Amnesty International says the body must have a mandate to investigate and prosecute offenders.
It also denounced the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank and called on Palestinians to end militant attacks.
The report marks 40 years since the Mid-East war which led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen said Israel could not justify its behaviour in the West Bank under security grounds.
"Legitimate security concerns are no excuse for... the mistreatment of thousands of Palestinians in a massive programme of collective punishment," she said.
In response to the report, Israel's government defended its observance of international law, and Palestinian rights activists said what was needed was a peacekeeping force - not more monitors with no mandate to intervene.
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Amnesty says that since September 2000, Israeli forces have killed some 4,000 Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians and including about 800 children.
Palestinian armed groups have killed more than 1,100 Israelis, some 750 of them civilians and including 120 children.
About a third of the Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian armed groups were settlers in the occupied territories.
Amnesty stressed that the settlers are civilians who should never be targeted.
The group said human rights violations by both sides highlighted the need for an effective international watchdog.
"This must be backed up with a commitment to investigate and prosecute, through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, those who commit war crimes or other crimes under international law."
Excerpted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6718283.stm
I would love to see this implemented, but sadly I am not sure what good it might actually do. Much of the world, including the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a host of other NGOs and IGOs have taken Israel to task on the its heavy-handed, bordering on brutal, security policies (as well as calling on groups like Hamas and Islamic Jyhad to stop attacks on civilians). But it seems like not much ever changes. Maybe, as many Palestinian activists have suggested, a peace keeping force with the mandate to intervene to protect civilians would make a difference, but monitoring seems to do little. And honestly, nothing is likely to change at all so long as the US gives nearly blind support to Israeli policies--which also will prevent a force with any mandate for intervention from ever coming into existence. I am not suggesting that the US should completely withdraw support for Israel, but it seems hard for us to call on other nations to support international human rights laws (or even to shame China for its close financial dealings with the Sudan) when we constantly turn a blind eye to the abuses committed by Israel. Just take a look at the numbers presented above: Israeli forces have killed 5 times as many Palestinian civilians as Palestinian factions have killed Israeli civilians; and the numbers for children are more staggering, coming in at almost 7 to 1. One word: Repugnant.
1 comment:
I agree that here needs to be SOMETHING done on the Israel/Palestine front. A watchdog without teeth would be pretty useless. I mean, we know that there are atrocities committed by both sides. But without the means to change anything, any organization setup there would basically be a number of people waiting to become "collateral damage". Sadly, the only answer may be an independent party who enforces peace and "justice" at the end of a gun.
Both sides suck.
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