Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Israel fails to act on Jewish settler violence in West Bank: report

By Ron Bousso :: Agence France Presse :: 10 September 2006

JERUSALEM, Sept 10 2006– The vast majority of Israeli investigations into Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank ended in failure in 2005, an Israeli rights group said in a report published Monday.

According to the report by Yesh Din, which monitors law enforcement in the occupied Palestinian territories, “90 percent of the complaints that were filed ended with the investigation file being closed or the complaints lost”.

Palestinians in the West Bank are often harassed by extreme-right Jewish settlers, resulting in some cases in casualties, damage to property and the destruction of olive groves.

In 2005, Yesh Din recorded reports of at least 522 separate incidents of abuse of Palestinians by Israeli civilians. But police opened only 299 investigations between January and November 2005.

In two of the events five Palestinians were killed, and in 89 of them the injury of one person or more was reported.

While Israeli police is responsible for the Jewish population in the West Bank, the Israeli army is in charge of coordination with Palestinians.

In some Palestinian areas, including the town of Hebron in the southern West Bank, the Israeli army is supposed to
provide protection to Palestinians who are regularly attacked and harassed by far-right settlers.

Ninety-six percent of the files on trespassing, 100 percent of the alleged property offenses and 79 percent of
the assault files were closed without indictments, the report said.

According to the report, there was “a total failure” of police in probing Palestinian complaints about Israeli civilians harming them and their property.

Although it is no longer present in most Palestinian towns across the West Bank, which are under the Palestinian
Authority’s administration, Israel continues to occupy the vast majority of the area which it seized in 1967.

While the some 200,000 Israelis living in the West Bank enjoy full freedom of movement in the area, Palestinians are often limited in their movement between areas across the West Bank due to army roadblocks and checkpoints.

According to the report, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal last year from the densely-populated Gaza Strip after 38
years of occupation caused a sharp rise in the number of Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Indeed, the figures show that August 2005 was the worst month in terms of the scale of violence by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank,” with a recorded 87 incidents, the report said.

The army said in reaction to the report that “great efforts are being invested in preventing friction between Israelis and Palestinians, either by advanced IDF (army) deployment, or by promoting resolution of boundary disputes”.

Police said that the complexities of the West Bank made “investigative activity difficult”. They were “studying the report and the comments made, and as a learning organization we will amend whatever requires amendment.”

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This entry was posted on 12 September, 2006 by in Diplomacy, Human Rights, International Law, Israel, Israel Watch, Palestine, Political Economy, Political ideologies, Racism.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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