Israeli firing zones are usually closed military areas exclusively reserved for military training purposes. They are scattered all over the Occupied West Bank, encompassing many small and equally scattered Palestinian villages of mostly Bedouin communities.
The idea of the creation of “firing zones” was the brainchild of Ariel Sharon when he was minister of agriculture in 1979. Despite designating them as firing zones, Sharon, essentially a military man, had another sinister purpose in mind.
In a recently declassified document (in Hebrew), Sharon told a secret meeting with the World Zionist Organisation’s Settlement Division, that he wanted such zones to “provide an opportunity for Jewish settlements in the area.” He explained his intention behind creating the zones by saying “the firing zones were created for one purpose: land reserves for settlements.” Literally, to help settlers grab more Palestinian land.
Firing zones are not the same as “closed military areas” regularly announced by the Israeli army. Closed military areas are usually temporary, limited in scope and intended for a purpose. Usually, their designation, as such, is lifted once the purpose behind the designation has been achieved. For example, when the Israeli army and security forces besiege any Palestinian city, town or village looking for resistance fighters or seeking to murder or apprehend an individual, they designate such target area as a “closed military area”. Once the purpose is achieved, the designation is lifted.
Firing zones, on the other hand, tend to be permanent or remain as such for longer. Any civilians – and there are thousands of them – living in such zones or near them become less safe and face expulsion and their dwellings are demolished. Israel usually justifies such measures by “building without permit” or because the building is standing in a “military zone”, but usually avoids using the firing zone label.
Firing Zone 918, declared in the 1980s, is a good example of this. It encompasses a sizeable piece of land in the Southern Hebron region, surrounding, particularly, the Masafer Yatta, area. Thousands of Bedouin Palestinians living in the area are facing expulsion. Their case has been in the courts for the last 40 years. By the time it reached the Israeli occupation High Court in May 2022, the court simply threw out all residents’ petitions by upholding the long-standing expulsion of thousands of them. In explaining its ruling, the court said that those Palestinians were not living in the area before it was designated as a firing zone. However, historical Israeli sources show that Palestinians have been there, at least, since the end of the 19th century— long before Israel itself came into existence.
Under international law, firing zones are illegal since they are on occupied land. According to the United Nations 2022 report, firing zones take up to 18 per cent of the West Bank land which is about the same total area under the control of the Palestinian Authority pursuant to the Oslo Accords (some 17.7 per cent of the West Bank area is supposed to be controlled by PA) when, in reality, the PA only enjoys limited and occasional authority over this area and it is always vulnerable to incursions by Israeli forces. On top of that, as per the Oslo Accords, some 30 per cent of area C of the West Bank has also been designated as a firing zone—area C is fully controlled by Israel and is supposed to be transferred to full PA control after the final status negotiations, which have never taken place so far. Area C is about 60 per cent of the entire Occupied West Bank.
The same UN report estimates that almost 5,000 civilian Palestinians in 38 communities are scattered within these firing zones. It says that only 20 per cent of the designated firing zones are actively used for military training purposes, while the rest are mostly inactive. Around these areas, settlers, under the protection of the Israeli army, usually erect their colonial outposts on Palestinian land and later expand them into fully-fledged settlements.
Firing zones are closed to the public and the Israeli military uses them whenever it wants without any warning, thus endangering the lives of the civilian population living within or around such areas, eventually, leading to their forced expulsion. They represent serious dangers including: displacement, damage to property, safety risks and access restrictions among others.
Last March, Cassandra Dixon, a 64-year-old peace activist from Wisconsin in the United States, joined other protestors in trying to prevent the expulsion of Tuba village residents. Tuba is one of 15 such villages that make up Masafer Yatta.
Despite her age and the fact that she was peacefully protesting, she was attacked by a settler who hit her with what she described as a “large stick” over her head, causing a fracture to her skull and bleeding in “my brain”, she said.
Because she is a US citizen, she managed to go to court with the help of the US State Department. With additional pressure from a US Senator, the Israeli authorities arrested the settler and the case went to trial.
Mrs. Dixon, in an email message to me, wrote “the court scheduled another hearing for 2 November.” In a previous hearing, on 6 September, she said the entire proceeding was held “in Hebrew”, without interpretation. She does not understand the language. To make things even worse, the presiding judge ordered the human rights lawyer, who was accompanying her, to leave the courtroom, leaving her alone.
The attacking settler, named Dovid Weinstock, was released from jail and put under house arrest, pending the court ruling.
Mrs. Dixon told me she is determined to go back during next year’s olive harvest to help prevent the village being “seized” by Israel. In the meantime, while in Wisconsin she, along with a group of locals, are sponsoring olive trees to “replace” the ones destroyed by settlers.
Mrs. Dixon managed to reach the court because she was a US citizen. Imagine how it is for Palestinians, whom Israel does not recognise as citizens of its own or that of any other state, including Palestine, and how their suffering is simply ignored by Israel and its judiciary.
October 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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Israeli forces have opened fire on a vehicle near the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm, killing two Palestinian youths.
The victims, identified as Hudhayfah Fares and Abd al-Rahman Atta, were shot dead after Israeli troops targeted their car near the village of Shufah, south of Tulkarm in the northwestern part of West Bank, on Thursday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed the death of Atta, 23, and Fares, 27, saying they were killed during confrontations with the occupying regime’s forces, Palestine’s official Wafa news agency reported.
The two slain Palestinians were from the Tulkarm camp and lived in the suburb of Dhanaba, east of the city.
Violent clashes erupted in the Tulkarm refugee camp after Israeli forces invaded it, and fired live rounds, stun grenades and teargas canisters towards Palestinians.
Medical sources also reported that two people were wounded by Israeli bullets, one in the shoulder and the other in the abdomen, adding that their condition is stable.
Over the past months, Israel has ramped up attacks on Palestinian towns and cities throughout the occupied territories. As a result of these attacks, dozens of Palestinians have lost their lives and many others have been arrested.
More than 200 Palestinians have been killed this year in the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza. The majority of these fatalities have been recorded in the West Bank.
Those figures indicate that 2023 is already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the United Nations began keeping track of fatalities in 2005.
Previously, 2022 had been the deadliest year with 150 Palestinians killed, of whom 33 were minors, according to the United Nations.
October 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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In the pitch darkness of night, on October 3, 2015, a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz city came under high-precision, indiscriminate airstrikes, shattering the deafening silence.
Kunduz Trauma Center – including its intensive care unit, emergency rooms, laboratory, x-ray unit, outpatient department, mental health and physiotherapy ward – were all reduced to rubble.
At least 42 people, including patients, staff and caretakers, were killed in the devastating attack carried out by an American gunship, marking one of the deadliest chapters in the 20-year-long American war.
Tuesday marked the eighth anniversary of the tragic incident, and yet another reminder of how the US-led coalition perpetrated horrendous war crimes in the South Asian country following the invasion in 2001 and how the victims of America’s longest war that lasted two decades were denied justice.
The only thing Americans did was “apologize” to MSF – apologize for destroying dozens of lives and families, making more children orphans and filling more graveyards in Afghanistan.
How did the attack unfold?
At the end of September 2015, there was fierce fighting between the government and rebel forces in the north of the country, and the Taliban managed to capture the city of Kunduz.
The Afghan National Army responded to it with a counter-offensive in an attempt to regain control of the city, so they called in the US Air Force for help.
The Kunduz Trauma Centre was located in the city center, operated by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) since 2011. It catered to the local population in Kunduz.
Although it was in the middle of a rapidly changing frontline, MSF personnel had informed all warring parties of the location of its hospital complex.
Medical facilities are protected under international humanitarian law, so MSF officials and doctors had considered themselves relatively safe until all hell broke loose.
American military officials were also informed, and precise GPS coordinates were sent to them four days before the airstrike, according to multiple reports.
At 2:08 a.m. on October 3, the US Air Force started precise and repeated airstrikes on the Kunduz Trauma Centre complex that lasted for around one hour.
A US AC-130 Hercules gunship fired 211 shells on the main hospital building where patients were sleeping in their beds or being operated on in the operating theatre.
The surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched. During an hour of horror, MSF teams desperately called both Afghan and US military authorities to stop the airstrikes.
In a report at the time, the Washington Post admitted that US AC-130 gunship aircraft circled the hospital in the darkness of night, loaded with 25mm and 40mm cannon as well as a 105mm howitzer.
Every time the aircraft passed, approximately every 15 minutes, it fired and hit the main hospital building “repeatedly and precisely”, MSF said at the time, suggesting that it was not accidental.
US commander in Afghanistan John F Campbell later admitted that the hospital was “mistakenly struck”, without a shred of remorse and without any promise of justice and accountability.
Who were the victims?
Amid the fighting between two warring sides, the MSF staff were overwhelmed with hundreds of wounded patients whose number increased as the fighting intensified.
In the five days leading up to the airstrike, they treated 376 patients in the emergency room.
On the night of the fatal air attack, there were 105 patients in the hospital building, as well as 140 of the MSF staff, of whom 80 were on duty, according to reports.
According to official MSF data, at least 42 people were killed, including 24 patients (among others three children), 14 staff and 4 caretakers. An additional 37 people were seriously injured.
The killed staff were all Afghan nationals, which was a significant loss for a nation that had and continues to have an extremely low doctor-patient ratio.
Their patients burned in their beds, their medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs, and others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.
The US airstrike made the hospital unusable and all surviving critical patients were referred to other providers, and all MSF staff was evacuated from the war-torn Kunduz.
It was the only health facility of its kind in northeastern Afghanistan, according to MSF, which provided free high-level life and limb-saving trauma care, especially during the years of war.
After the attack, MSF demanded an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFCC.org) to establish the facts of the devastating attack.
The call was summarily rejected by Washington. A US report concludes that it was not a war crime.
“The investigation concluded that certain personnel failed to comply with the rules of engagement in the law of armed conflict,” Joseph Votel, commander of US Central Command, said after the attack.
“However, the investigation did not conclude that these failures amounted to a war crime. The label war crimes is typically reserved for intentional acts — intentional targeting of civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations.”
In response, MSF President Meinie Nicolai said the report amounted to “an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which US forces failed to follow the basic laws of war”.
Human rights activists say the demand for an independent investigation was fair but it could have exposed the US military adventures in Afghanistan and that was a reason enough for them to reject it.
How did the US push it under the carpet?
US officials tried hard to downplay their role in the undeniable crime and even pushed it under the rug, changing the story several times and giving contradictory information to the media.
The first official reaction was that they were targeting Taliban positions and that the airstrike may have resulted in “collateral damage” in a nearby hospital, which is a long-standing US euphemism for civilian casualties.
MSF immediately denied US claims of an “accident,” stating that the building was hit precisely and repeatedly, despite giving coordinates to the Pentagon and their desperate calls during the attack.
Multiple examples appeared in the media when the US military did not show humanitarian principles towards doctors, destroying and invading numerous hospitals and even interrupting surgical operations.
As a result, the official story was changed and it was no longer a stray bomb or an accident, but a deliberate airstrike targeting the Taliban fighters at the hospital.
Once again, MSF denied US claims as none of its staff at the hospital heard or saw Taliban fighters engaging US or Afghan forces. MSF has issued this statement:
“Today the US government has admitted that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff.
Their description of the attack keeps changing, from collateral damage to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government. The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs.
The US hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition.
There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical.”
The Pentagon’s final report released in April 2016 changed the story again and called the attack an “accident,” arguing it thus did not amount to a war crime.
After the investigation, 16 members of the US military were disciplined in the form of suspension and removal from command, though none were criminally charged.
The victims were offered money as compensation, $6,000 for dead and $3,000 for wounded people, which tells us how much Washington values Afghan life.
A similar compensation of $5,000 was offered by the German government for the victims of the 2009 German airstrike in Kunduz that killed between 100 and 200 Afghan civilians.
For comparison, in 2018 a federal judge in New York set damage awards for 9/11 victims according to the following scale: $12.5 million per spouse, $8.5 million per parent, $8.5 million per child and $4.25 million per sibling.
Ajmal Barakzai is an Afghan activist currently living in Europe.
October 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, United States |
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