Killing Children
By Khalid Amayreh
03 November, 2004
Aljazeera
The
Palestinian Authority has accused Israel of making the killing of Palestinian
children by the occupation army a daily occurrence while calling on
the world to put an end to the practice.
"Every day
they murder one or two Palestinian children on their way to school,"
Palestinian Deputy Foreign Minister Abd Allah Abd Allah said.
"It is becoming
a gruesome daily routine and Israel, as you see, is interested more
in concocting and inventing lies to justify the murder than in stopping
it."
He told Aljazeera.net
that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian people were
increasingly frustrated by the international community's failure to
force Israel to stop the killing of Palestinian children.
Abd Allah said:
"I am afraid that much of the international community has reached
the nadir of its morality. What else explains this deadly silence and
indifference in the face of the daily killings of our children?
"I wonder how
many of our children will have to be riddled by Israeli bullets before
there is an awakening of the world's conscience."
Abd Allah's remarks
coincided with the killing by Israel of another Palestinian child in
the northern West Bank town of Jenin.
Palestinian sources
and witnesses said Israeli soldiers manning armed personnel carriers
opened fire on a group of children who reportedly had hurled stones
at Israeli tanks.
An Israeli army
spokesman said soldiers opened fire after "somebody" fired
from the direction of the children.
A witness contested
the Israeli account. "I was there, I saw no firing, I heard no
firing. The only people who were firing were the Israeli occupation
soldiers," Fadi Nazzal, a Palestinian from the nearby town of Kabatya,
told Aljazeera.net.
He said the Israeli
soldiers opened fire on children whose stone throwing had in no way
put Israeli troops at risk.
Nazzal added: "The
children were hurling stones from a long distance. The stones didn't
hit the armoured vehicles. But even if stones were hurled at these huge
tanks, would that justify executing children in this manner?"
On Thursday 28 October,
Israeli soldiers manning a watchtower opposite the Khan Yunus refugee
camp, south of Gaza City, opened fire at children, killing eight-year-old
Ranya Iyad Aram.
Hospital sources
said a stray bullet hit Aram in the neck, killing her on the spot.
The Israeli army
admitted that soldiers were "firing through heavy fog" towards
Palestinian neighbourhoods to forestall "possible" firing
of mortar shells by Palestinian resistance fighters.
The army said: "The
IDF opened machine-gun fire towards the Palestinian areas from which
Palestinian regularly fire mortar fire. Apparently, one of the bullets
hit the child. We are sorry about it."
PA minister Abd
Allah Abd Allah says an army that fires heavy machine-gun fire through
fog in civilian areas actually intends to kill civilians.
"This is Israel's
state terror. When troops open fire randomly on crowded streets and
schools just because somebody had fired a mortar shell from these areas
many days ago, it is murder, it is terror."
However, Israeli
army spokesman Eitan Arusi rejected Abd Allah's view.
"We are the
most moral army in the world. Look at what the Russians are doing in
Chechnya, it is a huge carnage there. The Israeli Defence Forces are
trying as much as humanly possible to avoid harming civilians,"
he said.
"Don't blame
the soldiers, blame the terrorists who operate in the midst of Palestinian
population centres."
People brutalised
Hamas spokesman
in Gaza, Mushir al-Masri, dismissed what he called Arusi's "corrupt
reasoning".
"The Palestinian
resistance fighters happen to be in their own homes, towns, streets,"
he said.
"They are defending
their children and women from this Nazi-like military occupation which
is brutalising and savaging an entire people in ways unprecedented since
the second world war."
Earlier this month,
the Israeli army killed two girls, one in Rafah in southern Gaza and
the other in central Gaza.
Since the beginning
of October, as many as 33 Palestinian children and minors under 17 have
been killed by the Israeli army. All in all, nearly 158 Palestinians,
the bulk of them civilians, were killed in October.
During the same
period, the Israeli army lost three soldiers.
The frequency of
killing Palestinian children and civilians by the Israeli army has aroused
suspicions within Israeli judicial circles over the credibility of the
army's accounts and investigations into the deaths.
Last week an Israeli
officer who in October shot a 12-year-old Palestinian child in Rafah
in southern Gaza 20 times to ascertain that she was dead, was arrested
briefly on suspicion that he lied about the incident.
"They are trying
to deceive the world, and I must admit they are succeeding this is not
a case of one or two or three or even 10 isolated cases of deliberate
murder"
PA official Abd
Allah Abd Allah dismisses the arrest as "no more than a public-relations
distraction from the real thing".
"They are trying
to deceive the world, and I must admit they are succeeding. This is
not a case of one or two or three or even 10 isolated cases of deliberate
murder," he said.
"I am talking
about a deliberate and systematic practice of targeting and murdering
Palestinian children for the purpose of inflicting pain and suffering
on our people. When murder occurs on a daily basis, it becomes policy
and Israel's policy is to murder Palestinian children."