B'Tselem: Investigate killing of Tul Karm resident

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Human rights group says Tul Karm resident shot to death in IDF operation for wanted suspect who was not in the city

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3256906,00.html

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"Itaf Zalat, a 45 year-old woman living in Tul Karm, was shot to death during an IDF operation in the West Bank. The army issued a rapid apology for the incident, which took place at the start of the month.

The IDF said that the shots were fired at the woman because an Islamic Jihad member, Iad Abdallah Muin, was hiding in her apartment. But
Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem challenged the IDF's statement, and claimed that Muin was not in the apartment. Rather, said B'Tselem, Muin was living in a separate apartment on the other side of the building, and on a separate floor.

The human rights group said that "during the lethal fire there was no danger posed to the lives of soldiers," and the organization has demanded the military prosecutor immediately open a criminal investigation in order to clarify the circumstances of the incident, and if necessary, to act to bring to trial those responsible for Zalat's death.

A B'Tselem investigation released on Tuesday says that Muin lived in one of the two apartments on the first floor of the building. The apartment next to it was empty. There are two apartments on the second floor of the building, and in one of them lived the Zalat family, with five children."

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1. From B'Tselem...

Was the shooting justified?

A slightly different version of the reason for the shooting was given by the IDF Spokesperson's Office in a letter to B'Tselem on 18 May 2006: the soldiers did not open fire at the house because of "suspicious movement," but as "warning fire" intended to cause Mu'in to surrender. This contention is even harder to understand than the previous version, given that the bullet that hit Zalat in the head was not an "stray bullet" that penetrated her apartment, as appears from the version given by the IDF Spokesperson's Office, but was part of the crossfire aimed at the windows of the apartment that lasted for some time.

Trigger-happy soldiers

From January 2004 to the time of this incident, Israeli security forces have killed 157 persons in actions to arrest wanted persons in the West Bank . At least thirty-five of the fatalities were civilians who were not wanted, and at least fifty-four others were listed as wanted but were not armed or did not use their weapons when they were shot and killed.

The killing of innocent civilians and wanted persons who did not endanger soldiers' lives during the arrest operations is not a matter of "regrettable mistakes" or the "inevitable" product of the circumstances of the particular case. It is a direct result of army policy. Following the outbreak of the second intifada, the IDF changed its open-fire regulations in general, and regarding operations to arrest wanted persons, in particular, in a way that encourages a "quick trigger finger." Soldiers are instructed to open fire also in situations in which their lives are not at risk. Soldiers are given verbal orders, which are often vague, enabling a wide variety of interpretation and partial, or mistaken, transmission of the orders. In addition, since the second intifada began, the Judge Advocate General's Office has refrained from opening Military Police investigations in cases in which Palestinian civilians were killed by soldiers' fire, except in exceptional cases. This fact creates an atmosphere of immunity and non-accountability.

B'Tselem's report Take No Prisoners, published in May 2005, which describes and analyzes four operations to arrest wanted persons during the preceding year, indicates that the soldiers acted as if they were sent on missions to kill, and not arrest, the wanted persons, in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law. In two of the cases, soldiers besieged a house in which a person on the wanted list was staying and opened fire at another person who lived there, at the moment that he opened the door, without prior warning and without giving him any opportunity to surrender. The persons killed in these cases were unarmed and did not endanger the soldiers' lives. In the last two of the four cases, security forces "neutralized" the person wanted by them, but they still fired at him and killed him. In one of the cases, the person raised his hands in surrender and was then shot; in the other case, a person who was wounded by soldiers' gunfire later tried to escape and was shot while lying wounded on the ground, after his weapon had been taken from him.

http://www.btselem.org/english/Firearms/20060501_Itaf_Zalat_killed_by_IDF_gunfire.asp