Amnesty catalogues Israel's human rights abuses
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
London, May 28, IRNA – Amnesty International has catalogued a host of gross human rights violations and breaches of international law in its latest annual report on 157 countries and territories worldwide.
In its the latest massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, the London-based human rights organisation also said that the Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings.”
Israel’s military offensive, it said, was on “an unprecedented scale,” killing over 1,400 Palestinians, including some 300 children, and wounding some 5,000 others.
“From Gaza to Darfur and from eastern DRC to northern Sri Lanka, the human toll of conflict has been horrendous, and the lukewarm response of the international community shocking,” said Amnesty’s Secretary General Irene Khan, in summing up last year events.
The report for 2008 said that Israel was already “stoking up a growing humanitarian catastrophe” in its siege of Gaza even before it launch its slaughter at the end of the year.
“The blockade throttled almost all economic life and led growing numbers of Palestinians to become dependent on international food aid; even terminally ill patients were prevented from leaving to obtain medical care that could not be provided by Gaza’s resource- and medicine-starved hospitals,” it said.
“Palestinians already living in poverty were made homeless as a matter of deliberate policy” and this also included the West Bank, where Israeli forces demolished many Palestinian homes, the human rights group said.
“In the Jordan Valley, they brought in bulldozers to flatten villagers’ homes and animal pens, depriving them of their livelihood, while elsewhere Palestinians were cut off from their agricultural lands by the construction of the fence/wall and were prevented from travelling to work, study or even to obtain hospital treatment by numerous Israeli army checkpoints and road-blocks.”
In Gaza during the bombardment, some 20,000 Palestinian homes were further destroyed or badly damaged as well as schools and workplaces and this was to an entire population of 1.5 million that were “virtually imprisoned” by Israel.
With regard to Israel’s war crimes, Amnesty also castigated the UN for showing “itself unwilling to establish a comprehensive international investigation of its own or to require that Israel cooperate with the inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council.”
The catalogue of Israeli killings was not only confined to Gaza but also included was listed as 425 Palestinians, included some 70 children in the first half of 2008.
Breaches of international law extended to Israel’s continuing expansion and development of illegal settlements in the West Bank, where the movement of Palestinians were also severely curtailed by some 600 checkpoints and barriers, and by the 700km illegal barrier.
“The expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on seized Palestinian land increased to a level not seen since 2001,” the report said.
It also criticised the increased violence by soldiers and illegal settlers, who committed serious abuses against Palestinians, including unlawful killings, assaults and attacks against property, saying they “enjoyed impunity in most cases.”
On the other side were the hundreds of Palestinians were arrested and frequently reportedly tortured and ill-treated, but Amnesty said that any investigations by Israeli authorities were “rare.” It calculated some 8,000 Palestinians remained in Israeli prisons, many after unfair military trials.
In Lebanon, it reported that Israel was still in breach of UN demands to provide data to assist clearance of unexploded munitions from cluster bombs during its 2006 invasion and that by the end of 2008, it was still illegally occupying the border village of Ghajar.
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