Eye On Israel/Palestine

Call to exhume Gaza girl's body

The Israeli military is seeking to exhume the body a 13-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in October.

Iman al-Hams was shot by soldiers after straying into a restricted area near Gaza's border with Egypt.

An Israeli commander is accused of repeatedly firing into her lifeless body despite pleas from his colleagues.

Army lawyers want to examine Iman's body to gather evidence in the case against the officer.

Soldiers from the Givati Brigade fired at Iman as she approached an observation post in the Tel Sultan area of Rafah.


'Verifying the kill'

They believed she was planting a bomb but her family maintained she was on her way to school.

The soldiers said the officer walked up to the girl after she was hit and riddled her body with a burst of automatic fire, in an outlawed practice called "verifying the kill".

It is not known whether the girl was already dead when he shot her.
Palestinian hospital officials said the girl was shot at least 15 times, mostly in the upper body.

Prosecutors want to examine the body to determine the range from which the girl was shot and the type of bullets used.

The arrested officer, who has not been named, has maintained his innocence but the Israeli military is expected to press charges against him next week.

Lea Tzemel, a lawyer for the girl's family, said they had so far refused the request. Autopsies are seen by many Muslims as shaming and forbidden.

"Also, the family does not have much faith in the army," said Tzemel.


"They fear the army wants to use the autopsy to clear the officer."
She said the army had agreed to have Palestinian and Arab pathologists present should the examination take place.

Hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed during the intifada, often in clashes between Israeli troops and stone throwers.

The military rarely launches investigations into the incidents.

Moishe3rd, are you denying that those three Egytians were killed by the Israelian tank

Israeli troops accused of corpse abuse

The Israeli army has launched an investigation into photographs apparently showing soldiers posing next to the bodies of dead Palestinians.

One such picture, published in the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot Israeli daily, shows a soldier pointing his weapon at a corpse while pressing his foot into the half-naked body.

"I ordered the military police to open an investigation and I intend to shed full light on this matter," chief of Staff General Moshe Yaalon told military radio on Friday.

"It is inconceivable that such things should happen in the ranks of Israel's army," he added.

"They shoot and have their pictures taken" read Yediot's headline as the paper went on to detail "ways that soldiers play with bodies".

Another picture shows a dead man, a cigarette allegedly stuck in his mouth by troops. When walking by a Palestinian shot in combat, several troops would "fire into the dead body. One of them even shot four bullets," one soldier is quoted as saying by the newspaper.

"Our unit commander told us it was morally wrong, especially for that soldier who fired the four shots. His punishment? He was downgraded to serving as the commander's driver and then radio," the soldier was reported as saying.
AFP

Barghouti to seek Palestinian presidency
Posted: Wednesday, December 1, 10:53am EST

Associates of Marwan Barghouti said Wednesday the jailed Palestinian uprising leader has decided to run for president, reversing an earlier decision and throwing Palestinian politics into disarray. Barghouti's candidacy would undermine the prospects of interim Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, the presidential candidate of the ruling Fatah movement. Fatah officials have warned that a bid by Barghouti, who is a leading Fatah member and more popular than the staid Abbas, could split the movement.

Barghouti, who represents the younger generation in Fatah, has wavered repeatedly on whether to run. Several days ago, he announced he would drop out of the race for the sake of unity.

However, on Wednesday, Barghouti's campaign paid a $3,000 bank deposit required of independent presidential candidates, a Barghouti associate said on condition of anonymity.

Barghouti, 45, is serving five consecutive life terms in an Israeli prison for his role in deadly shooting attacks that killed four Israelis and a Greek monk. Barghouti has denied involvement in violence.

One step foward two steps backwards. It's the peace in the middle east and a settlement of the Palestinian conflict i speak
One candidate for the PA presidency says he will settle for nothing less than Palestinian's right of return while the other is in an Isreali jail serving five lifetimes for murder.

On the contrary I fully accept the right of Israel to exist. However, not as a discriminatory state, and not with unequal status for Jews and non-Jews.

The history of mankind is a story of exploitation and brutality. Nearly every people has been on both sides of that divide many times. The Jews have done a much better job than others in preserving and recording their long history, and that is as much a source of their uniqueness as any other factor.

I cannot understand the logic that would proclaim the right of immigration (usually subsidized, by public and private aid from the United States) by Jews anywhere, while, at the same time denying it to the sons and daughters of Palestinian former residents, driven out of their homes by the Irgun and the IDF.

How would the right of return deny peace to many?

There is so much potential for an agreement and lasting peace between the two sides right now; more so, I think, than during the Oslo Accords.

Israel says 148 unarmed Palestinians killed by army in West Bank in 2004
(AFP)

8 December 2004

JERUSALEM - Israel has killed 148 unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the year, the army said Wednesday.


"148 civilians and 119 terrorists have been killed in 2004," a senior officer based on the West Bank told Israeli military radio, adding that "at least 29 were innocent victims killed by mistake."

The Israeli army is currently hunting 560 Palestinian activists in the West Bank suspected of involvement in anti-Israeli attacks, while some 3,000 others are behind bars, the unnamed officer said.

An Israeli military spokesman confirmed the figures to AFP but said that many of the civilians killed were militants "involved in the preparation of attacks but not actually armed".

Army chief of staff General Moshe Yaalon said Tuesday that 70 percent of all victims of the intifada were civilians and warned the army against losing its "moral values" after a series of blunders reported in the media.

Around 4,600 people have been killed since the September 2000 start of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, including more than 3,500 Palestinians and nearly 1,000 Israelis.

Einherjar
Because it looks as though both sides are ready to compromise and there is no Arafat to stand in the way.

Sharon's Showdown With Likud

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: December 8, 2004
The political tectonic plates under the Middle East may have at last begun to shift.

Some Arab leaders, facing four more years of George W. Bush, seem to have understood the policy message he sent from Canada last week: "Achieving peace in the Holy Land is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been tried before without success. As we negotiate the details of peace," said Bush, "we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy."

That message - putting the bedrock principle of democratic interaction ahead of the endless process of "engagement" - is reverberating through the Arab world. A few days ago, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, swapped a Druse Israeli citizen, Azzam Azzam, imprisoned for seven years on phony spy charges, for a group of captured Egyptian infiltrators. Israel sets great store on freeing its citizens, and the release of Azzam was a major gesture by Egypt.

This followed Mubarak's surprise description, after Yasir Arafat's death, of Ariel Sharon as the Palestinians' best chance for peace - "he asks for only one thing: the end to the explosions, so they can work together on a solid basis." It also follows Mubarak's offer, accepted by Israel, to station troops along Egypt's border with Gaza to stop Hamas's arms smuggling as Israel begins its withdrawal.

Hopes are rising that Sharon's prospective pullout, along with easements to facilitate Palestinian elections and his promise "to give quiet for quiet," will lead to the return of the long-absent Egyptian and then the Jordanian ambassadors. (The euphoria does not extend to Syria, whose president is suddenly offering talks without preconditions about the Golan Heights. Nobody trusts Syria.)

Today's sense of early movement comes on the eve of Sharon's showdown with Likud, the rightist party he helped found. Its 3,000-member central committee meets tomorrow to accept or reject the prime minister's plan to form a unity government with leftist Labor, which supports him on leaving Gaza to the Palestinians but opposes his budget.

Sharon welcomes the showdown within his party. If a Likud majority were to reject his new coalition, that would trigger unwelcome new elections, a re-freezing of the current thaw with Arabs and the splintering of Likud. But yesterday, the former Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Sharon, urged reciprocity from Palestinians and continued economic reform, and pledged his support. (Bibi wants Arik to succeed because he wants to succeed him.)

As Palestinians elect a new government that can restrain its violence-prone bitter-enders, I'm told that Sharon's coalition of Likud, Labor and several religious parties would agree to start Palestinian negotiations with a clean slate. The previous Barak-Clinton offers, including a division of Jerusalem - anathema to most Israelis - came off the table when Arafat chose war.

That unencumbered start would please Likud's right and annoy Labor's left, but here's the delicious complexity of the first "unified disunity government": On foreign affairs, Sharon will have his center-left coalition; on domestic budgets, his rightist coalition.

This swinging Knesset majority would be designed to last until the next election in 2006, enough time to negotiate a settlement that Palestinians and Israelis could abide.

The dangers: rebellion in Likud if Gaza settlers are seen to be heroic, or an "end run" by Labor's Shimon Peres to appeal to pro-Palestinian European, Russian and U.N. concessioneers.

Already we see outside pressure for "return to the pre-'67 borders." As documented in Dore Gold's "Tower of Babble," this ignores Lyndon Johnson's defeat of Aleksei Kosygin's attempt to slip the specific word "the" in front of the general "territories" in crafting U.N. Resolution 242 - which would have left Israel's borders vulnerable.

No global bureaucrat can belatedly dictate who owns what part of those disputed territories. As Bush noted, "This approach has been tried before without success."

What could succeed is a direct negotiation between democratically elected officials of two Middle East nations who can control their extremists. That has not happened yet, but Jews and Arabs may soon have a narrow window of opportunity.