In the Palestinian West Bank town of Birzeit early 27 February, the Israeli occupation army acted determinedly, under the media spotlight, to feed Amnesty International with a showcase study to vindicate the report it released only hours earlier, entitled “Trigger-happy: Israel's use of excessive force in the West Bank,” and to refute official Israeli denials of the contents thereof. Under the command of Colonel Yossi Pinto, a Nahal infantry force of the Binyamin Territorial Brigade, joined by the Border Police's elite Counterterrorism Unit, Yamam, according to the IsraeliJerusalem Post, on the same day, and “200 Israeli soldiers, dozens of jeeps, two (military) bulldozers and many Shin Bet (internal security) officers”, according to Amira Hass of Haaretz on 3 March, including more than 30 armored patrol vehicles, by the count of Arab natives of Birzeit who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly, were amassed in Birzeit University town, raising a hell of explosives and gunfire and disrupting its peaceful early spring morning. Amira Hass was on the scene. Wondering what all that military mobilisation was for, a former mayor of Birzeit told me that he heard her asking in repudiation, “was it (the late Al-Qaeda founder Osama) Bin Laden inside!” Their mission, according to Israeli military spokespeople, was to arrest a “wanted individual” who, according to Shin Bet, quoted by Hass, had “intended” to carry out an “aggressive operation” against Israeli targets. An Israeli army spokeswoman said the man was “suspected” of “terror activity”. Israel National News online on the same day quoted “the IDF Spokesman's Unit” as saying that he was “a wanted man suspected of terror activity”. Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 2 March quoted “military correspondents” as repeating what the “IDF claimed”: that the man “had the intention to carry out a terror attack in the near future”. Hass wrote: “In the unofficial Israeli law code, unproved ‘terrorist intentions' are enough to be punishable by death. In Hebrew, ‘terror attack' is a magic phrase that exempts the Israelis from wondering why an arrest needs so many troops and fanfare, and has such a murderous end.” Gideon Levy, sarcastically repeating the self-described epithet as “the most moral army in the world”, wrote that the Israeli army “is also an army that reads intentions”. But Levy did not add that the army also acts accordingly. An Israeli army spokeswoman said: “After the suspect was called to turn himself in, he barricaded himself inside his house, effectively resisting arrest. Under the premise that he had weapons in his possession, the forces used different means to complete the arrest, including live fire.” The “suspect” was 24-year old Moatazz Abdul-Rahim Washaha, an unemployed Palestinian native of Birzeit. Hass questioned the accuracy of the army spokeswoman's statement. Claiming that the victim had “barricaded” himself in would make people “think he built a fortress and surrounded himself with explosives. This is very inaccurate,” she wrote. The IDF Spokesman's Office said that Israeli “troops forcibly entered the building and found his body.” Hass responded: “This is a lie.” “The elite police unit had shot Washaha at point-blank range dozens of times, according to the pieces of brain that covered the room, not to mention his legs, arms and fingers that were nearly severed from his body,” she added. Washaha's head was split open after being struck by a projectile, a doctor at the Palestinian Ramallah Hospital told AP on the same day. It was left to Levy and others to specify the details of “live fire”. Levy reported that “the most moral army in the world fired an (M72 LAW) anti-tank missile at the house in which a wanted young Palestinian was hiding… ran a bulldozer over the top of the house and destroyed it,” using “a drill it calls a ‘pressure cooker' — a rather disgusting drill it invented for itself.” When the tactic of the “pressure cooker,” which involves shooting at the walls of the house that is surrounded, failed to persuade the suspect to come out and turn himself in, Israeli troops at around 7am bulldozed part of the outer wall of the house and fired projectiles into the building. Fire erupted in the house. At 11am, they issued an ultimatum, “giving Moatazz two minutes to surrender, without result. As the ultimatum expired, the army fired several artillery shells from close distance. They then stormed the burning house, killing Moatazz,” Jan Walraven reported in the Palestine Monitor 3 March. The four-apartment building was bulldozed and shelled out of use and its contents burned and vandalised. Four families suddenly found themselves on the street, dependent on charities. Washaha did not “resist” his arrest; he simply refused to give himself in. Released from an Israeli jail only a few months ago, he knew very well what being imprisoned by the occupation meant. “I will be free here. Leave and do not worry about me. I will stay here and not surrender. I will not return to prison,” he told a Palestinian civil defence worker who rushed in to extinguish the fire caused by the Israeli projectile. Those were his last words, quoted by The Electronic Intifada on 28 February. “They could have taken him as a prisoner, but they did not want him as a prisoner; they wanted to kill him,” his father, Mr Abdel-Rahim said. Similarly, his mother, Mrs Eitzaaz Washaha, told Anadolu Agency: “Israeli forces could have arrested Washaha, but they were determined to kill him. My son wasn't armed. He was killed after the house was bombed.” An Israeli Shin Bet officer who goes under the name of Alon gave permission to kill Moatazz because he refused to appear for an interview with him, according to Hass. “This was regarded as a personal affront by Alon,” she wrote. The victim's brother, Tha'er Washaha, told Haaretz he implored Alon for permission to go inside and convince his brother to come out. Alon refused. However, despite the officially acknowledged “suspicion,” an official army tweet, quoted by The Los Angeles Times on the same day, convicted him as a “terrorist who resisted arrest”. Pro-Israeli media and Israeli media, the latter being subject to well-known strict military censorship, echoed this unconfirmed conclusion. For example, The Algemeiner on the same day headlined its report, “Wanted Terrorist Shot Dead by Israel Defense Forces.” Israel Hayom, reportedly close to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office, reported that “a firefight broke out” between the holed in victim and the besieging army brigade. But witnesses on the site confirmed the Reuters report that “no shots were heard from inside the home before the Israeli forces opened fire,” a fact that is confirmed by the other fact that the raiding Israeli forces did not suffer the slightest casualty, which also refutes the occupation forces claim that the man had an AK-47 rifle, another “story” that “Israel accepted… with a yawn,” according to Levy of Haaretz. The Palestinian Authority (PA) in a statement condemned Washaha's killing as an “assassination,” a “crime” and a “deliberate” killing. PA Spokesman Ihab Bsaiso said it was an “example of the violence perpetrated on a daily basis against our population”. In a letter sent to the UN secretary-general, the president of the UN Security Council and the president of the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Ambassador Feda Abdel-Hadi Nasser said Washaha's killing indicates Israel's “pre-meditated intention of killing him”. Israeli journalist Hass agrees further that his killing was a “cold-blooded assassination”. “The Israeli army did this deliberately,” she wrote. “Israel's goal” was “to embarrass the Palestinian Authority and undermine its status” among its own people, and Israel was “successful” as the “Palestinian Authority officials were absent from Washaha's funeral” the next day to avoid the angry crowds, estimated at more than 5,000, who were demanding an end to peace negotiations and to PA security coordination with Israel. Levy had another interpretation of the motives of “the most moral army in the world,” which was the title of his opinion column in Haaretz. “The Israel Defence Forces has also created a heartwarming name for all this: the ‘Tool of Disruption' — storming a civilian community for the purpose of causing panic and fear, and to disrupt its life,” or “sometimes these operations are conducted… as a training routine in order to preserve the readiness of the forces and a demonstration of sovereign power” towards the Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation since 1967, he wrote. AMNESTY'S REPORT VINDICATED: Washaha's extrajudicial assassination came on the same day Amnesty International (AI) released its 87-page report recommending that the US, EU and the rest of the international community suspend all transfers of military aid to Israel because “without pressure from the international community the situation is unlikely to change any time soon,” according to Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa Director Philip Luther. “Too much civilian blood has been spilled… (and Israel's) unlawful killings and unnecessary use of force must stop now,” he added. The AI reported it had documented the killing of 22 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in 2013 and in all the cases Palestinians did not appear to have been posing a direct and immediate threat to life. “The circumstances of all their deaths point to them having been victims of unlawful killings, including — in some cases — possible wilful killings.” “Several victims were shot in the back suggesting that they were targeted as they tried to flee and posed no genuine threat to the lives of members of Israeli forces or others,” the report said. “In several cases, well-armoured Israeli forces have resorted to lethal means to crack down on stone-throwing protesters causing needless loss of life,” adding: “There is evidence that some individuals were victims of wilful killings, which would amount to war crimes.” Since US Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in resuming Palestinian-Israeli peace talks on 29 July 2013, the Israeli occupation army killed more than 42 Palestinian civilians. Washaha was among the latest. Using “excessive force,” “arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters” and displaying “callous disregard” for human life, Israeli soldiers and police officers have been operating with “near total impunity” in a “harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries”, “as a matter of policy”, while the Israeli investigative system is “woefully inadequate”, said Luther. The AI report accused Israel of “war crimes and other serious violations of international law”. Israel's ambassador to the UK, Daniel Taub, said that Amnesty was “obsessive” with a “focus on Israel” and accused the London-based rights organisation of having “an agenda that has more to do with politics than human rights”. His embassy in London told The Jewish Chronicle that AI's report was merely a “stunt” filled with “unverifiable and often contradictory accounts”. In Birzeit on that sad morning of 27 February, the elite and disproportionate military force that the Israeli occupation army used to liquidate Washaha acted as if it was intentionally determined to undermine the credibility of Israel's official diplomacy, represented this time by Ambassador Taub, and to vindicate the contents of Amnesty's report, which he tried to deny or at least to question. Ironically, Israeli Premier Netanyahu, less than a week later, was in Washington DC lecturing a receptive American audience at the annual conference of AIPAC about drawing a “clear line… between life and death, between right and wrong” and about the importance of the “moral divide”! The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit in the West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
