A Palestinian human rights group on Saturday slammed as a ”joke” an internal Israeli army inquiry which absolved the military of blame in the killings of 12 Palestinian civilians in the past two weeks.
”The conclusions of the commission are a joke and show the willingness of the occupation forces to carry on with crimes against Palestinian civilians with the full blessing of the Israeli political leadership,” it said in a statement.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) called for the establishment of ”a neutral and impartial investigating committee to investigate war crimes committed by Israeli occupying forces”.
The army on Friday absolved itself of blame in the spate of killings, in an internal inquiry carried out at the demand of Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer.
”The findings reveal that the standing open fire orders, used in the three incidents, were appropriate,” the army said in a statement on the probe into separate incidents which drew sharp criticism of the army.
”The soldiers acted following suspicious behaviour, which included persons being in an unauthorised area during the late night hours, crawling toward an Israeli community or infiltrating an Israeli agricultural patch,” it said.
On September 1, four Palestinians were killed in an army ambush close to a Jewish settlement near the southern West Bank town of Hebron. Witnesses said the victims were workers walking home from their jobs in a quarry, while the army said they were preparing an attack.
The day before, two children and two teenagers were killed by mistake during a helicopter missile strike targeting a Palestinian militant in the West Bank village of Tubas, near Nablus.
A woman, her two sons and one of her nephews were killed the week before in the shelling of a house in a Gaza City neighbourhood.
The army said troops had seen suspicious figures crawling near the settlement built adjacent to the Palestinians field in the Sheikh Ajleen district of southern Gaza City, and opened fire with tanks.
The PCHR said the tank shell contained tiny razor sharp darts that explode from a projectile to rip flesh apart, while chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat slammed the army’s findings as a licence to kill. – Sapa-AFP