Israel has become embroiled in another conflict with Amnesty International over charges by the London-based humanitarian agency that it has encouraged and condoned the killing of Palestinians as a means of controlling the intifada.
The charges, published in Amnesty’s January newsletter, drew an expression of “concern,” from the British Foreign Office.
But a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir branded them “total nonsense and absolutely baseless” in a statement from Jerusalem.
The Israeli Embassy in London also rejected the allegations.
Amnesty International claimed that Israel Defense Force guidelines for the use of firearms against civilians “appear to permit the killing of people who are involved in activities which do not necessarily endanger life.”
It charged further that the Israeli authorities “appear not to have taken adequate measures to investigate fatal incidents promptly and punish those found guilty of abuses.”
The organization cited details of a dozen killings, several of them involving children, and concluded that “taken together, these factors appear to add up to more than just tolerance of serious abuses and amount to real encouragement of them.”
Israeli military sources said IDF guidelines “strictly limit the use of gunfire to situations in which soldiers’ lives are in danger or in which they are trying to apprehend suspects and masked youths.”
The sources added that all killings are investigated and that soldiers who violate regulations are prosecuted.
61 SOLDIERS CONVICTED
The Israeli Embassy here disputed Amnesty’s claim that only four soldiers have been convicted for civilian deaths. The embassy said 61 have been convicted, of whom 46 were sentenced to prison terms.
The embassy also rejected Amnesty’s report that 70 Palestinians died in tear-gas incidents.
Amnesty alleged that leading intifada activists were killed “during operations whose ostensible purpose was arrest” and that “most appear to have been shot while trying to escape.”
In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Richard Boucher noted Wednesday that Israel has denied the allegations contained in the Amnesty report.
“We agree that Israel does not have a deliberate policy of the indiscriminate use of deadly force,” he said. “At the same time, we have long been strongly opposed to the Israeli military use of lethal fire in civilian disturbances, except in life-threatening situations.
The State Department will come out later this month with its own annual human rights report, which generally includes a section on the situation in the Israeli-administered territories.
(JTA Washington correspondent Howard Rosenberg contributed to this report.)
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