Israeli helicopters killed a Hamas activist and wounded about a dozen bystanders in a missile attack on Gaza City on Monday.
The dead militant was named as Khader al-Huseri, a member of Hamas’s military wing. Reports said other activists in the car escaped.
In the fortnight since a Hamas suicide bomber murdered 21 people in the worst bus attack of the past three years of intifada, Israel has killed 11 activists from the organisation and three civilians in ”targeted assassinations”.
In Jerusalem, a judicial inquiry into the deaths of 13 unarmed Israeli Arabs shot dead by police three years ago in riots in support of Palestinians in the occupied territories has accused Israeli governments of ”prejudice and neglect” in dealing with the one-million-strong Arab minority, which accounts for one in five of the Israeli population.
The report also blamed the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, for ignoring grievances that fuelled the protests. But families of the dead accused the inquiry of letting Barak off the hook by failing to hold him directly responsible for the conduct of the police who opened fire on the protesters, and of ”blaming the victim” by accusing three Arab Israeli leaders of inciting the protests.
The inquiry said the police regarded Israeli Arabs as ”the enemy” and were incapable of handling a riot, and should not have used live ammunition to disperse unarmed crowds.
It recommended that the police minister and the police chief in charge at the time be barred from holding the same posts again.
But families of the victims and their lawyers accused the commission of a whitewash because it fails to identify the police officers who opened fire.
”We are planning to continue the struggle to find those responsible for the killing and bring them to justice,” said one of the lawyers, Marwan Dalad. — Guardian Unlimited Â