Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Nella guerra del Libano, Israele uso' i propri cittadini come scudi  umani

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19003.htm
01/04/08 "ICH" -- -- It apparently never occurred to anyone in our
leading human rights organisations or the Western media that the same
moral and legal standards ought be applied to the behaviour of Israel
and Hizbullah during the war on Lebanon 18 months ago. Belatedly, an
important effort has been made to set that right.
A new report, written by a respected Israeli human rights
organisation, one representing the country's Arab minority not its
Jewish majority, has unearthed evidence showing that during the
fighting Israel committed war crimes not only against Lebanese
civilians -- as was already known -- but also against its own Arab
citizens. This is an aspect of the war that has been almost entirely
neglected until now.
The report also sheds a surprising light on the question of what
Hizbullah was aiming at when it fired hundreds of rockets on northern
Israel. Until the report's publication last month, I had been all but
a lone voice arguing that the picture of what took place during the
war was far more complex than generally accepted.
...
Last month the Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth,
published its own report, "Civilians in Danger", covering the ground
its much bigger cousins dared not touch.
The hostile climate in Israel towards the fifth of the population who
are Arab has made publication of the report a risky business. Azmi
Bishara, Israel's leading Arab politician and a major critic of
Israel's behaviour during the Lebanon war, is currently in exile under
possible death sentence. Israel has accused him of treason in helping
Hizbullah during the fighting, though the secret services have yet to
produce the evidence they have supposedly amassed against him.
Nonetheless they have successfully intimidated most of the Arab
minority into silence.
Also, much of the report's detail, including many place-names and maps
showing the location of Hizbullah rocket strikes, has had to be
excised to satisfy Israel's strict military censorship laws.
But despite these obstacles, the Human Rights Association has taken a
brave stand in unearthing the evidence to show that Israel committed
war crimes by placing much of its military hardware, including
artillery positions firing into Lebanon, inside and next to Arab towns
and villages. These were not isolated instances but a discerible
pattern.
The threat to which this exposed Arab communities was far from as
theoretical as HRW supposes. Some 660 Hizbullah rockets landed on 20
Arab communities in the north, apparently surprising Israeli
officials, who believed Hizbullah would not target fellow Arabs. Of
the 44 Israeli civilians killed by the rockets, 21 were Arab citizens.
Israel has cited these deaths as further proof that Hizbullah's rocket
fire was indiscriminate. The Human Rights Association, however,
reaches a rather different conclusion, one based on the available
evidence. Its research shows a clear correlation between an Arab
community having an Israeli army base located next to it and the
likelihood of it being hit by Hizbullah rockets. In short, Arab
communities targeted by Hizbullah were almost exclusively those in
which the Israeli army was based.
"The study found that the Arab towns and villages that suffered the
most intensive attacks during the war were ones that were surrounded
by military installations, either on a permanent basis or temporarily
during the course of the war," the report states.
Such findings lend credibility to complaints made during the war by
Israel's Arab legislators, including Bishara himself, that Arab
communities were being used as "human shields" by the Israeli army --
possibly to deter Hizbullah from targeting its positions.
In early August 2006, Bishara told the Maariv newspaper: "What
ordinary citizens are afraid to say, the Arab Knesset members are
declaring loudly. Israel turned the Galilee and the Arab villages in
particular into human shields by surrounding them with artillery
positions and missile batteries."
Such violations of the rules of war were occasionally hinted at in
reporting in the Israeli media. In one account from the front line,
for example, a reporter from Maariv quoted parents in the Arab village
of Fassuta complaining that children were wetting their beds because
of the frightening bark of tanks stationed outside their homes.
According to the Human Rights Association's report, Israel made its
Arab citizens vulnerable to Hizbullah's rockets in the following ways:
* Permanent military bases, including army camps, airfields and
weapons factories, as well as temporary artillery positions that fired
thousands of shells and mortars into southern Lebanon were located
inside or next to many Arab communities.
* The Israeli army trained soldiers inside northern Arab communities
before and during the war in preparation for a ground invasion,
arguing that the topography in these communities was similar to the
villages of south Lebanon.
* The government failed to evacuate civilians from the area of
fighting, leaving Arab citizens particularly in danger. Almost no
protective measures, such as building public shelters or installing
air raid sirens, had been taken in Arab communities, whereas they had
been in Jewish communities.
Under the protocols to the Geneva Conventions, parties to a conflict
must "avoid locating military objectives within or near densely
populated areas" and must "endeavour to remove the civilian population
... from the vicinity of military objectives". The Human Rights
Association report clearly shows that Israel cynically broke these
rules of war.
Tarek Ibrahim, a lawyer and the author of the Association's report,
says the most surprising finding is that Hizbullah's rockets mostly
targeted Arab communities where military installations had been
located and in the main avoided those where there were no such
military positions.
"Hizbullah claimed on several occasions that its rockets were aimed
primarily at military targets in Israel. Our research cannot prove
that to be the case but it does give a strong indication that
Hizbullah's claims may be true."
Although Hizbullah's Katyusha rockets were not precision-guided, the
proximity of Israeli military positions to Arab communities "are
within the margin of error of the rockets fired by Hizbullah",
according to the report. In most cases, such positions were located
either inside the community itself or a few hundred metres from it.
In its recommendations, the Human Rights Association calls for the
removal of all Israeli military installations from civilian
communities.
(Again noteworthy is the fact that Israel has built several weapons
factories inside Arab communities, including in Nazareth. Arab
citizens are almost never allowed to work in Israel's vast military
industries, so why build them there? Part of the reason is doubtless
that they provide another pretext for confiscating Arab communities'
lands and "Judaising" them. But is the criticism by Arab legislators
of "human shielding" another possible reason?)
The report avoids dealing with the wider issue of whether the Israeli
army located in Jewish communities too during the war. Ibrahim
explains: "In part the reason was that we are an Arab organisation and
that directs the focus of our work. But there is also the difficulty
that Israeli Jews are unlikely to cooperate with our research."
Israel has longed boasted of its "citizen army", and in surveys
Israeli Jews say they trust the military more than the country's
parliament, government and courts.
Nonetheless, the report notes, there is ample evidence that the army
based itself in some Jewish communities too. As well as the eyewitness
account of the Human Rights Watch researcher, it was widely reported
during the war that 12 soldiers were killed when a Hizbullah rocket
struck the rural community of Kfar Giladi, close to the northern
border.
A member of the kibbutz, Uri Eshkoli, recently told the Israeli media:
"We deserve a medal of honor for our assistance during the war. We
opened our hotel to soldiers and asked for no compensation. Moreover,
soldiers stayed in the kibbutz throughout the entire war."
In another report, in the Guardian newspaper, a 19-year-old British
Jew, Danny Young, recounted his experiences performing military
service during the war. He lived on Kibbutz Sasa, close to the border,
which became an army rear base. "We were shooting missiles from the
foot of this kibbutz," he told the paper. "We were also receiving
Katyushas."
So far the Human Rights Association's report has received minimal
coverage in the Hebrew media. "We are facing a very difficult
political atmosphere in Israel at the moment," Ibrahim told me. "Few
people inside Israel want to hear that their army and government broke
international law in such a flagrant manner."
It seems few in the West, even the guardians of human rights, are
ready to hear such a message either.

 by military installations, either on a permanent basis
Di basi militari al confine con paesi da cui provengono attacchi
militari e' normale che ve ne siano.  E questo senza fantasiosi "scudi
umani" se non per i *PIRLA*.
Peccato che non sia stato annunciato nessun razzo lanciato contro tali
basi.
-Stefano