Human rights situation in the OT – CHR – Letter from Palestine

QUESTION OF THE VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE

OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES, INCLUDING PALESTINE

Letter dated 2 April 1998 from the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations

Office at Geneva addressed to the High Commissioner for Human Rights

and to the Chairman of the Commission on Human Rights

The Israeli occupation authorities are confirming once again their perpetration of terrorist practices against the Palestinian people n practices that are included within the framework of State terrorism n when they killed last Sunday 29 March 1998 the martyr Mohiyeddine Sharif in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Furthermore, Mr. Ariel Sharon, Minister of infrastructure in the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu, declared last week that the Israeli occupation authorities will kill Khaled Mashaal, since the Israeli Mossad agents failed to do so in Amman, Jordan, on 25 September 1997.

Sharon's statements have special importance since he is a member of the ministerial committee for security affairs.  It is also the first time that Israel announced the intention to liquidate a person in name.  Statements by Sharon, who was one of the Israeli officials directly in charge of the 1982 massacres against the Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Beirut, broke Israel's silence, which it commonly practised concerning its terrorist acts.

All this takes place after the murder of the martyr Yahya Ayyash in January 1996 in Gaza by the Israeli Mossad agency, in addition to inciting Israeli settlers to kill Palestinian civilians, whether men, women or children, giving compensations to the Israeli soldiers for killing Palestinians, and not investigating them nor submitting them to trial, as was the case on 10 March 1998, when the Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian workers and wounded nine others in Tarkumiya Junction, in the Palestinian occupied territory.

These acts of deliberate killing and violation of the right to life of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli soldiers and the Mossad agency are a confirmation of the terrorist method which is being used by the Hebrew State, and of the disregard of the Israeli Government for all the principles of human rights, particularly the right to life.

I would be grateful to you if you could have this memorandum distributed as an official document to the members of the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on Human Rights, under agenda item 4.

—–