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Israeli tanks bulldoze Rafah airport: witnesses
GAZA CITY, Jan 11 AFP|Published: Friday January 11, 12:03 PM
Twelve Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled into the Palestinian
Authority's airport by the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah and started
tearing up the runway early today, security sources and witnesses said.
The offensive into self-rule Palestinian land followed Israel's razing
of dozens of Palestinian homes pre-dawn yesterday in Rafah.
The destruction of homes came less than 24 hours after the killing of
four Israeli soldiers by two gunmen from the radical group Hamas at an
isolated army post on the Israeli border near Rafah.
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Hundreds made homeless while we discussed war crimes
GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - http://www.gush-shalom.org/
"Destroying the houses of innocent civilians is a war crime" Shulamit Aloni was
quoted to have said today during her visit to Arafat in his besieged Ramalla
residence. Confronted with that statement on the Israeli Channel-Two five o'clock
news Aloni explained: "I have said it also yesterday in Tzavta: the time has come
to prepare charge sheets."
Last night we held in Tel-Aviv's Tzavta Hall a well-attended panel discussion on
the war crimes being perpetrated in the Occupied Territories. On the morning of
the same day, our appeal on a related issue was heard by the Supreme Court in
Jerusalem. Just as we were about to compose a report on these events we got
the information about the destruction of dozens of Palestinian homes at Rafah
by Israeli troops - leaving hundreds of people, exposed to a cold and rainy winter
night, powerless against the bulldozers. The number of destroyed homes varies
in different reports from 45 in some, to 73 in others. In any case, the earlier terse
communique by the IDF spokesman, speaking of "a number of structures
demolished out of tactical considerations" and published as fact by the Israeli
media, was grossly and deliberately misleading.
The destruction was clearly intended as retaliation for the guerrilla raid in
which four Israeli soldiers were killed a day earlier at the Gaza Strip border;
a retaliation directed entirely against a civilian population which had nothing
to do with the attack, and as such a violation of International Law,
specifically of the Fourth Geneva Convention - and as such a war crime.
This act would be horrific enough in itself. It is all the more so, being but
part of of a long-term policy implemented at the long-suffering town of Rafah,
which is divided in three: one part under the self-governing Palestinian
Authority, another part under Egyptian rule, and bisecting them in between, a
long and narrow Israeli-held miltary zone, designed to prevent contact between
these two sundred parts and - in general - prevent Palestinians from having
free acess to the outside world. This unnatural situation led to an
endless series of confrontations and incidents over the past year and half.
In response, the Israeli Army formulated a simple and brutal strategy: to
extend and widen the "buffer zone" under its control by destroying Palestinian
dwellings and creating a "sterile zone" in their place.
The policy was stated quite openly by reserve General Yom-Tov Samia,
former commander of IDF's Southern Command, in a live interview to
Israeli radio on June 9, 2001:
"THE IDF MUST RAZE ALL THE HOUSES within a strip of 300-400 metres in width....
No matter what the future (final) agreement would be, this will be our border
with Egypt (!)... Arafat must be punished; after each incident, another two or
three rows of houses must be razed..." This is precisely what the army has
been doing, steadily and systematically, ever since. As several of the speakers
at our panel discussion remarked, war crime (as, in fact, ordinary crime) is
aggravated by being part of a deliberate and systematic policy.
A few hours before the latest wave of destruction was unleashed at Rafah, Dr.
Eyal Gross of the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law advanced at the Tzavta
Hall the opinion that ordering a soldier to drive a bulldozer to destroy a
civilian dwelling constitutes a manifestly illegal order: "Under both
International Law and the Israeli Military Code, a soldier has not only the
right but also the duty to refuse such an order. Should he be court-martialed
for that refusal, he can in all consicience claim to be law-abiding, while it
was his commanding officer who was guilty of law-breaking".
Shulamit Aloni - former Education Minister, and grand old lady of the Israeli
peace and human rights movement - was even more forthright: "The time has come
for us to prepare the charge sheets of Israel's war criminals, since nobody
else does it.". This she said from the podium at Tzavta yesterday, and repeated
it at a TV interview today.
So as not to make this message too long, a fuller description of the Tzavta
meeting will be delayed for tomorrow.
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