The cheapening of life
Editorial
Haaretz, 5 December 2002
Fatma Obeid, 95, was killed on Tuesday by Israeli soldiers. She was a passenger in a taxi that was fired on as it drove away from an IDF unit in the Jelezun area, near Ramallah. There were no suspects in the taxi, and although it was traveling on a road that had been declared a security route and was off limits to Palestinians, nobody's life had been in danger. The IDF claims that the shots were aimed at the tires, but the bullet struck the passenger and killed her. Military sources admitted the soldier acted in violation of orders and with bad judgment.
Iain Hook, a British UN official, was shot to death in Jenin while inside the UNWRA compound from which he was conducting the rehabilitation of the refugee camp, during a gunbattle between the IDF and several wanted men in the neighborhood near the compound. A sniper fired a single shot at Hook, apparently believing he was an armed Palestinian. The mistaken identity cost Hook his life. Last week, in Nablus, IDF troops killed a young man running away from them while they conducted a search for wanted men. The soldiers feared he was armed, but it turned out he was holding a club used to beat pots to waken people for early morning prayers. These cases join more than two hundred Palestinian children and youths below the age of 16 and dozens of other cases in which Palestinian civilians, including innocent women and the elderly, who have been killed by IDF fire since the start of the intifada.
The IDF has been conducting some very complex missions lately involving patrols and searching for wanted people in densely crowded Palestinian cities. The level of threats and risk to the soldiers is extremely high, and the determination of the militias and terrorists to harm the soldiers demands a very high degree of caution. Under such conditions, the rules of engagement were loosened, to allow opening fire sometimes without the usual practice of calling for the suspect to stop.
The flip side of those loosened rules is the proliferation of cases of innocent people being killed. It also turns out that where there was no clear threat to lives, soldiers' fingers were sometimes too quick on the trigger. Apparently, the intensive military activity often blurs the distinction between an innocent resident and a terrorist.
Such blurring is dangerous. It widens the cycle of suffering and conflict, contradicts the IDF's basic code of behavior and Israeli and international moral values, and is an expression of the army command's loosening grip on its soldiers. The IDF does not appear to be making an effort to impress upon the soldiers this critical distinction. There appears to be no effort to inculcate this in the soldiers, nor give out deterrent punishments. Only in rare cases are indictments filed against soldiers who violated the rules of engagement.
The IDF did not receive permission to fight the civilian population, and its commanders cannot be allowed to give their soldiers the feeling that such permission has been granted. In the complicated war the IDF faces in the territories, the effort to carefully filter out legitimate targets from the general population is the real test of the army's ability to foil attacks. The killing of innocent people without any strict disciplinary or legal controls that place a clear boundary between what is permitted and prohibited, could undermine the public's recognition of the legitimacy of the war on terror.
