Source: http://www.renegadetribune.com/israel-carried-extrajudicial-executions-tortured-children-report/
Renegade Editor’s Note: While I am not a fan of Amnesty
International, I do not doubt anything put forth in their report.
Israeli authorities and armed forces
carried out extrajudicial executions, tortured Palestinian prisoners and
targeted human rights defenders, Amnesty International’s new annual report says.
2017
“marked the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the [occupied]
Palestinian Territories” (OPT), Amnesty noted, “and the 10th anniversary of its
illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.”
Israeli authorities
intensified the expansion of settlements and related infrastructure across the
West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and carried out a large number of demolitions
of Palestinian property, forcibly evicting more than 660 people,” the report states.
“Many
of these demolitions were in Bedouin and herding communities that the Israeli
authorities planned to forcibly transfer.”
Meanwhile,
Amnesty also slammed “Israel’s air, land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip,”
which it says is “collectively punishing Gaza’s entire population of
approximately 2 million inhabitants.”
Addressing
the use of lethal violence, Amnesty International noted that Israeli forces
killed 76 Palestinians and one foreign national in 2017, adding that “many,
including children, were shot and unlawfully killed while posing no immediate
threat to life.”
Some
killings, Amnesty continued, “appeared to have been extrajudicial executions.”
Across
the occupied territories, “Israeli forces, including undercover units, used
excessive and sometimes lethal force when they used rubber-coated metal bullets
and live ammunition against Palestinian protesters,” killing “at least 20, and
injuring thousands.”
Amnesty’s
annual report notes the killing in December of “wheelchair user Ibrahim Abu Thurayya,” who “was shot in the head by
an Israeli soldier as he was sitting with a group of protesters near the fence
separating Gaza from Israel.”
The
new report also commented on Israel’s use of mass incarceration as a tool of
political repression, documenting how “Israel detained or continued to imprison
thousands of Palestinians from the OPT, mostly in prisons in Israel, in
violation of international law.”
Israeli
authorities also “continued to substitute administrative detention for criminal
prosecution,” says Amnesty, “holding hundreds of Palestinians, including
children, civil society leaders and NGO workers, without charge or trial under
renewable orders, based on information withheld from detainees and their
lawyers.”
Furthermore,
“Israeli soldiers and police and Israel Security Agency [Shin Bet] officers
subjected Palestinian detainees, including children, to torture and other ill-treatment with impunity, particularly
during arrest and interrogation.”
Amnesty
International also accused Israeli authorities of using “a range of measures,
both in Israel and the OPT, to target human rights defenders who criticised
Israel’s continuing occupation.”
Other
topics covered by the report, in relation to Israel’s ongoing rights
violations, included the lack of accountability, “more than three years” later,
for “evidently unlawful attacks including war crimes” committed by the Israeli
military in its 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.
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