Palestinian attacks on Israelis are "crimes against humanity"
 
Agence France Presse, 
July 21, 2003
 
Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians amount to "crimes against humanity" which Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority has not done enough to stop, a French-based rights group charged Monday.
 
"Armed Palestinian groups clearly premeditate and organise serious
violations of international humanitarian law," Medecins du Monde(Doctors of the World) said in a report.
 
The study found that the violence against Israelis -- in particular suicide bombings -- "by their 'systematic or generalised' character, in a stated intention to kill civilians and to sow terror in the Israeli population, constitute crimes against humanity in the terms of the statute of the International Criminal Court." 
 
The study covered almost two years of the latest Palestinian uprising from September 29, 2000 to August 12, 2002.
 
In its research, based upon interviews with survivors, victims' families,workers in non-governmental organisations, police officers, soldiers and officials from the Israeli ministries of foreign affairs and health, Medecins du Monde calculated that the proportion of civilian victims was "at least equal to 70 percent" and that most were elderly, young or children.
 
"All of Israeli society is effected, either symbolically, with Holocaust survivors becoming victims in their daily life, where safety imperatives modify behaviour, or on an economic level."
 
According to an AFP tally, a total of 3,382 people have been killed since the start of the conflict, including 2,549 Palestinians and 772 Israelis. Israeli human rights watchdog B'Tselem said 515 of the Israeli victims were civilians, including Jewish settlers.
 
The Medecins du Monde report was a follow-up to a study conducted last year with the International Federation for Human Rights which accused the Israeli army of "war crimes" in the way it repressed the Palestinian civilian population.
 
In its latest report, the group accused the Palestinian Authority of
"letting a climate of impunity develop" around Palestinian attacks on
Israelis, and of maintaining "an ambiguity as to the moral support for
people who organise and commit these crimes."
 
 
Nevertheless, it noted that senior Palestinian officials and respected
intellectuals have admonished the actions against civilians, and it called on the international community to support them.
 
"Currently, there is a very good window of opportunity -- there is a truce (declared by armed Palestinian groups) and, in Aqaba, the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmud Abbas, has denounced terrorism and violence," the group's honorary president Jacky Mamou told AFP.
 
"We made an analysis by placing ourselves in the field of international
humanitarian law, to see if the victims are 'collateral damage' in the
conflict. The answer is clear: there is a deliberate will to terrorize the population and to cause the maximum number of civilian victims. That constitutes a crime against humanity, there is no doubt about that at all."