Israel's Death Squads Defy U.S. Human Rights Criticism

By Stephen J. Sosebee

When Israeli soldiers dressed as Arab women pulled 23-year-old Samir Sha'ath from a car and immediately pumped three bullets into his brain on the main road entering the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza on July 8, it was more than just another bloody assassination of a Palestinian activist by an Israel Defense Force death squad. It also was the defiant Israeli response to a newly published 180-page report on the IDF undercover units issued by Middle East Watch.

Just one week prior to Sha'ath's killing, Middle East Watch, a branch of Human Rights Watch, the largest U.S.-based human rights organization, held a press conference in Jerusalem announcing the report's conclusions. Acting executive director Kenneth Roth charged that IDF undercover units have "conducted unjustified patterns of killing" in the occupied territories, resulting in the deaths of at least 120 Palestinians since the December 1987 start of the uprising.

The report, entitled A License To Kill, based its conclusions on fieldwork involving cross-checking of cases and interviews with IDF soldiers and Palestinian eyewitnesses. For many who attended the press conference, the report was hardly news.

A License To Kill painstakingly documents 20 killings by the undercover units. Seven of the victims were 16 years old or younger. Only 2 of the 20 were carrying firearms when killed. While many Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have published similar conclusions in the past three years, the new report is unique in that for the first time Israeli soldiers from the death squads themselves are interviewed.

Although only one of the five soldiers interviewed permitted his name to be published, all testified clearly that the units do indeed target Palestinian activists for summary execution. One soldier said that while he was in Gaza his unit was briefed about 13 Palestinians on the "wanted list."

"At the nightly briefings we were always told that these 13 had to die," the soldier reported. "The officers said, 'Keep your eyes open and kill them."' Champagne would be sent to a unit each time it killed a wanted person, and a celebration would be held. Since the interviews were conducted before Samir Sha'ath was killed, the report does not reveal whether he was one of the wanted 13.

There is little doubt that the IDF, by employing the Salvadoran army's infamous death-squad tactics, has struck a blow to the intifada. While Palestinian popular support for the uprising remains strong among all social, political, religious and economic sectors in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the strength of the intifada depends on the work of the young activists. They are the ones who organize the occupied population politically. It is they who first warn individuals who secretly collaborate with the Israeli intelligence service, and who then kill those who continue. It is the young activists who comprise the armed groups increasingly using force against Israelis. For all these reasons killing the young activists has become, as one undercover unit soldier explained, an Israeli "obsession."

A Long Delay

Other than including interviews with IDF personnel, A License to Kill actually offers little new information concerning Israeli death squads. In fact, some in the human rights field in the occupied territories are critical of Middle East Watch for its long delay in dealing with the issue.

"After years of such actions by the Israeli military here and after Al-Haq published a report and after the Palestine Human Rights Information Center published a report and even after B'tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, published a report, I am wondering what now is the meaning of this (Middle East Watch) report," said Raji Sourani, director of the Gaza Center for Rights and Law. "Why did they wait so long? I think it shows negligence by such a human rights organization."

Fateh Azzam, program coordinator at the Ramallah-based Al-Haq/Law in the Service of Man, welcomed the report, despite its delay. "The issue here remains that the willful killing of individuals is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and is tantamount to a war crime," he said. "Their report confirms again what we found in a similar study long ago: that the IDF is targeting active individuals, that they kill them without a real attempt at arrest, and that most of the victims are unarmed and many times mistakenly targeted. The fact that these units have killed many children should further the war crimes as well as human rights aspects."

For the parents of Sarnir Sha'ath, neither human rights reports nor press conferences prevented the cold-blooded assassination of their only son. Like many active in the uprising, Samir had expected to die from Israeli gunfire. He was a leader in the PFLP's Red Eagles, and the blood of many of his friends already had been spilled on Rafah's sands. Ultimately, it made little difference to this Palestinian freedom fighter whether he was shot point-blank without warning in the back of the head by Israelis dressed like his aunts, or whether death came during a demonstration or armed clash.

"The point is, he loved Palestine enough to fight for its liberation and to die a young martyr's death," said his cousin, Ahmed Sha'ath, at Samir's funeral. "The young ones here learned from Samir and are ready to take his place. The Israelis don't understand that killing him makes us that much more determined to follow his lead and liberate our land."

The gravity of Israeli human rights violations and breaches of international law, and whether the undercover units can or cannot be called death squads, are debated in a world far removed from the brutal killing fields of Gaza. Nor did the Middle East Watch report break new ground in that distant world. There was no avalanche of outrage from the foreign embassies in Tel Aviv. The United Nations Security Council did not pass a condemnation resolution or impose sanctions. Nor did the Israeli public give any sign that it cared.

Instead, only a week after Kenneth Roth spoke about the report on death squads to a room full of journalists, another young Palestinian was pulled out of a car and shot dead in broad daylight and in front of many witnesses by male Israeli soldiers wearing brassieres under their Palestinian gowns.

Existence vs. Effectiveness

In a world that refuses to acknowledge Israeli war crimes, even when they are described to human rights investigators by the war criminals themselves, the important question is not whether Israeli death squads exist, but whether they will be effective in subjugating the political aspirations of an entire nation under occupation. It seems unlikely that Central American type Israeli death squads will be more successful than the previous bone breaking, total curfews, economic strangulation, mass imprisonment and deportations, relaxed open-fire regulations and the closure of the territories in halting the Palestinian national liberation struggle.

They have, however, further frustrated a people who already have offered the compromises necessary for a settlement, and deepened the psychological wounds of occupation at a time when the combatants, instead of brutally hunting each other down, are supposed to be talking together reasonably about peace. Since the return of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to power in Israel, however, the only peace offered to Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is that meted out to young victims of the IDF like Samir Sha'ath.