who are caught at checkpoints and other places. Every innocent life is precious, but if you check how many have been harmed, check if the exceptions are unreasonable. And I, in the place where I am, do not think so. There are exceptions, our job is to find them, do deal with them, but I think that the common soldier and commander have heads on their shoulders, have sound minds, have consciences and act according to the rules.
“It is important for soldiers to come to us with testimony about apparently criminal acts. I see in it an important report that will be investigated. It is important to us not to be detached and to say that everything is OK. We are in daily contact with human rights organizations. Every incident is checked with the commanders in the field, who investigate if there was an IDF force on the scene and how it acted. There are cases in which the IDF simply was not in the area, and in the investigations there are sometimes replies that explain why the injury to innocents, as distressing as it is, was unavoidable. And sometimes people are put on trial. “The judicial process is very hard in those investigations. It is a trial with all its intricacies, with all the rights accorded to the accused, according to the rules of evidence, and it is not simple. We request cooperation from the Palestinians, sometimes with success. There are cases in which those killed or wounded arrive at an Israeli hospital, and then the prosecution has more of a chance.”
7 jan 2005
Worse Than War Crimes
It looks as if the shine is beginning to wear off Mahmoud Abbas' run for the PA Presidency, among Americans and Israelis who were previously touting him as the "pragmatic" PLO leader, i.e. the one who will sign off on an imposed one-and-a-half-state solution and declare that an end to the conflict. Suddenly the "grandfatherly" Abbas has thrown a spanner in the works: instead of running as the candidate who is acceptable to Israel and the U.S., he has gone off-script and is inexplicably running as a candidate who is acceptable to his own electorate.
The issue that seems to have set off alarm bells is Abbas' widely-reported reference to Israel as "the Zionist enemy" in a campaign speech at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on 4 January 2005. This is language uncomfortably reminiscent of the "Zionist entity" rhetoric that regimes hostile to the very existence of the Jewish state use as an alternative to uttering the name "Israel", and reflects a level of anger and hostility toward the Israelis that is uncharacteristic of Mahmoud Abbas.
Apparently, the context in which Abbas uttered those words didn't merit the same banner headlines as the words themselves. Despite what the headlines in the U.S. media suggest, Abu Mazen didn't just pluck some isolated reference to "the Zionist enemy" out of the air in order to annoy the Israelis. This is what he actually said to the crowds in Khan Younis:
"We came to you today, while we are praying for the souls of the martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya..." (from the same CBS report previously linked)
So his words were actually an angry reaction to the fact that the IDF had just killed seven Palestinians in nearby Beit Lahia by firing two tank shells into the field where they were working, in an apparent response to an earlier attack from the same area by Hamas militants who fired four mortars at the Jewish settlement of Nissanit.
As Ali Abunimah noted, National Public Radio managed to report Abbas' reference to "the Zionist enemy" without any reference whatsoever to that fact that he was responding to these killings. While Abbas' words were extreme and troubling to NPR, the deaths that provoked them were utterly ignorable. It is as if al-Qaeda were to blow up seven American children, prompting an angry vow from President Bush to hunt down the bastards that did it, and the U.S. news media responds by ignoring the dead children altogether while clucking and swooning over the Presidential use of the word "bastards".
CBS at least referred to the fact that the killings had taken place but, in the usual "he-said-she-said" regurgitation of competing claims that passes for U.S. news reporting, managed to insinuate that the victims probably deserved it anyway, by disseminating the IDF's palpably false claim that "at least four of the dead were members of Hamas and it is not the first time the militants have used children as shields". (A claim that CBS could have debunked by simply checking with journalists on the scene as the clearly civilian fatalities - overwhelmingly children - were brought into Kamal Edwan Hospital in Beit Lahia).
Critically wounded double leg amputation
The issue that seems to have set off alarm bells is Abbas' widely-reported reference to Israel as "the Zionist enemy" in a campaign speech at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on 4 January 2005. This is language uncomfortably reminiscent of the "Zionist entity" rhetoric that regimes hostile to the very existence of the Jewish state use as an alternative to uttering the name "Israel", and reflects a level of anger and hostility toward the Israelis that is uncharacteristic of Mahmoud Abbas.
Apparently, the context in which Abbas uttered those words didn't merit the same banner headlines as the words themselves. Despite what the headlines in the U.S. media suggest, Abu Mazen didn't just pluck some isolated reference to "the Zionist enemy" out of the air in order to annoy the Israelis. This is what he actually said to the crowds in Khan Younis:
"We came to you today, while we are praying for the souls of the martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya..." (from the same CBS report previously linked)
So his words were actually an angry reaction to the fact that the IDF had just killed seven Palestinians in nearby Beit Lahia by firing two tank shells into the field where they were working, in an apparent response to an earlier attack from the same area by Hamas militants who fired four mortars at the Jewish settlement of Nissanit.
As Ali Abunimah noted, National Public Radio managed to report Abbas' reference to "the Zionist enemy" without any reference whatsoever to that fact that he was responding to these killings. While Abbas' words were extreme and troubling to NPR, the deaths that provoked them were utterly ignorable. It is as if al-Qaeda were to blow up seven American children, prompting an angry vow from President Bush to hunt down the bastards that did it, and the U.S. news media responds by ignoring the dead children altogether while clucking and swooning over the Presidential use of the word "bastards".
CBS at least referred to the fact that the killings had taken place but, in the usual "he-said-she-said" regurgitation of competing claims that passes for U.S. news reporting, managed to insinuate that the victims probably deserved it anyway, by disseminating the IDF's palpably false claim that "at least four of the dead were members of Hamas and it is not the first time the militants have used children as shields". (A claim that CBS could have debunked by simply checking with journalists on the scene as the clearly civilian fatalities - overwhelmingly children - were brought into Kamal Edwan Hospital in Beit Lahia).
Critically wounded double leg amputation
|
|
Mahmoud Abbas of course doesn't get his news courtesy of CBS. So when he made his angry reference to the "Zionist enemy", he knew the sad truth that the dead "members of Hamas" were actually a family of farm labourers at work in their own fields:
12-year-old Mahmoud Ghaben; his 13-year-old brother, Bassam Ghaben; his 16-year-old brother, Hani Ghaben; his 10-year-old cousin, Rajeh Ghaben; his 12-year-old cousin, Jaber Ghaben; his 22-year-old cousin, Mohammed Ghaben; and a family friend, 20 year-old Jibril al-Kaseeh. Eleven other labourers harvesting potatoes and strawberries on the Ghabens' farmland were wounded, four of them critically. Two of the critically wounded suffered double leg amputations, and one a single amputation. Neither CBS, NPR, nor any other U.S. news source that I am aware of mentioned what really should have been the most newsworthy aspect of the Ghaben family killings, which is that they were killed by the illegal use of two Flechette tank shells, making their deaths a grave breach of international humanitarian law. Apparently, it was more important for U.S. news to swoon over the fact that Abu Mazen used the words "Zionist enemy" than it was to report that the killings he was reacting to were, technically, a War Crime. |
You have to go foreign reporting, specifically to the British Guardian newspaper, to find even a passing reference to the munitions used in the Beit Lahia killings:
Mahmoud Abbas, who is expected to win Sunday's election for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, condemned "the Zionist enemy" yesterday after seven children on their way to pick strawberries were mistaken for Palestinian militants and killed by Israeli tank shells.
Mahmoud Abbas, who is expected to win Sunday's election for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, condemned "the Zionist enemy" yesterday after seven children on their way to pick strawberries were mistaken for Palestinian militants and killed by Israeli tank shells.
|
The tanks used anti-personnel shells, which throw out thousands of metal darts in a deadly cloud.
Children aged 10, 12, 13 and 14 and three 17-year-olds were killed. A further 11 people were injured, four critically. The dart-releasing anti-personnel shells that the IDF uses in the Gaza Strip are U.S.-made M494 105mm APERS-T rounds that rupture upon impact releasing approximately 5,000 small darts ("flechettes", pictured left), that scythe indiscriminately through anything in their path for a distance of up to 300 metres from the point of impact (further if the shell is detonated mid-air). Flechettes are not automatically illegal: they have a legitimate use as an anti-personnel weapon against massed ranks of enemy soldiers. A weapon that wipes out indiscriminately members of a crowd of enemy combatants might be unpleasant, but isn't illegal. If that same weapon is used in a crowd control or internal security situation however, its use becomes, as Jane's Defence Weekly delicately puts it, "problematic". Yet this is exactly how it is used in the Gaza Strip: |
Who would have believed that the Israel Defense Forces would fire flechette shells at a soccer field where children were playing, wounding nine people, including two children, without anyone protesting? In fact, the story was barely reported. Only those who saw the hundreds of small black metal spurs scattered over a wide area from the shell - as was the case in an incident half-a-year ago in which four members of the Abu al-Hajin family were killed in the Gaza Strip - or saw the results of the post mortem of three Palestinian youths whose bodies were split apart by such shells a few months ago, can understand what a truly horrific weapon this is. The use of the type of weapons to which the flechette belongs has been banned by international law. In Israel, this weapon, which is no different from the appalling devices used by terrorists who pack nails into their explosives, is legal.
-- The IDF's 'Permissiveness' In The Territories, Ha'aretz, 9 Feb 2003
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel is bound by international law to make every effort to distinguish between those Palestinians who are combatants and those who are not involved in hostilities: the use of an indiscriminate, 'kill-'em-all-let-God-decide' weapon like the Flechette does not meet that criterion. In the Gaza Strip in particular, where militants and non-combatants are not only indistinguishable but also packed together in the most crowded piece of real estate on the face of the earth, the use of flechette shells passes from the "problematic" to the illegal.
Although it does not discuss it publicly, the IDF has nevertheless certainly used Flechettes on several occasions during the current intifada, in situations where the deaths of large numbers of innocent civilians were not only foreseeable, but absolutely inevitable.
For example, on 20 October 2003, an Israeli assassination squad killed Hamas activists Khalid al-Masri and Iyad al-Hilo as they drove through the Nusseirat refugee camp near Gaza City. They were killed by a missile that struck their car, and dozens of bystanders were horrifically wounded - at least 10 of them fatally - by a second missile that struck while EMS personnel were treating the victims of the first. IDF spokesmen denied that the appalling civilian casualties were anything to do with their operation. They insisted they had used Hellfire missiles in the attack, which would have been lethal only to those in the immediate vicinity of the car, and made available to international journalists a video of the killing showing that no bystanders were in the immediate vicinity at the time (ergo it could not have been the Israeli missiles that killed the bystanders). Fortunately, one Israeli Knesset Member, Yossi Sarid, who knew from a classified security briefing that the IDF was lying about the munitions it had used at Nusseirat, forced it to come clean by threatening to go public with his information:
The Israeli military has admitted that it lied about a rocket attack on a Gaza refugee camp, which according to the army led to no casualties, but which the Palestinians have claimed killed 14 civilians.... [T]he army now admits that it lied in briefings to the Israeli and foreign press, because the second rocket was not a Hellfire missile. The military refuses to identify the weapon used, on the grounds of "operational security". But the speculation is that it was an American-made Flechette, which is illegal under international law because it fires thousands of tiny darts over hundreds of meters, causing horrific injuries. Israel has used similar weapons in Gaza in the past... Evidence from the attack scene indicated that the second missile exploded in the air, not on impact, suggesting an intention to cause casualties in a wide area instead of just destroying the vehicle.
-- The IDF's 'Permissiveness' In The Territories, Ha'aretz, 9 Feb 2003
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel is bound by international law to make every effort to distinguish between those Palestinians who are combatants and those who are not involved in hostilities: the use of an indiscriminate, 'kill-'em-all-let-God-decide' weapon like the Flechette does not meet that criterion. In the Gaza Strip in particular, where militants and non-combatants are not only indistinguishable but also packed together in the most crowded piece of real estate on the face of the earth, the use of flechette shells passes from the "problematic" to the illegal.
Although it does not discuss it publicly, the IDF has nevertheless certainly used Flechettes on several occasions during the current intifada, in situations where the deaths of large numbers of innocent civilians were not only foreseeable, but absolutely inevitable.
For example, on 20 October 2003, an Israeli assassination squad killed Hamas activists Khalid al-Masri and Iyad al-Hilo as they drove through the Nusseirat refugee camp near Gaza City. They were killed by a missile that struck their car, and dozens of bystanders were horrifically wounded - at least 10 of them fatally - by a second missile that struck while EMS personnel were treating the victims of the first. IDF spokesmen denied that the appalling civilian casualties were anything to do with their operation. They insisted they had used Hellfire missiles in the attack, which would have been lethal only to those in the immediate vicinity of the car, and made available to international journalists a video of the killing showing that no bystanders were in the immediate vicinity at the time (ergo it could not have been the Israeli missiles that killed the bystanders). Fortunately, one Israeli Knesset Member, Yossi Sarid, who knew from a classified security briefing that the IDF was lying about the munitions it had used at Nusseirat, forced it to come clean by threatening to go public with his information:
The Israeli military has admitted that it lied about a rocket attack on a Gaza refugee camp, which according to the army led to no casualties, but which the Palestinians have claimed killed 14 civilians.... [T]he army now admits that it lied in briefings to the Israeli and foreign press, because the second rocket was not a Hellfire missile. The military refuses to identify the weapon used, on the grounds of "operational security". But the speculation is that it was an American-made Flechette, which is illegal under international law because it fires thousands of tiny darts over hundreds of meters, causing horrific injuries. Israel has used similar weapons in Gaza in the past... Evidence from the attack scene indicated that the second missile exploded in the air, not on impact, suggesting an intention to cause casualties in a wide area instead of just destroying the vehicle.
|
-- Israel Admits It Lied Over Missile Raid on Camp; The Guardian, 21 Nov 2003.
And on 6 March 2003, an Israeli tank fired a Flechette shell into a crowd of Palestinians watching firefighters at work on a blazing furniture store, following an IDF incursion into Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip. Nine civilians were killed in the attack, including five schoolchildren (four of whom were decapitated). Describing the incident for the U.K. Independent newspaper: ... [m]ost witnesses told the same story: that the first burst of shrapnel that cut down the fireman, Mr Abu Jalili, came from an Israeli tank. They said it fired a shell packed with flechettes, arrow-shaped pieces of metal designed to inflict mass casualties, straight at the fireman, and that the flechettes and shrapnel ripped through a crowd watching from an alley opposite. |
The IDF denied that it had fired into the crowd, and suggested that Palestinian casualties were caused instead by a booby trap bomb they had themselves set in the furniture store. Unfortunately for the IDF, the explosion was captured on TV news footage:
[F]rom the television footage it was clear that the shrapnel which killed the fireman did not come from the furniture store, but from an entirely different direction. Nor was there evidence of a large blast at the furniture store: the large iron doors were still intact and hanging from the hinges. What the television footage appeared to show was that the tank had fired in the direction of the fireman and the civilians near him. Slowed down, you could see how the shrapnel flew in one direction, over, around, through the fireman, bursting as it hit the road.
Then the machine-gun fire began. All the fire came from the same end of the street as the first burst of shrapnel, and Palestinians fled from it – which meant it was almost certainly Israeli fire.
Additionally, the Israeli civil rights group B'Tselem knows of at least nine, and possibly as many as fifteen, other Palestinians killed by Flechettes since September 2000; and we can now add to that total the seven killed two days ago in Beit Lahia.
The interesting thing about these incidents involving Flechette shells is that they have all occurred in the Gaza Strip. This is because the IDF's Central Command has forbidden the use of Flechettes in the West Bank, precisely because of the the danger they pose to innocent civilians not involved in hostilities. IDF Southern Command (which has responsibility for Gaza), however, continues to use them and, as Gideon Levy reported, the rationale behind permitting in Gaza what is forbidden in the West Bank is amazing:
Israel says it uses the flechette only in the Gaza Strip, explaining... that in Gaza, there is a clear division between Jewish settlements and Palestinian locales. So, Israel knows that by using Flechettes it will indiscriminately kill innocent civilians, and refrains from using them in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers live in proximity to Palestinian civilians and might be among the innocent civilians killed or wounded. It continues to use them in the Gaza Strip however, because in Gaza there is a separation between Palestinians and settlers, so the innocent civilians killed will only be Palestinian (and can presumably be explained away with a deceitful "it is not the first time the militants have used children as shields"). Isn't that unbelievably callous? And just a little bit newsworthy?
Apparently not. Five dead Palestinian children isn't news for NPR. Five dead Palestinian children killed by illegal weapons isn't news for NPR, CBS or anyone else. All that matters is that Abu Mazen said "Zionist enemy".
[F]rom the television footage it was clear that the shrapnel which killed the fireman did not come from the furniture store, but from an entirely different direction. Nor was there evidence of a large blast at the furniture store: the large iron doors were still intact and hanging from the hinges. What the television footage appeared to show was that the tank had fired in the direction of the fireman and the civilians near him. Slowed down, you could see how the shrapnel flew in one direction, over, around, through the fireman, bursting as it hit the road.
Then the machine-gun fire began. All the fire came from the same end of the street as the first burst of shrapnel, and Palestinians fled from it – which meant it was almost certainly Israeli fire.
Additionally, the Israeli civil rights group B'Tselem knows of at least nine, and possibly as many as fifteen, other Palestinians killed by Flechettes since September 2000; and we can now add to that total the seven killed two days ago in Beit Lahia.
The interesting thing about these incidents involving Flechette shells is that they have all occurred in the Gaza Strip. This is because the IDF's Central Command has forbidden the use of Flechettes in the West Bank, precisely because of the the danger they pose to innocent civilians not involved in hostilities. IDF Southern Command (which has responsibility for Gaza), however, continues to use them and, as Gideon Levy reported, the rationale behind permitting in Gaza what is forbidden in the West Bank is amazing:
Israel says it uses the flechette only in the Gaza Strip, explaining... that in Gaza, there is a clear division between Jewish settlements and Palestinian locales. So, Israel knows that by using Flechettes it will indiscriminately kill innocent civilians, and refrains from using them in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers live in proximity to Palestinian civilians and might be among the innocent civilians killed or wounded. It continues to use them in the Gaza Strip however, because in Gaza there is a separation between Palestinians and settlers, so the innocent civilians killed will only be Palestinian (and can presumably be explained away with a deceitful "it is not the first time the militants have used children as shields"). Isn't that unbelievably callous? And just a little bit newsworthy?
Apparently not. Five dead Palestinian children isn't news for NPR. Five dead Palestinian children killed by illegal weapons isn't news for NPR, CBS or anyone else. All that matters is that Abu Mazen said "Zionist enemy".
