27 may 2016
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/6437519.jpg)
Israel's channel 10 has revealed an Israeli plan to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA) to have administrative and security control over some Palestinian neighborhoods in Occupied Jerusalem.
According to the channel, mayor of the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem Nir Barkat claimed that Arab neighborhoods in the holy city and its vicinity as well as Shu'fat refugee camp would be under the control of the PA.
In a seminar held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Thursday, Barkat expressed his support for removing security walls from several neighborhoods in the city and annex them to what he labelled as the capital, but he emphasized his opposition to any intention to waive any part of Jerusalem.
Under the Oslo accords, the Palestinian occupied territories have been divided into three areas classified as A, B and C. Area A, which comprises 18 percent of the West Bank area, is supposed to be under full PA security and civil control, while Area B, 22 percent of the West Bank, should be under PA civil control and joint Israeli-PA security control.
Area C, which is about 61 percent of the West Bank, is under full Israeli military and administrative control.
According to the channel, mayor of the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem Nir Barkat claimed that Arab neighborhoods in the holy city and its vicinity as well as Shu'fat refugee camp would be under the control of the PA.
In a seminar held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Thursday, Barkat expressed his support for removing security walls from several neighborhoods in the city and annex them to what he labelled as the capital, but he emphasized his opposition to any intention to waive any part of Jerusalem.
Under the Oslo accords, the Palestinian occupied territories have been divided into three areas classified as A, B and C. Area A, which comprises 18 percent of the West Bank area, is supposed to be under full PA security and civil control, while Area B, 22 percent of the West Bank, should be under PA civil control and joint Israeli-PA security control.
Area C, which is about 61 percent of the West Bank, is under full Israeli military and administrative control.
26 may 2016
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/5728147.jpg)
By Ramzy Baroud
Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience. For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or ‘hasbara’.
It is still too early to claim any kind of paradigm shift, but the second Tawasol Conference in Istanbul, which took place 18 to 19 May, served as an opportunity to consider the vastly changing media landscape, and to highlight the challenges and the opportunities facing Palestinians in their uphill battle.
Not only are Palestinians expected to demolish many years of Israeli disinformation, predicated on a make-believe historical discourse that has been sold to the world as fact, but also to construct their own lucid narrative that is free from the whims of factions and personal gains. It will not be easy, of course. My message in the “Palestine in the Media” conference, organized by the Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication is that, if the Palestinian leadership is failing to achieve political unity, at least Palestinian intellectuals must insist on the unity of their narrative.
Even the most compromising of Palestinians can acknowledge the centrality of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages in 1947-48.
They can – and should – also agree about the hideousness and violence of the occupation; the dehumanization at the military checkpoints; the increasingly shrinking spaces in the West Bank as a result of the illegal settlements and the colonisation of whatever remains of Palestine; the suffocating hold on Occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds); the injustice of the siege on Gaza, and the one-sided wars on the Gaza Strip that have killed over 4,000 people, mostly civilians, in the course of seven years, and much more.
Professor Nashaat Al-Aqtash from Birzeit University, perhaps more realistically, downgraded the expectations even further. “If we could only agree on how we present the narrative regarding Al-Quds and the illegal settlements, at least that would be a start,” he said. The obvious fact is that Palestinians have more in common than they would like to admit.
They are all victimised by the same circumstances, fighting the same occupation, suffering the same violations of human rights, and facing the same future outcome resulting from the same conflict. However, many are strangely incapable of disconnecting from their tribal-like, factional affiliations. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having ideological leanings and supporting one political party over another.
It becomes a moral crisis, though, when the party affiliation becomes stronger than one’s affiliation to the collective, national struggle for freedom. Sadly, many are still trapped in this thinking. But things are also changing; they always do. After over two decades of the failure of the so-called ‘peace process’, and the rapid increase in the colonisation of the Occupied Territories in addition to the extreme violence used to achieve these ends, many Palestinians are waking up to the painful facts.
There can be no freedom for the Palestinian people without unity and without resistance. Resistance does not always have to mean a gun and a knife, but rather the utilisation of the energies of a nation at home and in ‘shatat’ (Diaspora), along with the galvanisation of the pro-justice and peace communities all over the world.
There must soon be a movement in which Palestinians declare a global struggle against apartheid, involving all Palestinians, their leadership, factions, civil society and communities everywhere. They must speak in one voice, declare one objective, and state the same demands, over and over again. It is bewildering to realise that a nation that has been so wronged for so long being so greatly misunderstood, while those who have done the harm are largely absolved and seen as if the victim.
Sometime in the late 1950s, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion became aware of the need to unify the Israeli Zionist narrative regarding the conquering and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.According to a revelation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ben-Gurion worried that the Palestinian refugee crisis was not going to go away without a consistent Israeli message that the Palestinians left their land of their own accord, following instructions to do so by various Arab governments.
Of course, that, too, was a fabrication, but many supposed truths often start with a sheer lie. He delegated several academics to present the most falsified, yet coherent, story on the exodus of the Palestinians.
The outcome was Doc GL-18/17028 of 1961. That document has, ever since, served as the cornerstone of the Israeli ‘hasbara’ concerning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Palestinians ran away and were not driven out, was the crux of the message. Israel has been repeating this falsehood for over 55 years and, of course, many have believed it.
Not until recently, thanks to the effort of a burgeoning group of Palestinian historians – and courageous Israelis – who counter the propaganda, a Palestinian narrative is taking shape, although much is yet to be done to offset the damage that has already taken place. In fact, a real victory for the truth would only happen when the Palestinian narrative is no longer seen as a ‘counter narrative’ but as a sovereign story of its own, free from the confines of defensiveness and the burden of a history laden with lies and half-truths.
The only way I see that happening is when Palestinian intellectuals invest more time and effort in studying and narrating a ‘people’s history’ of Palestine, which could finally humanise the Palestinian people, and challenge the polarised perception of them as terrorists or perpetual victims. When the ordinary individual becomes the centre of history, the outcomes are more relatable, more effective and poignant.
The same logic can be applied to journalism, as well. Aside from finding their common story, Palestinian journalists need to reach out to the wider world, not only to their traditional circle of dedicated friends and supporters, but to mainstream society. If people truly appreciate the truth, especially from a humanist perspective, they cannot possibly support genocide and ethnic cleansing. And by ‘wider world’ I am hardly referring to London, Paris and New York, but to Africa, South America, Asia and the entire South.
Nations from this hemisphere can fully understand the pain and injustice of military occupation, colonisation, imperialism and apartheid. I fear that the emphasis on the need to counter Israeli ‘hasbara’ in the West has meant the allocation of a disproportionate amount of resources and energy in a few places, while ignoring the rest of the world, whose support has for long been the backbone of international solidarity.
They must not be taken for granted. The good news, however, is that Palestinians have been making great strides in the right direction, although with no thanks to the Palestinian leadership.
The key, now, is to be able to unify, streamline and build on those existing efforts so that such growing solidarity translates into greater success in raising global awareness and holding Israel accountable for its occupation and violations of human rights.
Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.
Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience. For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or ‘hasbara’.
It is still too early to claim any kind of paradigm shift, but the second Tawasol Conference in Istanbul, which took place 18 to 19 May, served as an opportunity to consider the vastly changing media landscape, and to highlight the challenges and the opportunities facing Palestinians in their uphill battle.
Not only are Palestinians expected to demolish many years of Israeli disinformation, predicated on a make-believe historical discourse that has been sold to the world as fact, but also to construct their own lucid narrative that is free from the whims of factions and personal gains. It will not be easy, of course. My message in the “Palestine in the Media” conference, organized by the Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication is that, if the Palestinian leadership is failing to achieve political unity, at least Palestinian intellectuals must insist on the unity of their narrative.
Even the most compromising of Palestinians can acknowledge the centrality of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages in 1947-48.
They can – and should – also agree about the hideousness and violence of the occupation; the dehumanization at the military checkpoints; the increasingly shrinking spaces in the West Bank as a result of the illegal settlements and the colonisation of whatever remains of Palestine; the suffocating hold on Occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds); the injustice of the siege on Gaza, and the one-sided wars on the Gaza Strip that have killed over 4,000 people, mostly civilians, in the course of seven years, and much more.
Professor Nashaat Al-Aqtash from Birzeit University, perhaps more realistically, downgraded the expectations even further. “If we could only agree on how we present the narrative regarding Al-Quds and the illegal settlements, at least that would be a start,” he said. The obvious fact is that Palestinians have more in common than they would like to admit.
They are all victimised by the same circumstances, fighting the same occupation, suffering the same violations of human rights, and facing the same future outcome resulting from the same conflict. However, many are strangely incapable of disconnecting from their tribal-like, factional affiliations. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having ideological leanings and supporting one political party over another.
It becomes a moral crisis, though, when the party affiliation becomes stronger than one’s affiliation to the collective, national struggle for freedom. Sadly, many are still trapped in this thinking. But things are also changing; they always do. After over two decades of the failure of the so-called ‘peace process’, and the rapid increase in the colonisation of the Occupied Territories in addition to the extreme violence used to achieve these ends, many Palestinians are waking up to the painful facts.
There can be no freedom for the Palestinian people without unity and without resistance. Resistance does not always have to mean a gun and a knife, but rather the utilisation of the energies of a nation at home and in ‘shatat’ (Diaspora), along with the galvanisation of the pro-justice and peace communities all over the world.
There must soon be a movement in which Palestinians declare a global struggle against apartheid, involving all Palestinians, their leadership, factions, civil society and communities everywhere. They must speak in one voice, declare one objective, and state the same demands, over and over again. It is bewildering to realise that a nation that has been so wronged for so long being so greatly misunderstood, while those who have done the harm are largely absolved and seen as if the victim.
Sometime in the late 1950s, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion became aware of the need to unify the Israeli Zionist narrative regarding the conquering and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.According to a revelation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ben-Gurion worried that the Palestinian refugee crisis was not going to go away without a consistent Israeli message that the Palestinians left their land of their own accord, following instructions to do so by various Arab governments.
Of course, that, too, was a fabrication, but many supposed truths often start with a sheer lie. He delegated several academics to present the most falsified, yet coherent, story on the exodus of the Palestinians.
The outcome was Doc GL-18/17028 of 1961. That document has, ever since, served as the cornerstone of the Israeli ‘hasbara’ concerning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Palestinians ran away and were not driven out, was the crux of the message. Israel has been repeating this falsehood for over 55 years and, of course, many have believed it.
Not until recently, thanks to the effort of a burgeoning group of Palestinian historians – and courageous Israelis – who counter the propaganda, a Palestinian narrative is taking shape, although much is yet to be done to offset the damage that has already taken place. In fact, a real victory for the truth would only happen when the Palestinian narrative is no longer seen as a ‘counter narrative’ but as a sovereign story of its own, free from the confines of defensiveness and the burden of a history laden with lies and half-truths.
The only way I see that happening is when Palestinian intellectuals invest more time and effort in studying and narrating a ‘people’s history’ of Palestine, which could finally humanise the Palestinian people, and challenge the polarised perception of them as terrorists or perpetual victims. When the ordinary individual becomes the centre of history, the outcomes are more relatable, more effective and poignant.
The same logic can be applied to journalism, as well. Aside from finding their common story, Palestinian journalists need to reach out to the wider world, not only to their traditional circle of dedicated friends and supporters, but to mainstream society. If people truly appreciate the truth, especially from a humanist perspective, they cannot possibly support genocide and ethnic cleansing. And by ‘wider world’ I am hardly referring to London, Paris and New York, but to Africa, South America, Asia and the entire South.
Nations from this hemisphere can fully understand the pain and injustice of military occupation, colonisation, imperialism and apartheid. I fear that the emphasis on the need to counter Israeli ‘hasbara’ in the West has meant the allocation of a disproportionate amount of resources and energy in a few places, while ignoring the rest of the world, whose support has for long been the backbone of international solidarity.
They must not be taken for granted. The good news, however, is that Palestinians have been making great strides in the right direction, although with no thanks to the Palestinian leadership.
The key, now, is to be able to unify, streamline and build on those existing efforts so that such growing solidarity translates into greater success in raising global awareness and holding Israel accountable for its occupation and violations of human rights.
Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/4963107.jpg)
Israeli extremist groups have called on Thursday for collective break-ins into al-Aqsa Mosque on the 5th of June that coincides with the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem.
According to Quds Press, the extremist groups called through social media for massive participation in collective break-ins into the Islamic holy shrine and Talmudic rituals in its plazas to celebrate what they called “the anniversary of Jerusalem's reunification.”
Israeli police will provide security protection for the plan, the groups pointed out. Earlier Thursday, nearly 45 Israeli settlers stormed al-Aqsa Mosque from the Magharibeh Gate under the protection of Israeli police.
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities banned the entry of two Jerusalemites to the Mosque for three and six months respectively for unknown reasons.
According to Quds Press, the extremist groups called through social media for massive participation in collective break-ins into the Islamic holy shrine and Talmudic rituals in its plazas to celebrate what they called “the anniversary of Jerusalem's reunification.”
Israeli police will provide security protection for the plan, the groups pointed out. Earlier Thursday, nearly 45 Israeli settlers stormed al-Aqsa Mosque from the Magharibeh Gate under the protection of Israeli police.
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities banned the entry of two Jerusalemites to the Mosque for three and six months respectively for unknown reasons.
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/6148199.jpg)
Hordes of Israeli extremist settlers stormed on early Thursday morning the holy al-Aqsa Mosque, in Occupied Jerusalem, via the Maghareba Gate.
The break-in was carried out under heavy escort by Israeli police officers. The fanatic Israeli settlers reportedly performed provocative rituals and chanted anti-Muslim slogans.
The peaceful Muslim learners and worshipers kept, meanwhile, chanting “Allah is the Greatest” in protest at the sacrilegious break-in.
A group of Muslim women have been maintaining vigil outside the al-Aqsa after the Israeli occupation police prevented them from entering the Mosque to perform their prayers. In a related development, the fanatic Israeli rabbi Yehuda Glick was sworn in to the Knesset on Wednesday after former war minister Moshe Ya’alon resigned from parliament last week.
Glick, who heads Israeli break-ins at the holy al-Aqsa Mosque, said he would work within the Knesset to change the absurd arrangements at the holy site. As member of the Knesset, Glick will be banned from entering the al-Aqsa Mosque as stipulated by Israeli law.
The break-in was carried out under heavy escort by Israeli police officers. The fanatic Israeli settlers reportedly performed provocative rituals and chanted anti-Muslim slogans.
The peaceful Muslim learners and worshipers kept, meanwhile, chanting “Allah is the Greatest” in protest at the sacrilegious break-in.
A group of Muslim women have been maintaining vigil outside the al-Aqsa after the Israeli occupation police prevented them from entering the Mosque to perform their prayers. In a related development, the fanatic Israeli rabbi Yehuda Glick was sworn in to the Knesset on Wednesday after former war minister Moshe Ya’alon resigned from parliament last week.
Glick, who heads Israeli break-ins at the holy al-Aqsa Mosque, said he would work within the Knesset to change the absurd arrangements at the holy site. As member of the Knesset, Glick will be banned from entering the al-Aqsa Mosque as stipulated by Israeli law.
25 may 2016
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/2473737.jpg)
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, announced Wednesday that they will stop working with the Israeli military law enforcement unit, which is supposed to handle complaints filed against soldiers for harm caused to Palestinians in the West Bank, but which, according to B’Tselem, is instead used to whitewash Israeli war crimes.
The statement by B’Tselem follows:
The role of the military law enforcement system has been narrowly defined to begin with: it investigates only specific incidents in which soldiers are suspected to have acted in breach of the orders or directives they were given. The system does not investigate the orders themselves nor the responsibility of those who issue them or determine the policy.
As such, the system is oriented toward low ranking soldiers only, while senior military and government officials, including the Military Advocate General (MAG), are absolved in advance of any responsibility. In this state of affairs, even if the system had fulfilled its tasks, its contribution to law enforcement would still remain limited. However, an examination of the operation of the military law enforcement system indicates that it makes no attempt to fulfill even this limited mandate.
Ever since B’Tselem was established more than 25 years ago, it has applied to the MAG Corps regarding hundreds of incidents in which Palestinians were harmed by soldiers, demanding the incidents be investigated. Some of B’Tselem’s applications led to the launching of criminal investigations. In many cases, B’Tselem assisted investigators in making arrangements for them to collect statements from Palestinian victims and eyewitnesses, and by obtaining medical records and other relevant documents.
Once the investigations were concluded, B’Tselem followed up with the MAG Corps to get information as to the case outcome. In some cases, B’Tselem appealed the MAG Corps’ decision to close a case, and in a few instances, even petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) against a decision to close a case, or regarding unreasonable delays in the MAG Corps’ processing of a case.
Since the second intifada began in late 2000, B’Tselem has demanded an investigation in 739 cases in which soldiers killed, injured, or beat Palestinians,used them as human shields, or damaged Palestinian property.
An analysis of the responses B’Tselem received as to how the military law enforcement system handled these 739 cases shows that in a quarter (182) no investigation was ever launched, in nearly half (343), the investigation was closed with no further action, and only in very rare instances (25), were charges brought against the implicated soldiers. Another thirteen cases were referred for disciplinary action. A total of 132 cases are still at various processing stages, and the MAG Corps was unable to locate 44 others.
MAG Corps handling of incidents referred by B’Tselem – 2000-2015:
On their own, these numbers do not necessarily mean there is any problem with the way the military law enforcement system operates, but the figures on how the system handles complaints of harm to Palestinians by soldiers must be viewed in a wider context.
How does the military law enforcement system operate?
Over the course of more than 25 years of operation, we have gathered information from hundreds of complaints B’Tselem filed with the military law enforcement system. In addition to the vast amount of information collected with respect to the processing of these cases, over the years B’Tselem has requested and received scores of investigation files from the Military Police Investigations Unit (MPIU).
B’Tselem staff members have also met with officials inside the military law enforcement system dozens of times over the years, and corresponded at length with the MAG Corps and other military officials. All this information has helped B’Tselem gain a great deal of experience and given it vast and detailed organizational knowledge regarding how the system works and the considerations that guide it.
It is the sum of this knowledge that serves as the basis for pointing to the structural failures that underpin the military law enforcement system’s ability to process a sizeable caseload and yet close the vast majority of cases without any further action:
With MPIU investigations conducted negligently, investigators cannot get at the truth. Almost no effort is made during the investigation to collect external evidence, the system citing as an excuse difficulties of which it has been aware for years and which it has made no attempt to resolve.
Instead of evidence, investigations rely almost exclusively on statements collected from soldiers and Palestinians. Nevertheless, the investigation files show that MPIU investigators are hard put to collect these statements, which are often obtained only months after the incident. At witness statement interviews, investigators function more like stenographers taking dictation than staff tasked with uncovering the truth. This is the case even when soldiers’ statements are found to contradict the accounts given by other soldiers or by the complainants.
The investigation file is transferred to the Military Advocacy for Operational Affairs, which is guided by considerations that almost inevitably dictate closing the file with no further action. Many cases are closed for “absence of guilt”, since the MAG Corps simply assumes that the accounts given by soldiers suspected of committing an offense are reliable – usually with no supporting evidence. In addition, the decision of the MAG Corps – which accompanies the investigations from the very start and oversees them – has done nothing to improve or make them more rigorous, instead finding the lax MPIU investigations sufficient for making decisions in cases. Under these circumstances, the fact that many cases are closed for absence of evidence is no surprise. Since no serious effort is made to obtain evidence, it clearly could not support a criminal case.
In many other cases the Military Advocacy for Operational Affairs elects not to launch a criminal investigation at all. Sometimes, it justifies its decision on the grounds of “absence of guilt”. Here, too, it does so on the basis of soldiers’ accounts of events. Sometimes, in cases in which there are Palestinian fatalities, the grounds are that the deaths were in “combat situations”, an exclusion that grants sweeping immunity to soldiers from criminal investigations, far above and beyond that granted by international humanitarian law.
The military law enforcement system also draws legitimacy from the ostensible existence of oversight mechanisms within the civilian system in the form of the Attorney General and the Supreme Court, saying they are meant to oversee the work of the MAG, who wields extensive authorities, as well as the work of the MAG Corps as a whole. However, the Attorney General elects to delegate most of his powers to the MAG and refrains from intervening in his decisions. As for the Supreme Court, it is not meant to serve as an oversight mechanism, and in the few cases in which it was asked to do so, for the most part it preferred not to intervene.
The military law enforcement system is plagued by a host of issues in the basic way it is run: The system is inaccessible to Palestinian complainants, who cannot file complaints with the MPIU directly and must rely on human rights organizations or attorneys to file the complaints on their behalf. The processing of each complaint lasts months, and even years, so that often enough soldiers who are the subject of the complaint are no longer under military jurisdiction. Both the MPIU and the MAG Corps act without transparency, and getting information from them – both about a complaint filed, as well as with general information about their work – requires repeated requests.
This is the system that officials bring as proof – to Israel and the world – of their claim that the military does everything in its power to investigate complaints against soldiers responsible for harming Palestinians and to prosecute the offenders. Top officials boast of the system’s effectiveness and values, discounting any substantive criticism, despite the fact that the system’s operation and the outcomes of its work are well known to senior officials both inside and outside the military.
While changes have been made to the military law enforcement system over the years, they mostly served to reinforce the impression that efforts were being made to get at the truth, and did not resolve the system’s substantive problems.
The deliberations and recommendations of the Turkel Commission ought to be considered against this backdrop. The Commission, which published its conclusions already three years ago (February 2013), recommended a number of improvements to the military law enforcement system.
The following were among the Commission’s recommendations: amendments to legislation that would include legislation against war crimes and address the criminal responsibility of commanding officers for the actions of their subordinates; improving MPIU and MAG Corps work methods – including setting shorter schedules for processing time; establishing an MPIU unit designated for handling complaints by Palestinians; greater transparency in the work of the MAG Corps; and a number of measures meant to enhance the MAG’s independence.
The implementation of these recommendations, which has already begun, may improve appearances of the current system, but it will not remedy the substantive flaws plaguing the military law enforcement system.
After the Turkel Commission published its recommendations, the government appointed another committee to implement them – the Ciechanover Committee, which submitted its own recommendations in August 2015. In its report, the Ciechanover Committee advocated the implementation of some of the Turkel Commission recommendations verbatim, stated that the implementation of others would require allocation of additional resources, and suggested some minor changes in yet other recommendations. The Ciechanover Committee concluded by stressing that its report is not the final word on the subject, and that some issues still require more work. It recommended the establishment of another agency that would follow up on the implementation of its recommendations.
A semblance of law enforcement
And so, report after report, committee after committee, the discourse in itself creates the illusion of movement toward changing and improving the system. This illusory movement allows officials both inside and outside the system to make statements about the importance of the stated goal of enforcing the law on soldiers, while the substantive failures remain as they were and most cases continue to be closed with no measures taken.
Among other things, the semblance of a functioning justice system allows Israeli officials to deny claims made both in Israel and abroad that Israel does not enforce the law on soldiers who harm Palestinians. In so doing, the state ensures that the military law enforcement system will remain in the sole purview of the military. The military, in turn, will be able to continue its investigation policy in which only the junior ranks are (ostensibly) investigated, while senior commanders and civilian superiors are absolved of accountability for unlawful acts committed under their authority.
These appearances also help grant legitimacy – both in Israel and abroad – to the continuation of the occupation. It makes it easier to reject criticism about the injustices of the occupation, thanks to the military’s outward pretense that even it considers some acts unacceptable, and backs up this claim by saying that it is already investigating these actions. In so doing, not only does the state manages to uphold the perception of a decent, moral law enforcement system, but also maintains the military’s image as an ethical military that takes action against these acts (defined as “aberrations”) and even has an extensive, professional system for doing so.
Effective investigations that get at the truth are critically important. For the victims and their loved ones such a system would mean getting justice, in that action would be taken against those responsible for death and injury.An effective law enforcement system will also serve the public interest by deterring soldiers and officers from committing similar offenses and preventing future harm. This is why establishing legal liability and accountability for human rights violations is the core of the activities of human rights organizations both in Israel and abroad.
And so, for 25 years, with a view to establishing accountability and preventing future harm, we contacted the military law enforcement system and demanded that soldiers suspected of harming Palestinians be investigated. Over the years, the military law enforcement system has developed the expectation that human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, serve as subcontractors for the military investigative system: that they submit the complaints, coordinate collecting statements, obtain documents, and so forth.
Although this is not B’Tselem’s job but the responsibility of the military system, we have elected to perform it for the last 25 years for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons we did so was that we hoped that in this way we were helping bring justice to the Palestinian victims and to establish deterrence that would prevent future similar incidents. If that had been the outcome, this paper would not have been written. In reality, however, B’Tselem’s cooperation with the military investigation and enforcement systems has not achieved justice, instead lending legitimacy to the occupation regime and aiding to whitewash it.
B’Tselem will no longer play a part in the pretense posed by the military law enforcement system and will no longer refer complaints to it. The experience we have gained, on which we base the conclusions presented in this report, has brought us to the realization that there is no longer any point in pursuing justice and defending human rights by working with a system whose real function is measured by its ability to continue to successfully cover up unlawful acts and protect perpetrators.
We will continue to document and report on Israel’s human rights abuses in the occupied territories, but we believe that the task of advancing human rights protection in the occupied territories will not be served by efforts to help shoddy investigations that would, in any case, end up being much watered down by MAG lawyers. The fight for human rights will be better served by denouncing this system and exposing it for what it is.
The statement by B’Tselem follows:
The role of the military law enforcement system has been narrowly defined to begin with: it investigates only specific incidents in which soldiers are suspected to have acted in breach of the orders or directives they were given. The system does not investigate the orders themselves nor the responsibility of those who issue them or determine the policy.
As such, the system is oriented toward low ranking soldiers only, while senior military and government officials, including the Military Advocate General (MAG), are absolved in advance of any responsibility. In this state of affairs, even if the system had fulfilled its tasks, its contribution to law enforcement would still remain limited. However, an examination of the operation of the military law enforcement system indicates that it makes no attempt to fulfill even this limited mandate.
Ever since B’Tselem was established more than 25 years ago, it has applied to the MAG Corps regarding hundreds of incidents in which Palestinians were harmed by soldiers, demanding the incidents be investigated. Some of B’Tselem’s applications led to the launching of criminal investigations. In many cases, B’Tselem assisted investigators in making arrangements for them to collect statements from Palestinian victims and eyewitnesses, and by obtaining medical records and other relevant documents.
Once the investigations were concluded, B’Tselem followed up with the MAG Corps to get information as to the case outcome. In some cases, B’Tselem appealed the MAG Corps’ decision to close a case, and in a few instances, even petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) against a decision to close a case, or regarding unreasonable delays in the MAG Corps’ processing of a case.
Since the second intifada began in late 2000, B’Tselem has demanded an investigation in 739 cases in which soldiers killed, injured, or beat Palestinians,used them as human shields, or damaged Palestinian property.
An analysis of the responses B’Tselem received as to how the military law enforcement system handled these 739 cases shows that in a quarter (182) no investigation was ever launched, in nearly half (343), the investigation was closed with no further action, and only in very rare instances (25), were charges brought against the implicated soldiers. Another thirteen cases were referred for disciplinary action. A total of 132 cases are still at various processing stages, and the MAG Corps was unable to locate 44 others.
MAG Corps handling of incidents referred by B’Tselem – 2000-2015:
On their own, these numbers do not necessarily mean there is any problem with the way the military law enforcement system operates, but the figures on how the system handles complaints of harm to Palestinians by soldiers must be viewed in a wider context.
How does the military law enforcement system operate?
Over the course of more than 25 years of operation, we have gathered information from hundreds of complaints B’Tselem filed with the military law enforcement system. In addition to the vast amount of information collected with respect to the processing of these cases, over the years B’Tselem has requested and received scores of investigation files from the Military Police Investigations Unit (MPIU).
B’Tselem staff members have also met with officials inside the military law enforcement system dozens of times over the years, and corresponded at length with the MAG Corps and other military officials. All this information has helped B’Tselem gain a great deal of experience and given it vast and detailed organizational knowledge regarding how the system works and the considerations that guide it.
It is the sum of this knowledge that serves as the basis for pointing to the structural failures that underpin the military law enforcement system’s ability to process a sizeable caseload and yet close the vast majority of cases without any further action:
With MPIU investigations conducted negligently, investigators cannot get at the truth. Almost no effort is made during the investigation to collect external evidence, the system citing as an excuse difficulties of which it has been aware for years and which it has made no attempt to resolve.
Instead of evidence, investigations rely almost exclusively on statements collected from soldiers and Palestinians. Nevertheless, the investigation files show that MPIU investigators are hard put to collect these statements, which are often obtained only months after the incident. At witness statement interviews, investigators function more like stenographers taking dictation than staff tasked with uncovering the truth. This is the case even when soldiers’ statements are found to contradict the accounts given by other soldiers or by the complainants.
The investigation file is transferred to the Military Advocacy for Operational Affairs, which is guided by considerations that almost inevitably dictate closing the file with no further action. Many cases are closed for “absence of guilt”, since the MAG Corps simply assumes that the accounts given by soldiers suspected of committing an offense are reliable – usually with no supporting evidence. In addition, the decision of the MAG Corps – which accompanies the investigations from the very start and oversees them – has done nothing to improve or make them more rigorous, instead finding the lax MPIU investigations sufficient for making decisions in cases. Under these circumstances, the fact that many cases are closed for absence of evidence is no surprise. Since no serious effort is made to obtain evidence, it clearly could not support a criminal case.
In many other cases the Military Advocacy for Operational Affairs elects not to launch a criminal investigation at all. Sometimes, it justifies its decision on the grounds of “absence of guilt”. Here, too, it does so on the basis of soldiers’ accounts of events. Sometimes, in cases in which there are Palestinian fatalities, the grounds are that the deaths were in “combat situations”, an exclusion that grants sweeping immunity to soldiers from criminal investigations, far above and beyond that granted by international humanitarian law.
The military law enforcement system also draws legitimacy from the ostensible existence of oversight mechanisms within the civilian system in the form of the Attorney General and the Supreme Court, saying they are meant to oversee the work of the MAG, who wields extensive authorities, as well as the work of the MAG Corps as a whole. However, the Attorney General elects to delegate most of his powers to the MAG and refrains from intervening in his decisions. As for the Supreme Court, it is not meant to serve as an oversight mechanism, and in the few cases in which it was asked to do so, for the most part it preferred not to intervene.
The military law enforcement system is plagued by a host of issues in the basic way it is run: The system is inaccessible to Palestinian complainants, who cannot file complaints with the MPIU directly and must rely on human rights organizations or attorneys to file the complaints on their behalf. The processing of each complaint lasts months, and even years, so that often enough soldiers who are the subject of the complaint are no longer under military jurisdiction. Both the MPIU and the MAG Corps act without transparency, and getting information from them – both about a complaint filed, as well as with general information about their work – requires repeated requests.
This is the system that officials bring as proof – to Israel and the world – of their claim that the military does everything in its power to investigate complaints against soldiers responsible for harming Palestinians and to prosecute the offenders. Top officials boast of the system’s effectiveness and values, discounting any substantive criticism, despite the fact that the system’s operation and the outcomes of its work are well known to senior officials both inside and outside the military.
While changes have been made to the military law enforcement system over the years, they mostly served to reinforce the impression that efforts were being made to get at the truth, and did not resolve the system’s substantive problems.
The deliberations and recommendations of the Turkel Commission ought to be considered against this backdrop. The Commission, which published its conclusions already three years ago (February 2013), recommended a number of improvements to the military law enforcement system.
The following were among the Commission’s recommendations: amendments to legislation that would include legislation against war crimes and address the criminal responsibility of commanding officers for the actions of their subordinates; improving MPIU and MAG Corps work methods – including setting shorter schedules for processing time; establishing an MPIU unit designated for handling complaints by Palestinians; greater transparency in the work of the MAG Corps; and a number of measures meant to enhance the MAG’s independence.
The implementation of these recommendations, which has already begun, may improve appearances of the current system, but it will not remedy the substantive flaws plaguing the military law enforcement system.
After the Turkel Commission published its recommendations, the government appointed another committee to implement them – the Ciechanover Committee, which submitted its own recommendations in August 2015. In its report, the Ciechanover Committee advocated the implementation of some of the Turkel Commission recommendations verbatim, stated that the implementation of others would require allocation of additional resources, and suggested some minor changes in yet other recommendations. The Ciechanover Committee concluded by stressing that its report is not the final word on the subject, and that some issues still require more work. It recommended the establishment of another agency that would follow up on the implementation of its recommendations.
A semblance of law enforcement
And so, report after report, committee after committee, the discourse in itself creates the illusion of movement toward changing and improving the system. This illusory movement allows officials both inside and outside the system to make statements about the importance of the stated goal of enforcing the law on soldiers, while the substantive failures remain as they were and most cases continue to be closed with no measures taken.
Among other things, the semblance of a functioning justice system allows Israeli officials to deny claims made both in Israel and abroad that Israel does not enforce the law on soldiers who harm Palestinians. In so doing, the state ensures that the military law enforcement system will remain in the sole purview of the military. The military, in turn, will be able to continue its investigation policy in which only the junior ranks are (ostensibly) investigated, while senior commanders and civilian superiors are absolved of accountability for unlawful acts committed under their authority.
These appearances also help grant legitimacy – both in Israel and abroad – to the continuation of the occupation. It makes it easier to reject criticism about the injustices of the occupation, thanks to the military’s outward pretense that even it considers some acts unacceptable, and backs up this claim by saying that it is already investigating these actions. In so doing, not only does the state manages to uphold the perception of a decent, moral law enforcement system, but also maintains the military’s image as an ethical military that takes action against these acts (defined as “aberrations”) and even has an extensive, professional system for doing so.
Effective investigations that get at the truth are critically important. For the victims and their loved ones such a system would mean getting justice, in that action would be taken against those responsible for death and injury.An effective law enforcement system will also serve the public interest by deterring soldiers and officers from committing similar offenses and preventing future harm. This is why establishing legal liability and accountability for human rights violations is the core of the activities of human rights organizations both in Israel and abroad.
And so, for 25 years, with a view to establishing accountability and preventing future harm, we contacted the military law enforcement system and demanded that soldiers suspected of harming Palestinians be investigated. Over the years, the military law enforcement system has developed the expectation that human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, serve as subcontractors for the military investigative system: that they submit the complaints, coordinate collecting statements, obtain documents, and so forth.
Although this is not B’Tselem’s job but the responsibility of the military system, we have elected to perform it for the last 25 years for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons we did so was that we hoped that in this way we were helping bring justice to the Palestinian victims and to establish deterrence that would prevent future similar incidents. If that had been the outcome, this paper would not have been written. In reality, however, B’Tselem’s cooperation with the military investigation and enforcement systems has not achieved justice, instead lending legitimacy to the occupation regime and aiding to whitewash it.
B’Tselem will no longer play a part in the pretense posed by the military law enforcement system and will no longer refer complaints to it. The experience we have gained, on which we base the conclusions presented in this report, has brought us to the realization that there is no longer any point in pursuing justice and defending human rights by working with a system whose real function is measured by its ability to continue to successfully cover up unlawful acts and protect perpetrators.
We will continue to document and report on Israel’s human rights abuses in the occupied territories, but we believe that the task of advancing human rights protection in the occupied territories will not be served by efforts to help shoddy investigations that would, in any case, end up being much watered down by MAG lawyers. The fight for human rights will be better served by denouncing this system and exposing it for what it is.
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/8136828.jpg)
By Jonathan Cook
In a surprise move, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week forced out his long-serving defence minister, Moshe Yaalon. As he stepped down, Yaalon warned: “Extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel.” He was referring partly to his expected successor:
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose trademark outbursts have included demands to bomb Egypt and behead disloyal Palestinian citizens. But Yaalon was also condemning extremism closer to home, in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Yaalon is to take a break from politics.
With fitting irony, his slot is to be filled on Likud’s backbenches by Yehuda Glick, a settler whose struggle to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple has the potential to set the Middle East on fire. Israeli commentators pointed out that, with Lieberman’s inclusion, the government will be the most extreme in Israel’s history – again.
French prime minister Manuel Valls, who began a visit to the region on Saturday, is likely to face an impregnable wall of government hostility as he tries to drum up interest in a French peace plan. Less noticed has been the gradual and parallel takeover of Israel’s security institutions by those espousing the ideology of the settlers – known in Israel as the national-religious camp.
None of this is accidental. For two decades the settlers have been targeting Israel’s key institutions. Under Netanyahu’s seven-year watch as prime minister, the process has accelerated.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler party Jewish Home and education minister, recently boasted that the national-religious camp, though only a tenth of the population, held “leadership positions in all realms in Israel”.
One such success for Bennett is Roni Alsheikh who was appointed police chief late last year. He was a long-time resident of Kiryat Arba, one of the most violent settlements in the occupied territories. The force’s most recent campaign, “Believing in the police”, is designed to recruit more religious hardliners.
Behind the programme are settler-politicians who have called Palestinians “sub-human” and expressed sympathy for those who burnt to death a Palestinian family, including a baby, last summer. The other security agencies are being transformed too. Religious nationalists now hold many of the top posts in the Shin Bet intelligence service and the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.
In the army too, the settlers are today heavily over-represented in the officers corps and combat units. For more than a decade their rabbis have dominated the army’s education corps, invoking God’s will on the battlefield. But, despite these rising tidewaters, Israel’s traditional secular elite – mostly of European extraction – have desperately clung on to the top rungs of the army command.
Netanyahu bitterly resents their continuing control. They stood in his way at two momentous occasions, as he tried to overturn the Oslo accords in the late 1990s and to bomb Iran five years ago. In a bid to curb their influence, Netanyahu tried to promote the religious Yair Naveh as military chief last year, but was blocked by the top brass.
Lieberman’s arrival as defence minister, however, may mark a turning point. In some ways, less is at stake than Yaalon’s hyperbolic warning suggests. For decades the secular generals have been in charge of an occupation that has crushed the rights of Palestinians and caged them into ever-smaller holding pens. These generals have been just as cruel as the religious officers replacing them. Nonetheless, the reverberations of this quiet revolution should not be ignored.
The old elites have lived off the fat of the land in the kibbutz, Israel’s spacious farming communities built on the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed in 1948. After the 1967 war, the kibbutz-generals happily exported the same model of industrial-scale theft of Palestinian land to the occupied territories. But their security obsessions were ultimately rooted in Israel, where they fear having to account for the crimes of 1948 from which they profited. Their abiding nightmare is a right of return to Israel of the lands’ original owners – Palestinian refugees today numbering in the millions.
The religious camp’s priorities are different. The lands they defend most passionately are not in Israel but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is where many live and where the holy places that sanctify their territorial greed are located. The spread of this zealotry into the army has deeply discomfited its more liberal elements. In recent years, small numbers of whistleblowers have emerged, from military intelligence unit 8200 through to a group called Breaking the Silence.
The recent video of an execution of a badly wounded Palestinian by army medic Elor Azaria – and the outpouring of public support in Israel for him – has only intensified these tensions. This month the army’s deputy head, Yair Golan, compared Israel to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Lieberman, meanwhile, is Azaria’s most vocal supporter. The goal of the religious nationalists is undisguised: to remove the last restraints on the occupation, and build a glorious, divinely ordained Greater Israel over an obliterated Palestinian society. That means no hope of a peaceful resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians – unless it is preceded by a tumultuous civil war between Israel’s secular and its religious Jews.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. (A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi)
In a surprise move, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week forced out his long-serving defence minister, Moshe Yaalon. As he stepped down, Yaalon warned: “Extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel.” He was referring partly to his expected successor:
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose trademark outbursts have included demands to bomb Egypt and behead disloyal Palestinian citizens. But Yaalon was also condemning extremism closer to home, in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Yaalon is to take a break from politics.
With fitting irony, his slot is to be filled on Likud’s backbenches by Yehuda Glick, a settler whose struggle to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple has the potential to set the Middle East on fire. Israeli commentators pointed out that, with Lieberman’s inclusion, the government will be the most extreme in Israel’s history – again.
French prime minister Manuel Valls, who began a visit to the region on Saturday, is likely to face an impregnable wall of government hostility as he tries to drum up interest in a French peace plan. Less noticed has been the gradual and parallel takeover of Israel’s security institutions by those espousing the ideology of the settlers – known in Israel as the national-religious camp.
None of this is accidental. For two decades the settlers have been targeting Israel’s key institutions. Under Netanyahu’s seven-year watch as prime minister, the process has accelerated.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler party Jewish Home and education minister, recently boasted that the national-religious camp, though only a tenth of the population, held “leadership positions in all realms in Israel”.
One such success for Bennett is Roni Alsheikh who was appointed police chief late last year. He was a long-time resident of Kiryat Arba, one of the most violent settlements in the occupied territories. The force’s most recent campaign, “Believing in the police”, is designed to recruit more religious hardliners.
Behind the programme are settler-politicians who have called Palestinians “sub-human” and expressed sympathy for those who burnt to death a Palestinian family, including a baby, last summer. The other security agencies are being transformed too. Religious nationalists now hold many of the top posts in the Shin Bet intelligence service and the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.
In the army too, the settlers are today heavily over-represented in the officers corps and combat units. For more than a decade their rabbis have dominated the army’s education corps, invoking God’s will on the battlefield. But, despite these rising tidewaters, Israel’s traditional secular elite – mostly of European extraction – have desperately clung on to the top rungs of the army command.
Netanyahu bitterly resents their continuing control. They stood in his way at two momentous occasions, as he tried to overturn the Oslo accords in the late 1990s and to bomb Iran five years ago. In a bid to curb their influence, Netanyahu tried to promote the religious Yair Naveh as military chief last year, but was blocked by the top brass.
Lieberman’s arrival as defence minister, however, may mark a turning point. In some ways, less is at stake than Yaalon’s hyperbolic warning suggests. For decades the secular generals have been in charge of an occupation that has crushed the rights of Palestinians and caged them into ever-smaller holding pens. These generals have been just as cruel as the religious officers replacing them. Nonetheless, the reverberations of this quiet revolution should not be ignored.
The old elites have lived off the fat of the land in the kibbutz, Israel’s spacious farming communities built on the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed in 1948. After the 1967 war, the kibbutz-generals happily exported the same model of industrial-scale theft of Palestinian land to the occupied territories. But their security obsessions were ultimately rooted in Israel, where they fear having to account for the crimes of 1948 from which they profited. Their abiding nightmare is a right of return to Israel of the lands’ original owners – Palestinian refugees today numbering in the millions.
The religious camp’s priorities are different. The lands they defend most passionately are not in Israel but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is where many live and where the holy places that sanctify their territorial greed are located. The spread of this zealotry into the army has deeply discomfited its more liberal elements. In recent years, small numbers of whistleblowers have emerged, from military intelligence unit 8200 through to a group called Breaking the Silence.
The recent video of an execution of a badly wounded Palestinian by army medic Elor Azaria – and the outpouring of public support in Israel for him – has only intensified these tensions. This month the army’s deputy head, Yair Golan, compared Israel to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Lieberman, meanwhile, is Azaria’s most vocal supporter. The goal of the religious nationalists is undisguised: to remove the last restraints on the occupation, and build a glorious, divinely ordained Greater Israel over an obliterated Palestinian society. That means no hope of a peaceful resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians – unless it is preceded by a tumultuous civil war between Israel’s secular and its religious Jews.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. (A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi)
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/8806637.jpg)
Several Palestinians joined on Tuesday evening a sit-in staged in the Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem, to speak up against the arbitrary abductions carried out by the Palestinian Authority (PA) forces against anti-occupation activists.
Reporting from Bethlehem, a PIC correspondent said dozens of Palestinians marched from the Aida camp to the so-called PA security square in Bethlehem.
Several PA troops were seen deployed around the area in an attempt to quell the protest.
Over recent days, several Palestinian anti-occupation activists and youths were arrested by the PA forces in a move aimed at propping up security coordination with the Israeli occupation.
In a related development, the Israeli occupation forces kidnapped the Palestinian student Khalil Mustafa Kanaan, a couple of days after he had been released from the PA jail, where he had spent 27 days.
The PA forces also arrested the Islamic Jihad leader Ahmad al-Nasr in western Ramallah city after they wreaked havoc on his family home.
Reporting from Bethlehem, a PIC correspondent said dozens of Palestinians marched from the Aida camp to the so-called PA security square in Bethlehem.
Several PA troops were seen deployed around the area in an attempt to quell the protest.
Over recent days, several Palestinian anti-occupation activists and youths were arrested by the PA forces in a move aimed at propping up security coordination with the Israeli occupation.
In a related development, the Israeli occupation forces kidnapped the Palestinian student Khalil Mustafa Kanaan, a couple of days after he had been released from the PA jail, where he had spent 27 days.
The PA forces also arrested the Islamic Jihad leader Ahmad al-Nasr in western Ramallah city after they wreaked havoc on his family home.
![Picture](/uploads/1/6/1/7/16170628/8097213.jpg)
The higher committee for supporting Jerusalem and the Aqsa in 1948 Occupied Palestine was launched in a press conference in Occupied Jerusalem on Tuesday.
The committee was declared in the conference that was attended by Sheikh Ekrema Sabri, Head of the Higher Islamic Committee in Occupied Jerusalem and Preacher of the Aqsa Mosque, along with Mohammad Watad, Head of the committee, and Sheikh Mahdi Masalha, the spokesman of the committee.
Sheikh Sabri hailed the establishment of the committee and condemned the Israeli aggressive practices at Muslims’ sacred places in Occupied Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque considering them as illegal and illegitimate.
For his part, Watad said the committee will work on supporting the Jerusalemite people and contacting them along with the Arab and Muslim worlds to achieve that goal.
Israel seeks to Judaize the city and displace its original inhabitants, he pointed out. The committee’s spokesman Masalha said that the general policy of the committee does not accept any changes in the Aqsa’s reality since the time before it was occupied in 1967. It also emphasizes on the fact the al-Buraq wall is for Muslims only.
The committee was declared in the conference that was attended by Sheikh Ekrema Sabri, Head of the Higher Islamic Committee in Occupied Jerusalem and Preacher of the Aqsa Mosque, along with Mohammad Watad, Head of the committee, and Sheikh Mahdi Masalha, the spokesman of the committee.
Sheikh Sabri hailed the establishment of the committee and condemned the Israeli aggressive practices at Muslims’ sacred places in Occupied Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque considering them as illegal and illegitimate.
For his part, Watad said the committee will work on supporting the Jerusalemite people and contacting them along with the Arab and Muslim worlds to achieve that goal.
Israel seeks to Judaize the city and displace its original inhabitants, he pointed out. The committee’s spokesman Masalha said that the general policy of the committee does not accept any changes in the Aqsa’s reality since the time before it was occupied in 1967. It also emphasizes on the fact the al-Buraq wall is for Muslims only.