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Revision as of 02:13, 14 July 2005

Template:Totallydisputed This article concerns an abbreviated list of actions by the Israeli Defense Forces against Palestinians. Some people describe these actions as terrorism.

Note: This compilation includes only casualties of the violence. Attacks which did not result in death or injury are not included.

Past Actions against Palestinians(1948-1999)

The first actions took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. While some of the earlier actions were committed by Arabs, the first documented action against Israeli was at al-Tira by the group Irgun. Other groups, such as the Haganah and Lehi, participated in other attacks during the war. A full list of actions by both sides can be seen at List of massacres committed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Israel was also accused of being a catalist for the Palestinian exodus, but some of the people who left the Palestinian lands left on their own. The number of exiles range from 520,000 (Israeli estimate) to 900,000 (Palestinian estimate).

• An incomplete list of military operations after 1948. Some of the following incidents were characterized by Israel as collateral damage resulting from counter-insurgency operations. All resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians.

• • Qibya massacre, carried out among others by Unit 101 under the command of Ariel Sharon.
  • Operation Suzannah (also known as the Lavon Affair), conducted in 1954.
  • Kafr Qasim massacre, carried out by the Israeli border police in 1956.
  • In a 1982 assassination attempt targeting Yasser Arafat, 200 people died when a Beirut apartment block was destroyed by an Israeli bomb.
  • The Sabra and Shatila massacre was perpetrated during September 1982 in Beirut, Lebanon by the Phalangist Lebanese Christian militia; The death toll is disputed, and commonly cited estimates range from 400 to 3000. The Israelis surrounded the camps and sent the Phalangists into the camps to clear out PLO fighters, and provided the Phalangists with support including flares, food, and ammunition. An Israeli investigation found a number of officials (including the Defense Minister of that time, Ariel Sharon) "indirectly responsible" for not preventing the killings, while emphasizing that the "direct responsibility" lay with the Phalangist militia that had done the killing.

The Kahan Commission wrote: "responsibility is to be imputed to the minister of defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps." However, some consider the sole responsibility for the massacre to lie with the Phalangists, rather than Israel.

• • In 1985, 73 people were killed in another assassination attempt aimed at Arafat in Tunis.

An assessment of Terrorism since September 2000

More than 2,870 Palestinian civilians have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force since (IDF) since September 27, 2000. Targets of attack include predominantly Palestinian settlements and refugee camps within the West Bank and Gaza strip, neighborhoods, school zones, and generalized locations of suspected Palestinian militants.

Amnesty International concluded in its October 2000 report that: “The Israeli security services were almost invariably well-defended, located at a distance from demonstrators in good cover, in blockhouses, behind wire or well-protected by riot shields.” The pretext for the use of lethal force, Amnesty found, was simply a fabrication. “Certainly, stones—or even petrol bombs—cannot be said to have endangered the lives of Israeli security services in any of the instances examined by Amnesty International.”

Admissions from IDF soldiers

In the course of a report in 2000 by Amnesty International, IDF soldiers were able to give private accounts of past and ongoing policies against Palestinians, under condition of anonymity and freedom from prosecution. One Israeli sniper privately revealed that soldiers are permitted to shoot at Palestinians who pose a potential threat, as long as they appear to be over the age of 12. “Twelve and up is allowed,” he confessed. A senior IDF officer also admitted: “Nobody can convince me we didn’t needlessly kill dozens of children."

International Relations

The use of military force by the IDF against Palestinians within disputed territories was documented by the authoritative report of Giorgio Giacomelli, an independent rapporteur mandated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to monitor the Occupied Territories. The UN investigator found that “the scale of violation is unprecedented. It is worthy of note that the number of deaths caused by Israeli forces so far approximate the number killed in the first four months of the intifada, in 1987-88.” Israeli forces “appear to have indiscriminately used excessive force in cases where there was no imminent threat to their lives,” according to Giacomelli, who met Palestinian Authority representatives, Palestinian and Israeli non-governmental organizations, international organizations, human rights monitors, medical professionals, and some wounded. “Whether in cases of Israel Defense Forces or Israeli police actions, deadly force is used without warning, and without employing deterrence or gradual measures consistent with the minimum standards and methods of crowd control or management of civil unrest.” The report also found that about 40 percent of Palestinians wounded by Israeli occupation forces were under age 18, and that at least half of the injuries resulted from the use of live ammunition.

An extensive investigation by The Village Voice based on “more than 100 interviews patients, doctors, and medical personnel in 14 hospitals and clinics in Jordan and the West Bank” similarly found that: “With no shooting from the Palestinian side, and often little or no use of tear gas to disperse the protests, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly fired live ammunition into unarmed crowds.” Consequently, “Thousands of Palestinian young men and boys may become permanently crippled from bullet wounds suffered during the last five months of stone-throwing protests against Israeli rule.” Many of the thousands of injuries “came when unarmed people were shot.”

Political Assassinations

• Several incidents during the 2nd Intifada in which Israel has assassinated individuals involved in violence against Israeli civilians, in certain cases also killing civilians around them in the process. The targeted individuals were members of militant organizations, including Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad; also some were simultaneously employed by the Palestinian Authority security forces.
• Operation Days of Penitence, an Israeli military operation in the northern Gaza Strip conducted between September 30, 2004 and October 15, 2004

Killings of Volunteers and External Activists

The IDF have been accused of killing three foreign civilians who were either volunteers of the International Solidarity Movement or film makers. The first shooting was of American ISM volunteer Rachel Corrie. Rachel was killed by bulldozer being used by the IDF to either clear debries or to take down a house to prevent future attacks. While the ISM claims the IDF ran Rachel over twice, the IDF claims it was an accident. IDF report, ISM and witness account. The second was Tom Hurndall, another ISM volunteer, but he was from the United Kingdom. While running for cover during an exchange of gunfire between the IDF and Palestinians, Hurndall ran into a street in Rafah and tried to escort three children, who were Palestinian, to safety. However, Hurndall was shot in the head before he was able to reach the children. . Unlike in the Corrie incident, the Israeli Government charged the IDF soldier who shot Hurndall and the soldier was convicted on the charges of obstruction of justice, giving false testimony and inducing comrades in his unit to bear false witness. The final victim, also a British national, was filmaker James Miller, which also occured in 2003. James was in the town of Rafah (where both Rachel and Tom were killed) filiming a documenty, which was called Death in Gaza. According to James's family, he announced to the troops that he wa British and carried the white flag of truce. When James came close to an IDF armored personel carrier, he was shot in the neck. The IDF closed the case early in 2005 and had announced that the soldier who shot James will not be indicted for manslaughter. However, the British Government will continue to press the Israeli Government on James's killing.

The Use of Bulldozers as Weapons

Bulldozing of houses and destruction of infrastructure within Palestinian residential areas in the name of Israeli security add to the perceived poor conditions and lack of opportunities for the Palestinians. This is a frequently-used point of indignation used against Israel by Palestinian sympathizers.

Since 1967 Israel has used Caterpillar bulldozers to demolish nearly 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving more than 50,000 people homeless. Since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, Israel has razed the homes of 12,737 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the past two years the Israeli army deployed Caterpillar bulldozers to uproot 200,000 Palestinian olive trees.

Treatment of Palestinians

Restrictions on Palestinian movements were introduced to increase levels of security within Israel and have been of variable severity over time. The international community often views these as punishments of the masses because of the actions of a few. This perception of unjust persecution provides a continuing rationale for hostility toward Israel.

Arab publications and others have compared Zionism to German Nazism and other historical examples of oppression and ethnic cleansing. Many Arabs, and others, including noted activist and linguist Noam Chomsky, believe Israel practises a form of "apartheid" against the Palestinian people, as bad as, or worse than, that practised by South Africa, and that Zionism is a form of "colonialism" and has been carried out through extensive "ethnic cleansing". Pro-Israel advocates reply that these claims are non-factual and the comparisons are specious, or with assertions that such claims are hypocritical, since Arabs have created twenty-two Arab states, in some of which the remaining Jews are discriminated against. Palestinians hold that the existence of other Arab nations is irrelevant; they want to have the land they owned back, rather than being forced to throw themselves on others' charity in foreign countries. Probably 50%-60% of Jordanian population is ethnically Palestinian (former refugees and their descendants; estimates vary widely) but the country is ruled by the Hashemite Bedouin family. In the 1970s, the PLO attempted to launch a coup against the Jordanian monarchy, which led to death of some 20,000 Palestinians and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan.

Related articles

• Israeli-Palestinian conflict timeline
• British Mandate of Palestine
• Camp David 2000 Summit between Palestinians and Israel
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• List of conflicts in the Middle East
• International law and the Arab-Israeli conflict
• Arab League and the Arab-Israeli conflict
• Israel's unilateral disengagement plan of 2004
• Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• Violence against Israelis
• Palestinian terrorism

Pro Palestinian Views

• Palestinian Position: Information from Palestine
• Palestinian negotiation team
• "Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents" -Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 3/18/1985

From US Israel Chamber of Commerice

• 1948 Arab-Israeli War
• Israel and Lebanon
• Human rights in Israel and the territories

• Arab-Israeli conflict
• Terrorism
• History of Israel