The Israeli civil rights group B'tselem commented in March 2002 on the disastrous results of the Israeli Army's decision to stop the practice of holding an inquiry whenever its soldiers kill a Palestinian civilian:
The I.D.F. effectively grants immunity to soldiers who open fire illegally. Since the beginning of the intifada, the I.D.F. has ceased to automatically open an investigation into every case in which a Palestinian is killed by I.D.F. fire… [T]he investigations that are opened are generally protracted and based primarily on soldiers' testimonies, while completely ignoring the Palestinian eyewitnesses. This policy has unavoidably resulted in a situation in which shooting at innocent Palestinians has practically become a routine.-- Trigger Happy - Unjustified Gunfire and the I.D.F.'s Open-Fire Regulations…; B'Tselem, March 2002.
And I have blogged on numerous occasions about Palestinian civilians who were deliberately killed by IDF soldiers, and whose deaths were never formally investigated by the Israeli authorities, much less prosecuted.
Like B'Tselem, I had taken it for granted that the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians was the by-product of a system that did not hold individual soldiers accountable, and that if the system of military oversight were improved, then the few "bad apples" (I hate that phrase, but it applies here) who abused their powers and killed civilians would be deterred simply by knowing that it would no longer be possible to get away with it. I never seriously thought as I wrote about individual deaths at the hands of Israeli soldiers that both B'Tselem and myself were wrong: that the shooting of unarmed people was not an unfortunate aberration by undisciplined individuals who benefitted from the absence of oversight, but rather the absence of oversight was itself deliberately perpetuated by the Israeli military authorities precisely because they already knew their soldiers were killing unarmed people, because that's what their orders were.
One of the cases I blogged about in some detail was that of the killing of Asma Mughayer, and her younger brother Ahmed. (Read their whole story here). They are the two children on the left of this family photo, via the Sydney Morning Herald:
Ahmed was thirteen years old. He was small for his age - "a small boy who could not easily be mistaken for a man" - and he loved feeding the pigeons he kept in a cage on the roof of his home. Asma was 16 years old, top of her class in school, and hoped to become a doctor. They were killed within minutes of each other on 18 May 2004, as they hung out laundry on the roof of their house in Rafah at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip.
(AP/Kevin Frayer)
An IDF spokesperson explained that "Asma and Ahmed had been killed in a 'work accident' - a euphemism for bomb-makers blowing themselves up - or by Palestinian fighters who had left a landmine in the street. 'A preliminary investigation indicates they were killed by a bomb intended to be used against soldiers. It was set outside a building by Palestinians to hit an Israeli vehicle. This is probably what happened,' a military spokesman said...".
But the Mughayer family said this was a lie, and the two children had in fact been targetted by an IDF sniper. British and Australian journalists examined the bodies as they lay in the morgue, and found no sign of injuries except for a single shot through the head. At the Mughayer home, they found no sign of bomb damage, only bullet holes left by bullets fired from an overlooking apartment block, that had been taken over by an Israeli sniper team on the morning the children were killed.
After the journalists reported their findings to Amnesty International, who called for an independent judicial inquiry, the IDF reluctantly agreed to open an internal military investigation. But, as is generally the case with IDF internal inquiries, no-one was charged in connection with the killings. In fact, after a 6-month interval, when it could be safely assumed that international attention had long-since moved on, the case was quietly dropped without comment by the IDF:
The military has quietly dropped an investigation into the killing by an Israeli sniper of a brother and sister, both teenagers, in Rafah in May. The army falsely claimed that the pair were killed by a Palestinian bomb and only began the investigation after journalists found the bodies of the children and reported that both had a single shot to the head. (Source)
And I just assumed it was another case of the IDF looking after its own, giving some private reprimand to a "bad apple" who broke the IDF's open fire rules.
But then, at the beginning of last month, I was reading the testimonies of IDF soldiers who had shared their stories about service in the Occupied Territories through the Breaking the Silence exhibition, and I came across this:
From a distance of 70 metres and through the sight of his machine gun, Assaf could tell that the Palestinian man was aged between 20 and 30, unarmed and trying to get away from an Israeli tank. But the details didn't matter much, because Assaf's orders were to "fire at anything that moved".Assaf, a soldier in the Israeli army, pressed the trigger, firing scores of bullets as the body fell to the ground. "He ran and I started shooting for a few seconds. He fell. I was a machine. I fire. I leave and that's that. We never spoke about it afterwards."
It was the summer of 2002, and Assaf and his armoured unit had been ordered to enter the Gaza town of Dir al Balah following the firing of mortars into nearby Jewish settlements. His orders were, he told the Guardian, "'Every person you see on the street, kill him'. And we would just do it."
It was not the first time that Assaf had killed an innocent person in Gaza while following orders, but after his discharge he began to think about the things he did. "The reason why I am telling you this is that I want the army to think about what they are asking us to do, shooting unarmed people. I don't think it's legal."
Assaf is not alone. In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand. The soldiers were brought into contact with the Guardian with the assistance of Breaking the Silence, a pressure group of former soldiers who want the Israeli public to confront the reality of army activities...
A common theme in the soldiers' testimony was the desire to avenge Israeli casualties and inflict collective punishment on Palestinians.
May 2004 was a bad month for the Israeli army in Gaza. Four soldiers were blown to pieces when their explosive-laden APC hit a roadside bomb in Gaza City. As the army took over, another seven soldiers were killed in a similar incident in Rafah, at the other end of Gaza. In response the army launched an operation "to secure the neighbourhood along the Philadelphi Road [the border between Gaza and Egypt] and to make sure they are clean from terrorists," said Major General Dan Harel, the local commander.
Thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and around 50 died, of whom between a quarter and a half were civilians. According to Rafi, an officer in the Shaldag, an elite unit connected to the air force, the whole mission was about revenge. "The commanders said kill as many people as possible," he said.
He and his men were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared to be touching the ground, as if they might be placing a roadside bomb, or anyone seen on a roof or a balcony, as if they might be observing Israeli forces for military reasons, regardless of whether they were armed.
Asma Moghayyer, 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, were shot as they went to collect clothes from a rooftop washing line. The Israeli army insisted the children had been blown up by a roadside bomb. However, journalists visiting the morgue saw only single bullet wounds to the head.
The truth, said Rafi, was that they were shot by an Israeli soldier following clear orders to shoot anyone on a roof regardless of their role in the conflict.
Rafi says that his overriding impression of the operation was "chaos" and the "indiscriminate use of force". "Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters."
-- Israeli Soldiers Tell of Indiscriminate Killings by Army and a Culture of Impunity by Conal Urquhart; 6 Sept 2005.
Well, that clears up a few things. Of course the IDF didn't want to hold an inquiry into how and why the Mughayer children were killed: they already knew perfectly well that the children were dead because the Army's own orders were "to shoot anyone on a roof regardless of their role". And of course once they were forced to hold an inquiry they couldn't allow it to lead to a prosecution: how could the IDF prosecute its own snipers for carrying out the open fire orders that the IDF chain of command had given them?
All these months I've been blogging about how the IDF could prevent needless deaths if only it would prosecute soldiers who shoot unarmed civilians in defiance of their orders, and it turns out that shooting unarmed civilians was their orders after all. I thought I was cynical about the IDF in the Occupied Territories: instead, it turns out I was naive.
Photo - Palestinian boy feeding pigeons on a roof in the West-Casbah area of Hebron. Photo taken through a sniper's rifle sight. (via Breaking the Silence)
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