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

QUESTION OF THE VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE OCCUPIED

ARAB TERRITORIES, INCLUDING PALESTINE

Letter dated 4 December 2002 from the Permanent Observer for Palestine

to the United Nations Office at Geneva addressed to the United Nations

High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Israeli occupation forces continue to perpetrate more attacks, aggressions, assaults, and war crimes in the ongoing bloody military campaign being waged against the Palestinian people all over the occupied Palestinian territory.

Crimes of extrajudicial execution continue: on Wednesday, 27 November, Atiya Rabaya (33) was driving home when Israeli troops at a roadblock on Beit Sahour road opened fire. Rabaya was shot in the head and died instantly.

Earlier on the same day, Israeli occupation troops shot dead a Palestinian civilian, Jihad Anatur (24 years old). Israeli soldiers opened fire at him in the Askar refugee camp as he went from door-to-door waking up fellow Muslims for Ramadan prayers. Israeli soldiers prevented an ambulance from reaching the area in which Jihad had been shot.

Israeli occupation forces assassinated two Palestinians during a midnight air raid on Tuesday, 26 November on the West Bank City of Jenin. An Israeli aircraft launched at least one air-to-surface missile at the house where Alaa Sabagh, 25, and Imad Nacharti, 23, were staying, killing them immediately.

Jihad Tahsin al-Faqeh, an 8-year old child, was murdered by Israeli forces in Nablus on Monday, 25 November, while on his way back from school. Jihad was shot in the head, killing him instantly. Another 13 people were injured during clashes in several parts of Nablus.

Sunday, 24 November: in a humiliating procedure, indicating the measure of impunity Israeli forces enjoy in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli soldiers forced a 28-year-old Palestinian to remove all his clothes and walk, stripped naked, during a cold rainy day on a main street. He was forced to act like a dog, and soon became hysterical.

Acts, assaults and crimes at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces and Israeli armed settlers, such as acts of deliberate killing, extrajudicial execution, liquidations and assassinations, severe beating, causing deliberate wounds and injuries, using tanks, escorted by military bulldozers and backed up by Apache aircraft, to raid, invade and reoccupy Palestinian areas, shelling densely populated neighbourhoods, causing severe damage to home, private and public institutions, terrifying residents, opening machine-gun fire at people deliberately and indiscriminately, declaring Palestinian-controlled areas closed military zones under constant siege and systematic curfew, carrying out house-to-house raids with sniffer dogs, carrying out wide-ranging detention campaigns amongst Palestinian civilian populations. destroying the main electricity transformer, leaving towns in total darkness, destroying water networks, uprooting trees, confiscating lands, stealing Palestinian shops, expropriating Palestinian-owned houses to turn them into military outposts, attacking mosques, desecrating holy places and blowing them up, demolishing homes, leaving many Palestinian families homeless; are all acts the Palestinian people continue to endure on a daily basis, in total violation of the provisions of human rights, the principles of international law, international humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

In the light of this bloody war and brutal military campaign being waged by Israel against the Palestinian people under occupation, and in the light of the persistence of Israel in committing such war crimes, State-sponsored terrorism and systematic human rights violations against the Palestinian people under its occupation with impunity, we appeal to Your Excellency and through you to the international community to bring an immediate end to all Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, to call on Israel to abide by international legitimacy and to live up to its obligations under international humanitarian law.

We also appeal to Your Excellency to use all your good offices to provide for an international protection force and presence in Palestine to monitor these daily Israeli aggressions, massacres and crimes and protect the Palestinian protected persons until Israel has withdrawn its forces from all the occupied Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem.

I would be most grateful if you could arrange to have this letter distributed to the members of the Commission on Human Rights as an official document of the fifty-ninth session of the Commission under its agenda item 8.

 (Signed): Nabil RAMLAWI

  Ambassador

  Permanent Observer

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