There was a noticeable increase in British coverage of Israel’s occupation in January, with The Guardian and the BBC running stories on the string of recent killings by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Israel’s refusal to co-operate with the UN’s Human Rights Council. Whilst greater coverage of Israel’s killings in the occupied Palestinian territories is welcome, it must be noted that these events are not new in the slightest.
These killings include a 21-year old student from Hebron was shot and killed on her way to college. The fifth unarmed Palestinian killed in 13 days, Lubna Muneer Hanash and her friends were said to be walking through al-Aroub refugee camp before armed men drew up in a civilian car and got out, firing four bullets, one of them the fatal shot that killed her. Whilst the army and police spokesmen have claimed they were ‘returning fire’ from petrol bombs and that evidence could be found at the scene, eyewitness have reported Lubna Hanash was unarmed and killed in cold blood. Her killing, along with several others, prompted the IDF’s military commander to warn soldiers about the use of live fire.
In December, the IDF was responsible for killing Muhammad Ziad Awad Salaymah, who was gunned down in Hebron on his 17th birthday after supposedly brandishing a toy gun. Once again, the killing of a minor was justified as self-defence. Similar to the case of Lubna Hanash, Salaymah’s family have denied he was carrying a toy gun, and that Israelis held the body from the Palestinian Red Crescent for two hours, suggesting they had time enough to plant one. The Guardian also claims footage shows Salaymah being shot as he left the scene.
There is a long record of this kind of behaviour by the occupying Israeli forces. South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, whilst studying apartheid in Israel, documented that during the final months of 2004 numerous killings were made by the IDF directed against students and children. Taking this small window of violence, we can see the character of the killings emerging.
On 7 September 2004, a ten-year old girl sitting at her desk in an UN Relief and Works Agency school in Khan Yunis camp was struck in the head by an Israeli bullet and died. This aggression was repeated a month later, when on October 3rd an Israeli tank drove through a school with children still in it, allegedly using it as a firing position. Twelve days later on the 15th of October, yet another child was killed whilst at their desk in a UN school. Two months after these incidents, a whole school was subjected to gunfire from Israeli forces which wounded no less than seven children, the eldest of them just nine years old.
The targeting of children whilst they sit in their classrooms, as depicted by the above examples, is a particularly serious offence, and the wider picture of Palestinian minors killed during the occupation is deeply distressing.
The Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) records at least 703 children killed by the IDF since January 2005 alone, whilst life is particularly bleak for Palestinian children in Gaza, with studies by Queen’s University Belfast estimating nearly all children in the besieged strip of land suffer from psychological trauma as a result of the Israeli occupation.
By far the deadliest period for Palestinian minors was during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. This assault on the Gaza strip in late 2008 and early 2009 resulted in the deaths of over 300 Palestinian children, and was recorded in Amnesty International’s report as ’22 Days of Death and Destruction’. The report details that hundreds of these children were killed with highly-accurate weapons, suggesting clear intent:
“Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks.”
It is imperative to see the continuing killing of the young in light of the Israeli occupation’s long record of brutality towards Palestinian youth. The same Amnesty report highlights how targeted schools were smouldered with burning white phosphorous, which constitutes a war crime, something which Israeli authorities continue to deny. Again in the recent attack on Gaza in November 2012, a further 34 children were killed by Israeli weapons.
When the previous two months ‘mistakes’ like the deaths of Lubna Hanash and Ziad Salaymah are woven into the long and repetitive narrative of state killings with highly precise and accurate weaponry, it is evident Israel is merely continuing its policy of disregard towards Palestinian life, a policy particularly heinous as it all too frequently includes the young, defenceless and innocent.
these stories never ever get any legs in the USA….
wonder why….
mondoweiss and a few others are the only ones to highlight them….
in israel them kill the natives for nothing other than sport….
in the USA we at least set them up to be jailed
@Mr. Elliot
“On 7 September 2004, a ten-year old girl sitting at her desk in an UN Relief and Works agency school in Khan Yunis camp was struck in the head by an Israeli bullet and died”
Let’s try too put this tragedy in it’s proper context.
Only minutes before the shooting, Hamas had fired five Qassam rockets, with two landing near the “Dugit” settlement and another in an open field near Sderot in Israel, lightly injuring a man. Israeli military positions in Gush Katif retaliated with sporadic gunfire targeted at the western part of the Khan Younis refugee camp.
A mortar shell had also been fired at the “Neveh Dekalim” settlement causeing damage to a local bus stop. (AP, BBC, CNN, Ha’aretz, Ma’ariv)
BBC reporter Alan Johnston, visited the school room where the girl was shot and reported:
” Groups like the Hamas organisation often fire crudely made missiles into the settlements or nearby towns in Israel where they can fall on family homes, or on schools or nurseries.”
“They attack from the edges of the refugee camps and the Israeli army tries to hit them there”.
link to news.bbc.co.uk
So they bullet that struck and killed the school girl was likely a stray shot. Nor has it been conclusively proven that it was an Israeli bullet and not one fired by the miliants.
Did the child’s classroom window face the Israeli positions? No one has even said so.
Before whining, criminal propaganda agents are reminded to count all the tens of thousands of civilians slaughtered by the Zionists with the excuse of “collateral damage”. This post does not reflect well on the perception of your mental powers.
Testimony from ex-IDF soldiers about “stray shots”:
link to monabaker.com
Even assuming that the IDF soldiers were “responding to mortar fire” its clear that they simply fired indiscriminately and not at specific targets such as a mortar location.
And here’s a report from 2003 where an IDF commander admits that most of the then recent child deaths were the result of actions by his own soldiers:
And from the same article, he’s an example of the IDF falsifying reports. In this case they were discovered because the IDF officer responding to Btselem’s demand for an investigation accidently enclosed the internal report on the incident which clearly indicated that they were lying in their official response to BTselem.
And from the penultimate paragraph, quoting the IDF commander again:
This is the sad and sick morality of Zionism. The idea, no doubt inculcated in many Israelis, that killing innocent children is somehow justified by a phantom threat of an impending second Holocaust if these children are instead treated as fellow human beings.
link to guardian.co.uk
And lest you think that this way new behavior on the part of Israel in the early 21st century, here’s a piece from Donald Neff, who was Time Magazine’s reporter in Jerusalem in the late 1970′s with an incident from 1978, where IDF soldiers went on a rampage against Palestinian schoolchildren, throwing tear gas grenades into classrooms filled with children, forcing some of those children on the second floor to jump out windows and break their bones in order to escape the attack. Some children had also been beaten and had their heads shaved by the IDF soldiers.
Neff broke the story, which was roundly denied in Israel. Of course, as a result he was labeled a lying anti-semite, until several months later the Israeli Defense Minister ordered an investigation which admitted that Neff’s account was true.
link to ameu.org
@tree
You forgot to mention that,
“As a consequence of an incident that shook all of Israel in late March, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman …removed Brigadier General David Hagoel as chief of the 2,200-man Israeli occupation force on the Jordan River’s West Bank. … the commander and deputy commander of the Bethlehem military district, a lieutenant colonel and a major, were ordered to be court-martialed for “an infringement of existing orders.”
Yes. The IDF gassed the high school, and consequently, heads rolled.
“In December, the IDF was responsible for killing Muhammad Ziad Awad Salaymah, who was gunned down in Hebron on his 17th birthday after supposedly brandishing a toy gun.”
Mr. Elliot. I’m sure you saw the video of the shooting where Muhammad Ziad Awad Salaymah assaulted an Israeli Border Guardsman without apparent provocation.
The ‘toy gun’ that the Border Guard displayed immediately after the incident was an exact replica of a Luger pistol.
Nope, he didn’t assault anyone.
He was shot IN THE BACK by Israeli fascists. Just another day in the occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.
“The ‘toy gun’ that the Border Guard displayed immediately after the incident was an exact replica of a Luger pistol.”
Source? Photo?
Here’s a photo of the gun offered to the press by the Israeli spokesman:
link to facebook.com
Looks more like a Walther than a Luger, but really not much like a Walther either. It seems very small too–maybe the hand holding it is abnormally big? Could be a lighter too.
@James Elliot
“This assault on the Gaza strip in late 2008 and early 2009 resulted in the deaths of over 300 Palestinian children, and was recorded in Amnesty International’s report as ’22 Days of Death and Destruction’.”
The data I’ve seen shows a higher male to female ratio — greater than 4.0 —among teens killed in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
In age 17-18, an age group often involved in hostilities, there is an abrupt increase in M/F ratio to 6.5. These high m/f ratios suggest that many could have been involved in combatant situations, either as shields, fighters, circumstantial helpers, sporadic helpers, or bystanders who were drawn into the goings on.
See, link to spme.net