Michael Jansen

The slaying last weekend by Israeli Border Police of 11-year-old Mahmoud Ibrahim Al Karnawi and seven other Palestinians, both civilians and fighters, shows that the prospect of the peace summit called by George W. Bush has not compelled Israel to scale down its military campaign against Palestinians. Instead, Israel seems to be stepping up raids against Palestinian population centres and escalating pressure on Palestinian citizens at roadblocks and checkpoints as the Olmert government contemplates legalising settlement outposts in the West Bank.

There was a brief flurry of comment in some Israeli media about Karnawi because he was a citizen of the Jewish state. His mother, from the village of Saida near Tulkarem in the West Bank, is married to a resident of the bedouin town of Rahat, located in Israel “proper”. Israel is a little sensitive to some bedouin concerns because members of this community serve in the Border Police. The dead boy was visiting maternal relatives in Saida when the Israeli police stormed their house, killing him and a member of Islamic Jihad.

According to Palestinian witnesses, Mahmoud and the other fatality were finished off with shots to the head by the Israelis. A third Jihad fighter died in custody. Two Palestinians were killed in Gaza and three in Jenin.

The weekend tally was not unusual. The Gaza-based Palestinian Human Rights Centre reported that during the week of August 16-22, 16 Palestinians, including three children, were killed and 18 injured by Israeli forces. Thirteen of the fatalities were in the Gaza Strip; 10 were executed; 44 were kidnapped and detained. Between August 9 and 15, the toll was eight killed, 31 injured and 61 arrested.

In an opinion article published in the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz last Sunday, Zvi Bar’el predicted the killing would carry on until the summit, even if it runs the risk of torpedoing negotiations. He even suggested that Israel is escalating its raids and shootings ahead of the summit.

“Suddenly, it seems that everything is permissible because ‘there is a summit’. It is permissible to kill children in Gaza, it is all right to continue to harass civilians at checkpoints, it is permitted to continue to strangle a million and a half people in Gaza - because there will soon be a summit and everything will be fine; we just need to liquidate another senior wanted man before the peace.”

Aware that he is losing face in front of his people for continuing to talk to Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert while Israeli forces raid Palestinian cities and towns, President Mahmoud Abbas has called for a halt to Israeli raids and assassinations. But Israel has turned a deaf ear to his pleas.

Amnesty International reported that Israel killed more than 650 Palestinians during 2006, half of them unarmed civilians, including 120 children. This figure is three times the number of Palestinian fatalities in 2005. During 2006, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians fell by half, to 27; amongst them were 20 civilians and one child.

Between September 29, 2000, and August 15, 2007, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, reported that 4,228 Palestinians, 952 of them children, and 1,024 Israelis, including 118 children, were killed. Of the Palestinians slain, 218 were assassinated and 367 were “collateral” fatalities.

There are other very telling statistics. Of the Israelis killed, 54.5 per cent died on their own land and 45.5 per cent on the land of others, while 98.6 of the Palestinians were slain on their own property. This means that nearly all Palestinians killed by Israelis are not engaged in offensive operations but are either defending their homes, villages and towns or are innocent civilians. It is also significant that suicide is the biggest killer of Israeli soldiers, while Israel is responsible for nearly all deaths of Palestinian fighters.

A few die, infrequently, in work accidents (making bombs or rockets).

Amnesty’s figures for Palestinian fatalities do not include men, women and children who died because they could not reach medical treatment thanks to Israeli closures, barricades and blockades.

Writing in Haaretz, on October 17, 2004, Gideon Levy, observed that Palestinian deaths, even of children, are “not on the [Israeli] public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with statistics.

“The plain fact … is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands.... An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.”

Levy dismissed claims by the Israeli army that children were hit in crossfire or by mistake. He said an army does not make hundreds of mistakes.

“… this is the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanisation of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behaviour...

“Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it’s no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty...”

Levy also made the points that thousands of schoolchildren have been injured, some of them “crippled for life”, others traumatised when Israeli troops broke into their homes in the middle of the night or Israeli tanks fired at their schools.

Levy continued: “The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israeli accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child’s fate means, turn away and don’t want to hear about the anxiety harboured by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become a part of the dehumanisation campaign: killing hundreds of them is no long a big deal.”