Dignitaries Press Israel on Assassinations
Islamonline.net & Newspapers
Israeli assassinations have drawn criticism from
anti-Zionism rabbis.
CAIRO Three Nobel laureates joined a galaxy of Israeli intellectuals and
peace activists is pressing Israel's High Court of Justice to order a halt of
almost daily assassinations of Palestinian activists, the Jerusalem Post
reported on Tuesday, November 14.
"How many more children need to die before the high court judges rule on the
matter," reads the petition signed by 10 peace groups and 200 prominent figures.
"If a ruling is not handed down immediately, this will cause the deaths of
more innocent people, as was the case several days ago in Beit Hanun."
Petitioners are demanding the High Court of Justice to rule on two other
petitions submitted in 2002 and 2003 against the Israeli army's policy of
so-called targeted killings.
Between mid-July and mid-September, 136 Palestinians were killed in such
targeted killings, said the disgruntled signatories.
The fatalities included 59 innocent bystanders, among them 28 minors and five
women.
The petitioners blasted the tactic as a recipe for disaster as the deaths of
innocent people have triggered Palestinian retaliation attacks.
"The court is responsible for many dead and wounded on both sides," said Yoav
Hass, head of the left-wing Yesh Gvul organization.
Since the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000, the Israeli
military has killed hundreds of Palestinians in targeted strikes, often leaving
civilians dead.
One of Israel's heinous assassinations was that of wheelchair-bound Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the Palestinian resistance
group Hamas, on March 22, 2004, which have triggered outcry across occupied
Palestine and the world.
Evasive
The assassination of wheelchair-bound Sheikh Yassin triggered an
international outcry.
The signatories, including Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel literature
prize in 2005 and Betty Williams and Mairead McGuire, the founders of an
organization that promoted peace in Northern Ireland and who won the Nobel
peace prize in 1976, accused the Israeli court of avoiding to make a ruling.
"It is the High Court's obligation to hand down rulings within a reasonable
amount of time," they wrote.
"After so much time has passed from the date in which the (first) petition
was filed, the petitioners have a very bad feeling that the court is
deliberately being evasive."
The petitioners said the court evasion paves the way for the government and
the Israeli troops to regard targeted assassinations as legal and therefore to
continue implementing the policy.
"The evasiveness has had catastrophic results, and we cannot accept it
because innocent civilians are losing their lives as a result."
Hass said the judges were caught between a rock and a hard place.
He added that if they ruled against the petitions, their colleagues in other
countries would look down on them and if they ruled in favor they would make
many enemies at home.
"They can't stretch it out like chewing gum," Hass stressed. "This is what
they are paid to do."
Observers say the Israeli society is becoming increasingly opposed to the
tactic of assassination.
In a public opinion poll by the daily Yediot Ahronot a large number of
Israelis expressed doubts about both the tactics and the motives of such
operations.
Israel's history of assassinations stretches back to the early 1970s, when a
group of Israeli commandos assassinated three of the Palestine Liberation
Organization's top officials in Beirut.
The leader of the team, Ehud Barak, and his men gunned down all three
targets, according to accounts confirmed by Barak, who later became Israel's
prime minister.
Source: http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2006-11/14/04.shtml
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