B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Haaretz and the international media – to Israelis, these have all fallen into the trash bin of the mendacious Palestinians. In the best case, they have become trapped in their own pure-hearted naivete, and in the worst, into collaborating with efforts to besmirch Israel and bolster prejudices against it. Like the Serbs of yore, we Israelis continue thinking it’s the world that is wrong, and only we who are right. (full article…)

PCHR and B’Tselem based their tallies on painstaking field research. (There are some small discrepancies between them. But most can be explained by differences in the definitions used.)

The Israeli government, by contrast, has not revealed the methodology by which – without having any access at all to surviving family members or local officials on the ground – it felt able to compile its much lower tally. (more…)

According to the B’Tselem data, 773 of those killed did not take part in the hostilities, 320 of whom were minors under the age of 18 and 109 were women (above the age of 18). The rest of those killed were 330 armed combatants, 245 Palestinian policemen – most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of the police station – and 38 others whose participation in the hostilities could not be determined. (more…)

Every crime recorded… though when the organization I used to work for (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights) published similar figures within weeks of the massacre, it was shrugged off by the international community. This was the single bloodiest episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, apart from Israel’s 1982 invasion and aerial bombardment of Lebanon.

The first detailed casualty figures from an Israeli human rights organisation since the war ended puts the number of children under 16 killed in the offensive at 252 as opposed to the 89 cited by the military. B’Tselem says its fieldworkers gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 of the children. (more…)

“During April four Palestinians, including two boys, were killed by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and another 145 were injured by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The number of Palestinians injured rose by 40 percent compared with the 2008 monthly average,” the report says. “We have noticed a significant increase in the incidents of both settler and soldier violence against Palestinian civilians since the new Israeli government took power at the beginning of the year,” says Ronen Shimoni from B’Tselem. “This is probably related to an increase in settlement activity in the West Bank as the rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to establish facts on the ground,” Shimoni told IPS. (more…)

I saw a child, who looked about twelve years old, and was dressed in white, was wearing a skullcap and had long, curly hair. He opened the door on the driver’s side and slammed it shut. Then he bent over and picked up a big rock. I was afraid he would throw it at us, and my daughter began to shout and asked the driver to get going quickly, before the child throws the rock at us. The soldier was still standing on the side of the ambulance, and put his hand on the window. Then the child threw the rock at the rear door of the ambulance, breaking the window, and it fell on the bed inside the ambulance. It weighed about three kilograms. Luckily, Hanaa and I were sitting on the seat and were not injured, but small pieces of glass scattered on my clothes. I began to shake in fear and to cry. I shouted and then I was just too overwhelmed to speak. My daughter and the paramedic tried to calm me. As they did that, another rock, a small one, flew into the ambulance, landing near the big rock. This one, too, didn’t hit me. The soldier standing next to us did not stop the child from throwing the stones, and let him run away. He didn’t do anything. (more…)

I watched them returning and saw a young settler stop and look around. I was afraid that he intended to do something, and right then, while I was thinking that, he picked up a stone and threw it at the car of my uncle Muhammad Nabih D’ana, who lives next-door. His car, a 1981 Subaru, was parked opposite his house. I saw and heard the rear window of the car shatter. I shouted, in Hebrew, to the settler, “What are you doing here?” Then, the soldiers aimed their rifles at my house, and one of them ordered me to shut up and stay inside. Other settlers began to throw stones at parked cars. I heard the stones strike the cars. I watched the settlers as they passed by my house, and then I went to the front door and continued to shout at them. I heard my uncle Muhammad D’ana and other neighbors shouting from their houses, but nobody went outside. (more…)

Palestinian sources reported Friday that a local demonstrator was killed after being hit in the chest by a tear gas canister during a protest against the separation fence in the West Bank village of Bilin. (more…)

After Tristan Anderson, an American demonstrator, was seriously injured by an Israeli tear-gas canister last month, Israel denied the weapon that tear-gas canisters were being used as weapons. But as the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem points out, “Firing of this kind has already resulted in injuries, some grave, to dozens of Palestinians and Israeli and foreign citizens.” This is the daily reality of life under Israeli brutality…

The fire spread throughout the house. I was holding my daughter Farah and we were both burned too. My clothes went up in flames, and some of my skin and Farah’s skin was scorched. Luckily, my baby daughter Aya wasn’t hurt. I ripped the clothes off my body and cried out that I was burning. I was naked in front of everybody in the house. My body was burning and the pain was excruciating. I could smell my flesh burning. (more…)

Israel was very quick to close the case on allegations of “serious misconduct” during its recent massacre in Gaza.

Earlier this month, several Israeli soldiers revealed the permissive atmosphere towards killing Palestinian civilians during Israel’s invasion. Among other shocking revelations, one soldier recounted the intentional shooting of an unarmed woman and her two children. Commenting on the incident, another soldier elaborated:

“What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. (more…)

Concluding that the testimonies were “based on hearsay” and had been “purposely exaggerated,” Israel’s head military prosecutor closed the whirlwind investigation and that is apparently as far as the case will go…

Of course, the investigation was a sham — as Israel’s military investigations almost always are. It ignored scores of evidence that illegal orders were given to Israeli soldiers in Gaza… not to mention the liberty some members of the IDF took to destroy civilian property and scrawl racist remarks on the walls of Palestinian homes. But, no… Zionist brutality is just “hearsay”.

According to the Israeli human rights organization, B’tselem:

The speedy closing of the investigation immediately raises suspicions that the very opening of this investigation was merely the army’s attempt to wipe its hands of all blame for illegal activity during Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

Discriminatory and unfair division of the shared water sources creates a chronic water shortage in the West Bank. Average per capita daily water consumption of Palestinians in the West Bank is two-thirds of the amount recommended by the World Health Organization. Due to the shortage, many Palestinians have to buy water from tankers at three to six times higher than regular prices, forcing poor families to spend up to one-fifth of their income on water, compared to the slightly more than one percent that average-income Israeli families spend on water. (more…)

If there is a single act that characterizes the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation, it is waiting: waiting in lines to pass through the hundreds of checkpoints scattered across the West Bank, waiting for Israel to issue an identification card, waiting for permission to travel to the next village or out of the country, waiting for loved ones languishing in Israeli prisons to be released — waiting for peace, waiting for justice.

And for nearly two months, I found myself sharing the experience of waiting — for Israel to allow me into Gaza.

Last year, I spent an extended period of time in Gaza working with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), helping them to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories. But the abuses I documented then now seem tame in comparison to the recent heights of atrocity Gaza has endured.
(more…)

Since the beginning of Operation “Cast Lead” at the end of 2008, there has been a sharp rise in reports of violence perpetrated by security forces against Palestinians in the West Bank. During this nearly three-month period, B’Tselem documented 24 cases in which police officers and soldiers beat Palestinians, using rifle butts, clubs and other means of injury. 16 of the cases were especially serious and their victims suffered heavier injuries. (more…)

“I do not know of any military that is more moral, fair and sensitive to civilians’ lives than the IDF,” he said. (more…)

They had just gone a little distance when there was an explosion. We were hit. We fell down, and I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then I started hearing again. I heard combat helicopters and gunfire, and I didn’t know where they were firing. Husam, Mahmoud, and I stayed where we were for about an hour, maybe more. Then the daughters of our neighbors came and took us into one of the houses. My father and uncle came there and took us to an ambulance. They told me that Husam had been killed and Mahmoud was wounded. My eyes were hurt, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to see again. (more…)

In February 2005, Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon adopted the recommendation of a team appointed to analyze the matter, headed by Major General Udi Shani, that the policy should be terminated. The team found that house demolition does not serve to deter and causes greater damage than benefit. The team’s findings undermined the claim of deterrence that Israel had argued for many years.

Despite this, yesterday Israel sealed parts of the Abu Dahim house, as stated above, which is home to the parents, brothers and sisters of ‘Alaa Abu Dahim. The floors that were sealed were a residential floor, on which the perpetrator, his parents and one of his brothers lived, and the basement floor, which has apartments for rent. (more…)

A few minutes later, soldiers arrived at the house and called on the father of the family to step out. As ‘Attiyah a-Samuni approached the door, one of the soldiers ordered him to raise his hands and then, without warning, the soldiers opened fire and killed him, in front of his family. They then continued to shoot into the room in which the family was gathered, injuring several members. (more…)

A Palestinian besieged in the Khuza’a area, in south-eastern Gaza, reported today that Israeli soldiers shot a woman waving a white flag and civilians who were fleeing a bombed house on army orders, killing at least three and wounding others. (more…)

Khaled had ridden his bicycle to the place, but before he managed to get there, the planes bombed again. Shrapnel from the second missile struck Khaled and he fell from the bicycle. Other people were injured. After that, everybody thought the bombing had ended. Two people came to help Khaled. Shortly after that, another missile was fired. Khaled was killed immediately, along with one of the two people who were trying to help him. The other person, Abu Laftah, was injured and is still in hospital. (more…)

B’Tselem received the testimony of Ahmad Sanur, the owner of the truck bombed. Sanur claims the truck was carrying oxygen canisters used for welding, not Grad rockets. B’Tselem field worker took photos of oxygen canisters left on the site of the bombing. (more…)