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palestinian youth
US Government Complicit in Israel's Videotaped Murder of Palestinian Boys
May 21, 2014
Unlawful killing of two Palestinian teens outside OferSubscribe to our mailing list: https://bit.ly/1jxSx7B. Israeli forces killed two Palestinian teens during clashes near Ofer military prison ...
A United States government call on Israel to investigate the cold-blooded videotaped killing of two Palestinian boys falls far short of a real demand for accountability and amounts to complicity in covering up the crime.
The boys, 17-year-old Nadim Siam Nuwara and 16-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu al-Thahir, were killed at a Nakba Day protest near the Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia on 15 May.
The video evidence indicates that Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon was simply lying when he claimed that "it was a life-threatening situation, so the officers acted accordingly."
The videos confirm that the boys were shot dead at long distance like hunted animals and were not engaged in any activity that could plausibly be described as threatening to anyone. Muhammad was shot while he had his back to the source of the gunfire that fatally wounded him.
The first of the videos, taken by security cameras on a nearby store, were released by Defence for Children International - Palestine Section on 19 May.
Additional footage taken from another angle was released by Israeli rights group B'Tselem yesterday.
A third boy, Muhammad Abdullah Hussein al-Azzeh, 15, not seen in the videos, sustained a gunshot wound in the back and left lung during the same demonstration. The fourth victim, a 23-year-old who B'Tselem said wished to remain unnamed, was lightly injured.
Israel told to investigate itself
"We are closely following this incident in the video," US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told journalists at the daily briefing on 20 May.
"We look to the Government of Israel to conduct a prompt and transparent investigation to determine the facts surrounding this incident, including whether or not the use of force was proportional to the threat posed by the demonstrators. We express, of course, our condolences to the families of those deceased and urge all parties to exercise restraint."
Asked if based on the video the State Department thought the Israeli "response proportional to the threat," Psaki replied, "We're not going to make an evaluation on that from here. We are encouraging the government of Israel to conduct their own investigation."
Impunity
Given Israel's total failure to properly investigate virtually any killings of Palestinians and the systematic impunity afforded to killers, the US call for Israel to investigate itself is tantamount to complicity in covering up the killings.
Since 2000, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,400 children.
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which Israeli soldiers hiding near schools had deliberately killed Palestinian children.
According to Amnesty International, "trigger-happy" Israeli occupation forces have engaged in a pattern of "war crimes" against Palestinians. Yet, according to Israeli legal advocacy group Yesh Din, "Most cases of violent crimes against Palestinians not only go unpunished - but often are completely ignored by the authorities."
Yesh Din says that 94 percent of criminal investigations launched by Israeli occupation authorities against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians and their property are closed without any indictments.
In December 2012, an Israeli occupation soldier shot dead Palestinian teenager Muhammad al-Salaymeh on his seventeenth birthday in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
Video of the incident totally contradicted the version of events given to Israeli media by Nofar Mizrahi, the occupation soldier who killed him. Yet once again, despite the evidence, Mizrahi has enjoyed complete impunity.
Amnesty International confirms that Israeli soldiers and officers, if investigated at all, generally go unpunished for killing or injuring Palestinian civilians, even when they do so in violation of Israel's own legal system.
The failure of the US to demand any real accountability is hardly surprising: one of the Obama administration's proudest achievements was helping Israel bury the UN-commissioned Goldstone report into Israel's December 2008-January 2009 massacre in Gaza.
The US has also tenaciously assisted Israel to avoid accountability over its killings of nine people, including the American youth Furkan Dogan, aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010.
Continuing this unbroken pattern of cover up and complicity, the US was alone out of 47 countries in voting against several resolutions condemning Israeli abuses at the UN Human Rights Council in March.
Under Obama, US military aid to Israel has reached record levels.
Live ammunition
In addition to the transparent lies about the killings of Nadim and Muhammad from the Israeli defense minister, Israeli occupation forces spokesperson Peter Lerner claimed that preliminary findings show that occupation forces fired only rubber-coated steel bullets and did not use live fire.
However, B'Tselem said it had "obtained medical opinions regarding the entry and exit wounds found in the bodies of all four victims, which are completely consistent with injuries caused by live fire and could not have been caused by rubber-coated metal bullets - especially not when fired at a relatively long range, as was the case here. Also, eyewitness accounts described the sound of live gunfire, which sounds different from rubber-coated bullet fire."
The evidence, B'Tselem said, raised "grave suspicion" that occupation forces "willfully killed two Palestinians" and "injured two others" and demanded investigation by Israel's Military Police Investigations Unit "into the military's highly incorrect version of the incident conveyed to the media."
B'Tselem surely knows, as does the US government, that the chances for impartial justice for Muhammad, Nadim and the other victims from the same occupation authorities that sent soldiers out armed to occupy and kill are precisely zero.
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Calls for Justice After Video Reveals IDF Shooting of Innocent Palestinian Teens
Rights group says killings amount to "war crimes," demands international probe
May 20, 2014
International outcry and condemnation came swiftly on Tuesday following the release of video footage showing two innocent Palestinian teenagers being shot dead by Israeli forces.
According to rights group Defense for Children International -- Palestine, which obtained and circulated the security camera footage, Nadeem Siam Nawara, 17, and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh, 16, sustained fatal gunshot wounds on May 15 by Israeli Defense Forces after participating in a demonstration near the Ofer military prison in the West Bank. The teens were there to mark Nakba (or Catastrophe) Day, which commemorates the 1948 mass displacement of Palestinians, and express solidarity with the hunger striking prisoners currently held in the detention center.
After the video was made public, assistant UN secretary general for political affairs Oscar Fernandez-Taranco demanded an "independent and transparent" probe into the circumstances surrounding the boys' deaths.
"It is of serious concern that initial information appears to indicate that the two Palestinians killed were both unarmed and appeared to pose no direct threat," said Fernandez-Taranco.
"The UN calls for an independent and transparent investigation by the Israeli authorities into the two deaths, and urges Israel to ensure that its security forces strictly adhere to the basic principles on the use of force and firearms by law enforcement officials," he said at a briefing of the UN Security Council.
Though the closed circuit television footage showed some rocks being thrown by protesters early on, as one witness reported, "at the moment of the killings, nothing was going on and no stone throwing was taking place."
"The images captured on video show unlawful killings where neither child presented a direct and immediate threat to life at the time of their shooting," said Rifat Kassis, executive director of DCIP. "These acts by Israeli soldiers may amount to war crimes, and the Israeli authorities must conduct serious, impartial, and thorough investigations to hold the perpetrators accountable."
The video below contains graphic and disturbing footage:
Unlawful killing of two Palestinian teens outside OferSubscribe to our mailing list: https://bit.ly/1jxSx7B. Israeli forces killed two Palestinian teens during clashes near Ofer military prison ...
Brad Parker, an attorney and International Advocacy Officer with DCIP, told Vice News that their organization is currently in discussion with the victims' families about pursuing complaints with both the Israeli Army and international bodies. However, he is not optimistic that they will be successful.
"We think the likelihood of having an impartial, open and thorough investigation opened is very slim," he said. "But we think that the key to child protection in occupied Palestinian territories is accountability, because Israeli soldiers can do whatever they want at the moment with essentially no repercussions."
The teens' deaths raise the number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in 2014 to four, according to data collected by DCIP. Since 2000, over 1,400 Palestinian children have been killed as a result of Israeli military and settler presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Reacting to the news, many expressed grief for the other Palestinian children whose deaths were not caught on camera.
\u201cI shudder to think how many other unspoken causalities there are or how many Nadeem & Mohammads have been killed.\n#Justice4NadeemandMohammad\u201d— Anam (@Anam) 1400613051
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