Amnesty report slams Israel

Fewer Israelis died by the hands of Palestinian terrorists in 2004 than the year before, while the number of Palestinians killed in army operations increased, the human rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

The group's annual report on world violations of human rights said that about 109 Israelis, including 59 civilian adults and eight children, died in Palestinian suicide bombings or other attacks in 2004 in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, marking a decrease from about 200 killed in 2003.

About 700 Palestinians, including about 150 children, were killed during army operations in the West Bank and Gaza in 2004, up from about 600 Palestinians who died by IDF fire in 2003, Amnesty said. The report did not specify how many of the Palestinians killed were gunmen and how many were civilians.

About 120 were killed by Israeli missile strikes, the report said. Amnesty has often criticized Israel of targeting terrorists in crowded neighborhoods and causing civilian casualties during more than four years of violence.

The number of Palestinian attacks decreased in 2004. Israel carried out several large army operations in the West Bank and Gaza and killed many senior terrorist leaders in missile strikes, including Hamas’s Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March 2004 and Abdel al-Aziz al-Rantisi a month later.

Violence has slowed down in recent months after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared a cease-fire in February to halt a four-year-old Palestinian uprising.

Palestinian terrorist groups agreed in March to abide by a de facto truce as long as Israel stops its operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Many of the Palestinian shooting and bombing attacks occurred in settlements and army bases in Gaza. Israel plans to remove all 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip this summer, where they live among 1.3 million Palestinians.

Zehava Galon of the left-wing Meretz party called for an Knesset committee to discuss the findings of the report, saying the government was using its Gaza plan as an excuse to continue violence and house demolitions.

Israel is concerned that Gaza terrorists, who hope to claim the withdrawal as a victory, will try to seize control of the area after the pullout. In fall 2004, it launched a series of deadly army operations, including its biggest in the territory to date, to stop gunmen from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns and Jewish settlements.

House demolitions in the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli army increased in 2004, the report said. Israel also destroyed some 300 homes and damaged about 270 more in the Rafah refugee camp in south Gaza last May, rendering almost 4,000 Palestinians homeless, Amnesty said.

The IDF has in the past destroyed Palestinian houses, many of which are abandoned, to clear paths for tanks during operations to root out gunmen. Many houses are wrecked during gun battles, and terrorists in Gaza often have used homes as gun nests or to hide tunnels used for smuggling weapons from bordering Egypt.

The army has recently stopped its policy of demolishing homes of the families of suicide bombers, which Palestinians and international rights groups had branded as collective punishment.

AMNESTY'S 2004 ANNUAL REPORT: ALL POLITICS, NO CREDIBILITY
www.ngo-monitor.org
Summary analysis: May 25, 2005
Amnesty International's Annual Report for 2004
www.amnesty.org , released on May 25 2005, provide further illustrations of the three fundamental failures in this NGO's activities:

1) The absence of credibility in its research and allegations regarding Israel and the Palestinian Authority;

2) The use of terms such as "war crimes" and "violation of international law" in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner;

3) The pervasive impact of ideological and political agendas that favor closed anti-democratic regimes over democracies, and replace universal human rights norms.

These failures have been documented by NGO Monitor in reports on previous Amnesty International publications and campaigns www.ngo-monitor.org/archives/infofile.htm#amnesty, and are continued in the current report. At the same time, the current report devotes somewhat greater attention to the systematic Palestinian violations of human rights, and is a step towards correcting the unbalanced and excessive emphasis on allegations against Israel

Examination of the sections on Israel and the Palestinian Authority reiterate the unverified and unverifiable claims of "Palestinian eye-witnesses", without an independent research capability or effort. The section on Israel is largely a compilation of Amnesty's previous campaigns, "alerts", and other activities, which as shown in www.ngo-monitor.org, lack credibility. For example, this report simply repeats Palestinian claims that during 2004, Israeli forces were responsible for the deaths of 700 civilians. This highly contentious allegation requires careful documentation to distinguish between combatants and others, and this is far beyond the minimal resources that Amnesty devotes to fact-checking and research in the Israeli-Arab conflict zone.

The claims regarding the number of Palestinian children killed in the conflict highlights the internal contradictions within Amnesty's report. Beyond the lack of verification of various claims, the section on the Palestinian Authority acknowledges that Palestinian "armed groups" use children to attack Israel. However, the chapter on Israel in which this claim is presented ignores evidence that many of the www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/2233897244 Palestinian children were sent to carry explosives for use in terror attacks. As a result of this contradiction, the allegations of Israeli violations of human rights on this issue are invalid.

The absence of credibility in this report is further illustrated by Amnesty's repetition of the Palestinian version of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin as www.amnesty.org.uk/deliver/document/15263.html "paralysed and wheelchair-bound". The fact that before he was killed by Israel, he was the leader of Hamas, and was directly responsible for planning the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians, is sanitized from Amnesty's reports. Similarly, Amnesty fails to provide systematic evidence for the familiar claims of Palestinian victimization, such as the absence of "education and medical facilities and other crucial services", as well as "high unemployment and poverty among the Palestinian population." Terror, rampant corruption as documented by the World Bank, as well as other casual factors are ignored in this report.

In the place of credible and verifiable reporting on real human rights issues, Amnesty's annual report highlights the abuse of terms such as "war crimes", "violations of international law", "excessive use of force", and "crimes against humanity". In the absence of clear and consistent criteria by which to measure and apply such terminology, it loses all normative and legal significance. As result, there is no basis for Amnesty's charge that the IDF killed many Palestinians "in deliberate as well as reckless shooting, shelling and bombardment of densely populated residential areas or as a result of excessive use of force."

At the same time, the expanded analysis of the human rights abuses by the Palestinian Authority and "armed groups" is a welcome step towards correcting this unbalanced agenda. This section is significantly more substantive than in previous years, although it still reflects the relative lack of resources devoted to analyzing and reporting on Palestinian abuses, in comparison to Israel.

The disproportionate and excessive condemnations of Israel, particularly given the absence of credible research, demonstrates that Amnesty's dominant political and ideological framework has not been reversed. The section of the 2004 annual report on Israel continues to focus on highly complex questions such as borders, "occupation", etc. without background or context, including ongoing warfare and terrorism. Amnesty critique of "stringent restrictions on the movements of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories" is a clear reflection of this dominant political agenda, which merely annexes human rights norms.

The report also erases the distinction between open democratic societies under attack, and "fear regimes" (including terrorist groups) that use violence to pursue their goals. Such distortions demonstrate the exploitation of human rights rhetoric and claims in the service of narrow political objectives.

AI wrote that Palestinian "armed groups" killed 67 Israelis including eight children, and 42 soldiers. Most of the civilians were killed in suicide bombings.

Regarding the Palestinian Authority, AI wrote that the internal security situation had significantly deteriorated because of power struggles and disagreements within the PA and between the PA and other factions.

These disagreements resulted in frequent armed clashes, attacks on individuals and property and abductions. Palestinian armed groups killed 18 "collaborators," and continued to carry out attacks against Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza and inside Israel.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.