On Wednesday, May 21, 2008, Israel’s Supreme Court held a hearing in a petition submitted by nine Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, represented by Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, claiming that since April 9, 2008, the State of Israel has violated its commitment to supply even minimal, insufficient quantities of fuel to the Gaza Strip. The groups also claimed that the fuel restrictions are crippling the functioning of hospitals, water wells, sewage treatment plants, and public transportation – and thus endangering the health and well-being of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. Israel controls Gaza’s borders and does not permit Gaza residents to receive fuel except via the Israeli-controlled Nahal Oz Crossing.
The position of the rights groups is that all deliberate restrictions on fuel supply to Gaza are illegal, because they violate Israel’s obligations to Gaza residents under international humanitarian law, including the obligation to refrain from collective punishment.
According to data assembled by Gisha for the period between April 9, 2008, the day that an attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot killed two Israeli civilians, and May 17, 2008, fuel supplies to Gaza have fallen far even below the court-ordered quantities and certainly far below the quantities that Gaza residents need. I encourage you to read the addendum to our news release issued on the subject, which contains graphs showing the extent of the fuel cuts and a timeline showing relevant events. Please click here to download document.
The court has not yet issued a ruling in the case.
The rights groups who petitioned the court are: Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights, B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, Mezan Center for Human Rights, The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.
Israeli restrictions on fuel supplies to Gaza peaked in April when Israel halted supplies of diesel, petrol and cooking gas (LPG) to Gaza. UNRWA was forced to suspend its food distribution to 650,000 beneficiaries for four days due to the lack of fuel. Limited supplies of cooking gas and industrial diesel resumed before the end of the month. Market prices increased significantly in the month of April. Gazan militants attacked the Nahal Oz fuel terminal on April 9 and the Kerem Shalom goods crossing on April 18.Israeli military incursions into Gaza occurred almost every day in April, killing 21 children.
As a Palestinian human rights organisation dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Al-Haq is compelled yet again to raise the spectre of Israel’s continuing disregard for the customary international humanitarian law principles of distinction and proportionality. The incursion on 14 May 2008 into ‘Izbet ‘Abed Rabba, in the occupied Gaza Strip provides clear examples of the impact on civilians of Israel’s consistent willful misinterpretation of its obligations under international humanitarian law.
On Wednesday, 14 May 2008, at approximately 8:00 am, 15 Israeli tanks entered the village of ‘Izbet ‘Abed Rabba, west of Beit Hanoun and east of Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, with aerial cover provided by the Israeli Air Force. Upon entry to the village, Israeli ground forces engaged in random gun fire despite not being fired upon. At approximately 9:15 am, 17-year old Hamdi Salemeh Khader was riding his bicycle on Al-Karama Road near the local cement factory when he was shot twice (once in the shoulder and once in the upper right quadrant of the chest) by machine gun fire emanating from the tanks, killing him instantly. The distance between Hamdi and the tanks was approximately 500 metres at the time they fired upon him. Further, the topography of the land in this part of the Gaza Strip is flat and unobstructed by buildings. As such the visibility for the tank commanders, when coupled with surveillance provided by aerial cover, must be assumed to have been definitive, providing a clear image of Hamdi on his bicycle, unarmed and presenting no threat to Israeli forces.
By 9:50 am the Israeli occupying forces had begun to encounter Palestinian armed resistance to the incursion in the form of gunfire. Between 10:15 am and 11:10 am when the Israeli forces withdrew, four tank shells were fired towards Jabaliya refugee camp in quick succession from 1 – 1½ kilometres outside of the camp. Two tank shells were fired at a combatant in a residential neighbourhood east of the camp, killing him as well as an unarmed 19-year old civilian bystander, Ibrahim Hasan Salah, who was walking to school. Another shell fell inside the densely populated camp next to the house of Baker Muhammed Al-Jamal, the shrapnel from the blast injuring 69-year old Zeina Muhammad Al-Jamal and her daughter, Siham. The last shell penetrated the house of Ghassan Mahmoud Abu-Habal inside the camp without detonating, leaving behind a dangerous unexploded ordinance and damage to the house at the shell’s entry point.
According to public statements by Israeli officials, the incursion was a response to the firing by Palestinian armed groups of indiscriminate missiles towards Israel. Al-Haq emphasises that the use by Palestinian armed groups of indiscriminate, and therefore unlawful, weapons against Israel civilian areas provides no justification in law for Israel to employ equally unlawful tactics. Such unlawful tactics include the violation of the customary international humanitarian law prohibitions on collective punishment and reprisals against protected persons; indiscriminate attacks failing to distinguish between civilians and military targets, and between civilian objects and military objects; disproportionate attacks; and attacks launched without taking feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of warfare with a view to avoiding injury to civilians and damage to civilian property.
The wilful killing of 17-year old Hamdi is a war crime which may amount to a grave breach of Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is impossible to imagine that tank crews stationed at a distance of 500 metres from the child, with a clear line of sight and the benefit of aerial surveillance, could not distinguish between an armed person and an unarmed person. Given that there was no exchange of fire between Palestinian armed groups before the child was shot, the “fog of war” cannot provide a defence. Moreover, the child was nowhere near a legitimate military target and as such cannot be considered as lawful “collateral damage.” Those who planned, ordered or executed this attack are individually criminally liable under the grave breaches regime of the Fourth Geneva Convention and all High Contracting Parties of the Convention are legally bound to search for and prosecute these persons. This obligation on High Contracting Parties is of heightened importance in light of the fact that Israeli authorities have only opened some 270 investigations resulting in a mere 30 indictments with very lenient sentences in relation to over 2,000 Palestinian civilian deaths since September 2000.
The attack that killed 19-year old Ibrahim Hasan Salah and the attack inside Jabaliya refugee camp which injured 69-year old Zeina Mohammad Al-Jamal and her daughter Siham are representative of Israel’s practice of neutralising the enemy using means and methods of warfare in urban combat which are incapable of avoiding civilian casualties. Ibrahim was killed and Zeina and her daughter were injured because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when Israeli tank crews stationed outside the Jabaliya camp employed heavy weaponry against armed Palestinians in the vicinity. The use of such weapons nullifies any expressed commitment by Israel to respect the principle of distinction.
The consistent use of heavy weaponry in densely populated urban areas of the Gaza Strip accounts for a disturbing number of the deaths and injuries among Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip so far this year, including the 28 April killing of a mother and her four children in Beit Hanoun.[1] Implicit in Israel’s policy choice to use the above described means and methods of warfare is the desire to minimise its own combat casualties. However, a willingness to accept the risk of combat casualties is an inherent element of a good faith commitment by Israel to respect the customary international humanitarian law principle of proportionality.
Al-Haq calls upon:
* The Israeli Military Prosecutor for Operational Issues to order a full independent military police investigation into the killing of Hamdi Salemeh Khader.
* The High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfill their obligations under Article 146 to search for and prosecute those responsible for the wilful killing of Hamdi Salemeh Khader in the likely event that Israeli authorities fail to investigate.
* The Legal Advisor to the Israeli military to review the legality of the means and methods of warfare used by Israel in urban combat in the Gaza Strip.
In order to highlight the impact of the siege and closure of the Gaza Strip on the civilian population, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) is publishing a series of “Narratives Under Siege” on their website. These short articles are based on personal testimonies and experiences of life in the Gaza Strip, highlighting the restrictions, and violations, being imposed on the civilians of Gaza. To view all the narratives on the website, click here
Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah spends as much time as she can in her garden in Gaza, maintaining her “intimate love of the land.” (Photo from PCHR)
“I am not sure what year I was born. But it was around 78 years ago, in Palestine.” Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah sits on the patio overlooking her large garden, recalling the turbulent story of her long life. “I am a Palestinian from the village of Beit Affa” she says, tucking her long white scarf under her chin. “It was a beautiful village and we had a good life there. There was a small Jewish settlement nearby, called Negba, and we had a good relationship with the Jews. Whenever we had weddings, we would invite them to come and celebrate, and we women all used to dance dabka (Palestinian (traditional dance) together. The muktar (or chief) of the settlement, was called Michael. He used to arrive at the weddings with a gift, like a goat, and we would cook it and share the meat between us.”
Beit Affa was a village of around 500 people, in southern Palestine, 29 kilometers north east of the Gaza Strip. Most of the villagers were farmers, but even those who did not solely earn their living from farming had, says Handuma, “an intimate relationship with the land.” Like many of the local women, Handuma married young and stayed in her village. But in 1948, after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the declaration of the new State of Israel on Palestinian land, mass violence erupted. “The Zionists refused the division of the land into two states, and the massacres started” she says. “The first massacre was in Deir Yasin, where they slaughtered more than a hundred people.” The Deir Yasin villagers were killed by the notorious Zionist Lehi and Etsel gangs, which had originally been part of the 50,000 strong Haganah militia (which later became the core of the Israeli Defence Force, or IDF). These heavily armed gangs of Zionists were intent on driving Palestinians from their homes en masse. After the Deir Yasin massacre, they targeted villages across Palestine, threatening the Palestinians that if they did not leave their homes immediately they would be killed like the people of Deir Yasin.
“It was a terrible time. The Zionists killed women and children, young and old. The Haganah would slit women’s throats. We were all terrified.” Handuma and her family, which included her eighteen month old son, Ibrahim, stayed at home, waiting. She recalls the Jordanian and Egyptian armies arriving at the border of nearby Ashdod city, and asking local Palestinians to volunteer to leave their homes, reassuring them they would be able to return within the week. “My family refused to leave our village. It was the wheat harvest and we had just stored our wheat. With the Egyptian and Jordanian troops nearby we hoped we would be safe.”
The Haganah militia entered Beit Affa in the summer of 1948. “They arrived at 1am” Handuma recalls, “and started to kill our people. I saw my husband’s cousin axed to death, and an elderly woman being murdered. We hid in our homes, and the killing continued until 7am. Then the Haganah broke down the front doors of our houses and told us all to get out. They separated us, women from men, and then they took the men and blindfolded them, tied their hands together, and forced outside into the hot sun.” The surviving villagers’ lives were saved when Egyptian troops arrived and drove the Haganah out of Beit Affa. “But we had to leave our village,” says Handuma. “We were still afraid for our lives – and for the honour of our girls. The land would have to wait for us. I took nothing from my home, and left the front door open.” She says all of the Beit Affa villagers left together en masse.
Handuma, her husband Motlaq and young Ibrahim, traveled with many of the villagers for approximately the next six months. She easily recalls the names of villages where they stayed for a month at a time before moving on. “We were in Karateya, then in Al-Falluja (now known as the Israeli town of Kiriat Gat). Then we moved onto Herbya. We kept moving. People from the villages all traveled in large groups. We heard some small news from Beit Affa – we knew it was under Egyptian control for six months, and then the Israelis occupied it.” According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, “There are [now] no traces of villages houses; only sycamore and carob trees and cactuses mark the site [of Beit Affa].” Like thousands of other Palestinians, Handuma Wishah still carries the key to the front door of her home in Beit Affa.
When Handuma, Motlaq and Ibrahim arrived in Gaza in December 1948, they were, according to UN figures, just three of the approximately 914,000 Palestinians who had been forced out of Palestine as refugees during the Nakhba, or Catastrophe. Around two hundred thousand of the refugees arrived in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming the local Palestinian population of eighty thousand. “We spent our first week in Gaza city” says Handuma. “Then we moved on to Nuseirat (in the middle area of the Gaza Strip) and stayed there. We had nothing. We slept on the land, uncovered, until UNRWA arrived and gave us tents.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was established in 1949 to assist the Palestinian refugees, and it remains by far the largest UN operation in the Middle East. In Gaza, UNRWA started to count the refugees, who were allocated tents according to the size of each family. Handuma and her small family were issued with a tent and UNRWA blankets, but had no beds. “The thing we needed the most was medicine” she says. “There was no medicine. My son, Ibrahim was dying in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.” Ibrahim died in Nuseirat, aged two years and two months.
Slowly the refugees divided themselves into camps; there are now eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and they are some of the densely populated places on earth. Handuma and Motlaq eventually moved from their tent into a small house in the Bureij refugee camp, where she has lived since 1953. “The first years were very difficult” she says. “After the death of my first son I gave birth to another boy, and called him Ibrahim too. But he died 45 days later. If I had known how much suffering it was going to cause my children, I would never have left my village.” She starts to cry silently, and excuses herself for a few minutes. This elderly woman has just recalled the hardest and most bitter battles of her life: the pain of losing her land, and the struggle to save her children.
Handuma’s third son, Jaber survived, and she went on to have another three sons and four daughters. Um Jaber (Mother of Jaber) as she has been known for years in the Gaza Strip and beyond, has also been a staunch political activist more than five decades. She remains grateful to UNRWA for their assistance, but is fiercely critical of both the United Nations, and especially Britain, for their roles in the Nakhba. “We Palestinians are not terrorists” she says. “We are living under occupation and siege from the Israelis, and we will continue to resist until we can return to our homes. We are patient people.”
In 1995, when she was 65 years old, Um Jaber started a major political campaign to support Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails. “All of my four sons were jailed” she says, “and through them I met other Palestinians who also needed support. I used to visit the jails in Israel daily.” The mothers of Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails have been denied all visitation rights by the Israeli authorities since June 2007, and Um Jaber still joins the weekly Gaza vigil that demands the right for Palestinian mothers to visit their sons, husband and daughters who are imprisoned in Israel. These days, however, Um Jaber spends as much time as possible in her large garden tending her flowers and herbs and her flocks of hens and pigeons. “I have never lost my intimate love for the land” she says. “I have fed this love to my children and grandchildren, and I practice my traditional village life here as much as I can.”
As she remembers her own Nakhba, Um Jaber says she has never lost the hope of returning to the site of her village. “The Nakhba day will be a difficult and sad day” she says. “I will remember my village, and our lives there. I will also remember the respect between us and the Jews. But we are not the problem, we are the occupied people. The problem is the Israeli occupation of our Palestinian land.”
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the killing of a mother in front of her children yesterday, during an IOF incursion into New Abasan town, east of Khan Yunis.
PCHR investigations indicate that at approximately 16:30 on Wednesday, 7 May, IOF troops raided the house of Majdi Abd El-Raziq El-Daghma during an incursion into New Abasan.
The troops opened the outside metal door, then blew up the wooden interior door. The force of the blast killed 33 year old Wafa Shaker El-Daghma instantly. The IOF troops then stormed into the house and covered her body with a rug, having ascertained that she was dead. The troops then detained her 3 children, who had all witnessed the killing of their mother, in one of the rooms of the house. A soldier remained on guard at the entrance to the room. The children, who included a two year old, were confined inside the room for the next six and a half hours.
At approximately 23:00 the children were finally able to leave the room after the IOF withdrew from the house. Twelve year old Samira ran to a neighboring house, and the neighours called an ambulance. Wafa Shaker El-Daghma’s body was immediately transferred to Naser hospital in Khan Yunis.
In addition to the killing of Wafa Shaker El-Daghma one Palestinian resistance member was also killed, and twenty three others were injured. IOF also damaged 22 houses, destroying several in the process.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights:
– Reiterates its condemnation of the killing of Wafa El-Daghma, which represents a continuation of Israeli war crimes in the OPT and is another clear indicator of IOF disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians. The Centre considers these actions to be acts of reprisal and collective punishment, and therefore in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949).
– Affirms that IOF uses excessive force against Palestinian civilians without any threat to the lives of IOF troops, which is a violation of International Humanitarian Law.
– Calls upon the international community to act immediately to stop these crimes; and renews the call to the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfill their obligation under Article 1 of the Convention to ensure that it is respected at all times, and their responsibilities under Article 146 to pursue perpetrators of serious violations of the Convention, which are determined in Article 147 that lists violations of the Convention amounting to war crimes.
Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah spends as much time as she can in her garden in Gaza, maintaining her “intimate love of the land.” (Photo from PCHR)