'Israel guilty of war crimes'
2004-05-18 09:51
Lara Sukhtian
Jerusalem - Israel is guilty of war crimes in its destruction of thousands of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the human rights group Amnesty International charged in a report released on Tuesday.
The release coincided with an Israeli operation in the Rafah refugee camp on the Israel-Egypt border, where Israel was poised to knock down more houses to widen a buffer zone in its battle against weapons-smuggling tunnels.
The report said the demolition and destruction are "grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes", calling on Israel to halt the practices immediately. Amnesty also said the house demolitions are linked to Israeli intentions to take over West Bank and Gaza land.
According to the report, Israel has destroyed more than 3 000 Palestinian homes, most of them in the impoverished and densely populated Gaza Strip, since Palestinian-Israeli fighting broke out more than three years ago.
The report also found that 10 percent of Gaza's agricultural land has been destroyed and more than 226 000 trees uprooted there in 2002 and 2003.
"In the vast majority of cases, it's wanton destruction," said Donatella Rovera, a co-author of the report. "It's unnecessary, disproportionate, unjustified, and deliberate."
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment but have stated in the past that house demolitions are necessary for security reasons. The Israeli army says that Palestinian militants often use Palestinian homes and agricultural land as cover to launch attacks. Also, they have discovered tunnel entrances under Rafah structures.
Amnesty countered that the destruction of homes, land and other property in the Palestinian territories is disproportionate to Israel's security needs.
Israel's practice of blowing up the homes of the families of suicide bombers is one form of punishment Amnesty criticised in the report. It said that since September 2000, when the current conflict erupted, there have been at least 600 such cases.
Amnesty also called on Caterpillar Inc., the American heavy equipment company that provides the Israeli army with the giant bulldozers that carry out many of the demolitions, "to guarantee that its bulldozers are not used to commit human rights violations, including the destruction of homes, land, and other properties".
The Amnesty report said most victims of demolitions are already among the poorest in Palestinian society, making it difficult for them to recover.
Rovera said Amnesty released the report to shed light on the long-term social and economic effects of the mass demolitions on the Palestinian people.
"We want people to look beyond the immediate effects of the demolitions ... to how they will continue to affect the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians for many years to come," she said.
On the Net
www.amnesty.org/
- SAPA