http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/200...Illegal Killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians have garnered much media attention, Israels quantitatively worse record of killing non-combatants is less well known. According to the most recent figures of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (BTselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified as combatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom 309 were combatants. This means that three times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and up to three times more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians. Israels defenders maintain that theres a difference between targeting civilians and inadvertently killing them. BTselem disputes this: [W]hen so many civilians have been killed and wounded, the lack of intent makes no difference. Israel remains responsible. Furthermore, Amnesty International reports that many Palestinians have not been accidentally killed but deliberately targeted, while the award-winning New York Times journalist Chris Hedges reports that Israeli soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Torture. From 1967, Amnesty reports, the Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects in the Occupied Territories. BTselem found that eighty-five percent of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security services were subjected to methods constituting torture, while already a decade ago Human Rights Watch estimated that the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated was in the tens of thousands - a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is under three-quarters of one million. In 1987 Israel became the only country in the world to have effectively legalized torture (Amnesty). Although the Israeli Supreme Court seemed to ban torture in a 1999 decision, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reported in 2003 that Israeli security forces continued to apply torture in a methodical and routine fashion. A 2001 BTselem study documented that Israeli security forces often applied severe torture to Palestinian minors.
House demolitions. Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories, BTselem reports, and since September 2000 has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes. Until just recently Israel routinely resorted to house demolitions as a form of collective punishment. According to Middle East Watch, apart from Israel, the only other country in the world that used such a draconian punishment was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In addition, Israel has demolished thousands of illegal homes that Palestinians built because of Israels refusal to provide building permits. The motive behind destroying these homes, according to Amnesty, has been to maximize the area available for Jewish settlers: Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than they are Palestinians. Finally, Israel has destroyed hundred of homes on security pretexts, yet a Human Rights Watch report on Gaza found that the pattern of destructionstrongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat. Amnesty likewise found that Israels extensive destruction of homes and properties throughout the West Bank and Gazais not justified by military necessity, and that Some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes.
Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein
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