Wednesday, March 05, 2014
In Birzeit, ‘Trigger Happy’ Israel Vindicates Amnesty’s Report
By Nicola Nasser*
In the Palestinian West Bank town of Birzeit early last
February 27, the Israeli (IDF) Occupation Forces (IOF) acted determinedly,
under the media spotlights, to feed Amnesty International with a show case
study to vindicate the report it released only hours earlier, entitled “Trigger-happy:
Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank,” and to refute the Israeli
official diplomatic denial of the contents thereof.
Under the command of Col. Yossi Pinto, a
Nahal infantry force of the Binyamin Territorial Brigade, joined by the
Border Police’s elite Counterterrorism Unit, Yamam, according to Israeli The
Jerusalem Post on the same day and “200 Israeli soldiers, dozens of jeeps, two (military)
bulldozers and many Shin Bet [internal security] officers” according to Amira
Hass of Haaretz on this March 3, including some 28 – more than thirty army
patrol armored vehicles according to the count of Arab natives of Birzeit who
spoke to this writer, were amassed in this Birzeit University town, raising a
hell of explosives and gunfire and disrupting its peaceful countryside early
spring morning.
Amira Hass was on the scene. Wondering
what was all that military mobilization for, a former mayor of Birzeit told
this writer that he heard her asking in repudiation, “Was it (the late al-Qaeda
founder Osama) Bin Laden inside?!”
Their mission, according to Israeli military spokespeople, was to
arrest a “wanted individual” who, according to the
Shin Bet internal security agency, quoted by Hass, had “intended” to carry out
an “aggressive operation” against Israeli targets. An Israeli army
spokeswoman said the man was “suspected” of “terror activity.” www.israelnationalnews.com
on the same day quoted “the IDF Spokesman's Unit” as
saying that he was “a wanted man suspected of terror activity.” Gideon Levy in
Haaretz on this March 2 quoted “the military correspondents” as repeating
what the “IDF claimed” that the man “had the intention to carry out a terror
attack in the near future.”
Hass wrote: “In the unofficial Israeli
law code, unproved “terrorist intentions” are enough to be punishable by death.
In Hebrew, “terror attack” is a magic phrase that exempts the Israelis from
wondering why an arrest needs so many troops and fanfare, and has such a
murderous end.”
Gideon Levy
sarcastically repeating the self-described as “the most moral army in the world”
wrote that the Israeli army “is also an army that reads intentions,” but Levy
did not add that this army has had it as a rule to act accordingly as well.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said: “After the suspect was
called to turn himself in, he barricaded himself inside his house, effectively
resisting arrest. Under the premise that he had weapons in his possession, the
forces used different means to complete the arrest, including live fire.”
The “suspect” was 24-year old Muatazz Abdul-Rahim Washaha,
an unemployed Palestinian native of Birzeit.
Hass questioned the accuracy of this statement. Claiming
that the victim had “barricaded himself” in would make people “think he built a
fortress and surrounded himself with explosives. This is very inaccurate,” she
wrote.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office said that the
“troops forcibly entered the building and found his body.” Hass said that “this
is a lie.” “The elite police unit had shot Washaha at point-blank range dozens
of times, according to the pieces of brain that covered the room, not to
mention his legs, arms and fingers that were nearly severed from his body,” she
added. Washaha's head was split open after being struck by a projectile,
a doctor at the Palestinian
Ramallah Hospital
It was left to Levy and others to specify the details of
“live fire.”
Levy reported that “the most moral army in the world fired an (M72 LAW) anti-tank missile at the house in which a wanted young
Palestinian was hiding … ran a bulldozer over the top of the house and
destroyed it,” using “a drill it calls a ‘pressure cooker’ – a rather
disgusting drill it invented for itself.”
When the tactic of “pressure cooker,” which
involves shooting at the walls of the house that is surrounded, failed to persuade the suspect to come out and turn himself in, the IOF troops at
around 7 AM bulldozed part of the outer wall of the house and
fired projectiles into the building. Fire erupted in the house. At 11
AM, they issued an ultimatum, “giving Muatazz two minutes to surrender, without
result. As the ultimatum expired, the army fired several artillery
shells from close
distance. They then stormed the burning house, killing Muatazz,” Jan Walraven
reported in the Palestine Monitor on this March 3.
The four – apartment building was bulldozed and shelled
out of use and its contents burned and vandalized. Four families suddenly found
themselves on the street, waiting for charities.
Washaha did not “resist” his arrest; he simply refused to
give himself in. Released from an IFO jail only a few months ago, he knew very well what being imprisoned by the IOF meant.
“I will be free here. Leave and do not worry about me. I will stay here and not
surrender. I will not return to prison,” he told a Palestinian civil defense
worker who rushed in to extinguish the fire caused by the Israeli projectile.
Those were his last words, quoted by The Electronic Intifada on last February
28.
“They could have taken him as a
prisoner, but they did not want him as a prisoner they wanted to kill him,” his
father Mr. Abdul – Rahim said. Similarly, his mother, Mrs. Eitzaaz Washaha, told Anadolu Agency:
“Israeli forces could have arrested Washaha, but they were determined to kill
him. My son wasn't armed. He was killed after the house was bombed.”
An Israeli Shin Bet officer, who goes under the name of
Alon, gave permission to kill Muatazz because he
refused to appear for an interview with him, according to Hass. “This was
regarded as a personal affront by Alon,” she wrote. The victim’s brother,
Tha’er Washaha, told Haaretz he implored Alon for permission to go inside and convince
his brother to come out; Alon refused.
However,
despite the officially acknowledged “suspicion,” an official army
tweet, quoted by Los Angeles Times on the same day, convicted him as
a “terrorist who resisted arrest.”
Pro – Israeli media and Israeli media, the latter being subjected
to well – known strict military censorship, echoed this unconfirmed conclusion;
for example, www.algemeiner.com on the
same day headlined its report to conclude that a “Wanted Terrorist (was) Shot
Dead by Israel Defense Forces.”
Disinformation was demonstrated by Israel Hayom, reportedly close to prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
office; on the same day Hayom reported that “a firefight broke out” between the
holed in victim and the besieging army brigade, but the witnesses on the site
confirmed the Reuters’ report that “no shots were heard from inside the home
before the Israeli forces opened fire,” a fact that is confirmed by the other
fact that the raiding Israeli forces did not suffer the slightest casualty, which also refutes the IOF’ claim that the man had an AK-47 rifle, another “story”
that “Israel accepted … with a yawn,” according to Levy of Haaretz.
The
Palestinian Authority (PA) in a statement condemned Washaha’s killing as an
“assassination,” a “crime” and a “deliberate”
killing. PA’s spokesman, Ihab Bsaiso, said
it was an “example of the violence perpetrated on a daily basis against our
population.” In a letter sent to the UN Secretary-General, the President
of the UN Security Council and the President of the UN General Assembly, Palestinian
Ambassador Feda Abdelhady – Nasser said Washaha’s killing indicates Israel
Israeli journalist Hass agrees further
that his killing was a “cold-blooded assassination”; “The Israeli army did this
deliberately,” she wrote. “Israel's goal” was “to embarrass the Palestinian
Authority and undermine its status” among its own people and Israel was
“successful” as the “Palestinian Authority officials were absent from Washaha's
funeral” the next day to avoid the angry crowds, estimated at more than five
thousand, who were demanding an end to peace negotiations and to PA’s security
coordination with Israel.
Gideon
Levy had another interpretation for the motives of “The most moral army in the
world,” which was the title of his opinion column in Haaretz; “The Israel
Defense Forces has also created a heartwarming name for all this: the “Tool of
Disruption” – storming a civilian community for the purpose of causing panic
and fear, and to disrupt its life,” or “Sometimes these operations are
conducted … as a training routine in
order to preserve the readiness of the forces and a demonstration of sovereign
power” toward the Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation
since 1967, he wrote.
Amnesty’s
Report Vindicated
Washaha’s extrajudicial execution came on the same day the Amnesty International (AI) released its 87-page report recommending that the U.S., EU and the rest of
the international community should suspend all transfers of military aid to
Israel because “without
pressure from the international community the situation is unlikely to change
any time soon,” Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Director Philip Luther
said. “Too much civilian blood has been spilled … (and Israel
The AI reported it had documented the killings of 22 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in 2013 and in
all the cases the Palestinians did not appear to have been posing a direct and
immediate threat to life: “The circumstances of all their deaths point to them
having been victims of unlawful killings, including — in some cases — possible
willful killings.”
“Several victims were shot in the back
suggesting that they were targeted as they tried to flee and posed no genuine
threat to the lives of members of Israeli forces or others,” the report said. “In
several cases, well-armored Israeli forces have resorted to lethal means to
crack down on stone-throwing protesters causing needless loss of life” and
“there is evidence that some individuals were victims of willful killings,
which would amount to war crimes,” it added.
Since the U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry succeeded in resuming the Palestinian – Israeli peace talks on last July
29, the IOF killed more than 42 Palestinian civilians; Washaha was among the latest.
Using “excessive force,” “arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters” and displaying
"callous disregard" for human life, Israeli
soldiers and police officers have been operating with “near total
impunity,” in a “harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted
injuries,” “as a matter of policy,” while the Israeli investigative system is
“woefully inadequate,” said Luther.
The AI report accused Israel
In Birzeit on that sad morning of last February 27, the
elite military disproportionate force which the IOF used to liquidate Washaha
acted as if it was intentionally determined to undermine the credibility of
Israel’s official diplomacy, represented this time by ambassador Taub, and to
vindicate the contents of Amnesty’s report which he tried to deny or at least
to question.
Ironically, Israeli PM Netanyahu, less than a week later,
was in Washington D.C. lecturing a receptive American audience at the annual
conference of AIPAC about drawing a “clear line … between
life and death, between right and wrong” and about the “moral divide!”
* Nicola Nasser is a
veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
