Joint Report Finds Israeli Riot Police Unjustified in Slayings of 9 Arabs

Israeli riot police who killed nine Israeli Arabs in October violated regulations by firing at distant protesters who posed no deadly threat and by shooting one victim in the back of the neck at close range, three human rights groups reported Sunday.

A joint inquiry by Jewish and Arab researchers faulted police for taunting the protesters, shunning nonlethal riot control methods, rebuffing efforts by Arab elders to defuse conflicts and detaining ambulances that were rushing to aid the wounded.

“There was no justification for any loss of life because in none of these cases were the police in a life-threatening situation,” said Naama Yishuvi, a Jewish human rights activist who edited the 38-page report. All the victims, she said, were young, male and unarmed.

The findings are the latest by independent monitors to accuse Israel of using excessive force against a 3-month-old Palestinian uprising that has claimed the lives of 302 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs and 43 other Israelis. The perceived brutality has helped sustain the rebellion, complicating President Clinton’s rush to end his administration with an Arab-Israeli peace accord.

Officials Defend Response to Unrest

On Sunday, a 20-year-old Palestinian student was fatally shot in her car, apparently without warning, by Israeli gunfire from a hill where soldiers were protecting a Jewish settlement near Nablus in the West Bank, witnesses said. And today, Palestinian security officials said Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 32-year-old Palestinian man in the Gaza Strip, Reuters news service reported. An Israeli official said the man was wearing a suspicious-looking backpack as he approached the soldiers in the middle of the night.

Israeli officials insist that they have confronted the unrest with restraint and followed clear rules of engagement. Caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak has rejected Palestinian demands for a comprehensive international investigation of the violence.

But Barak has taken the unusual step of naming a senior judge, Theodore Or, to lead an independent inquiry into the Israeli security forces’ most politically sensitive killings--those of 13 members of Israel’s minority Arab community during rioting in seven Arab towns in the Galilee region between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8.

Israeli Arabs--Palestinians who stayed when the Jewish state was founded in 1948, and their descendants--number about a million and make up nearly a fifth of Israel’s population. Unlike Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, they are taxpaying Israeli citizens with full rights to vote and hold office; Barak came to power in 1999 with the support of their representatives in parliament.

They suffer many forms of discrimination, however, and sided overwhelmingly with the uprising, or intifada, that began Sept. 28 in Jerusalem’s Old City and spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thousands of Arabs stormed through towns in the Galilee, shouting “Death to Jews,” torching government buildings, blocking highways in northern Israel and attacking Jewish Israelis.

Sunday’s report, titled “Fatal Force,” examines the deaths of nine of the 13 Arab Israelis killed in the Galilee. It records accounts by more than 50 witnesses, nearly all of them Arabs. The other four deaths were excluded from the inquiry for lack of witnesses, the authors say.

The inquiry was a collaborative effort of Jews and Arabs in three Israeli-based groups: the Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel, the Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority and the Arab Human Rights Assn.

They gave their findings Sunday to Or’s government-appointed commission, which has delayed public hearings until after Israel’s Feb. 6 election for prime minister.

Israeli police did not cooperate with the human rights groups, and a police spokesman, Ofer Sivan, declined to comment on their findings. He said the police will give their testimony on the 13 killings to Or’s panel, “not to the media.”

Police reported at the time of the killings that they had come under fire several times during rock-throwing Arab protests.

But “Fatal Force” concludes that in each of the nine fatal shootings it studied, police facing crowds of Arab protesters “failed to implement their own procedures for handling disturbances of public order, which mandate negotiating with the organizers or leaders as a first step, subsequently issuing a warning and only after that using increased force to disperse the disturbance.”

The police “barely made use of any non-deadly methods,” such as firing tear gas, the report says, and when they did, it was often accompanied or followed by live ammunition.

In several instances, the report says, the police “taunted, cursed and ridiculed” the Arab protesters.

In most cases, the police were beyond the stone-throwing range of crowds they fired into, witnesses told the investigators. The report asks whether police responsible for the killings have been punished.

Town Leaders Were Reportedly Rebuffed

Some of the most vivid testimony came from the Arab town of Arraba, scene of face-offs between police and protesters Oct. 1 and 2.

Town leaders negotiated an end to the first standoff. But the next day brought a different police unit, and when the mayor approached, its commander put his hands over his ears and said, according to the report: “I give the orders here and I don’t listen to orders. My order is that everyone will go home.”

In the ensuing riot, Assil Asleh, a 17-year-old activist in Seeds of Peace, which tried to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence, was fatally shot in the back of the neck after three policemen knocked him down and beat him with a rifle butt, his father and a second witness told the inquiry. The youth had been observing the clash, the report says, not taking part.

The next day, Barak met with angry Israeli Arab leaders and ordered police to stay out of Arab communities in the Galilee.

On Oct. 8, however, police returned to Nazareth on the heels of scores of Jews who had stormed the town.

But instead of expelling the Jews, as the town’s deputy mayor demanded, the police formed a wall between the two groups of antagonists, turned toward the Arabs and opened fire with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition, killing two Arab residents, the report says. No ammunition, it adds, was aimed at Jews.