92 per cent of Palestinian complaints against settlers and occupation go unheeded

A new report issued by an Israeli human rights group has found that most of the complaints filed by Palestinians against the violations committed by Israeli occupation forces, including settler attacks, go unheeded, Arabs48 news website reported on Thursday.

The Yesh Din human rights group, which researched and traced 1,045 complaints made by Palestinians against Israeli settlers and occupation forces since 2005, learned that 92 per cent of these files were closed without ever finding the aggressor.

The data suggests that Israel’s occupation authorities do not make any concerted efforts to find the attackers and hold them accountable; instead they provide them with cover, which only ends up encouraging them to continue launching attacks on Palestinians.

According to Arabs48, the complaints that were filed by Palestinians include violations and abuses by settlers and occupation soldiers, in each case a citizen of Israel, such as: shooting attacks, assault, stone-throwing, arson, cutting down trees, animal abuse, crop theft, construction on Palestinian-owned land, threats and other attacks.

The report confirms that over the last two years (2013-2014) there has been no progress in dealing with these abuses, even after the establishment of a police unit for combating nationalistic crimes. To the contrary, the report shows that the closed files against unknown perpetrators have only increased: out of 159 complaints that were tracked by the rights group over the last two years, the investigations of 106 complaints were completed, but indictments against the aggressors were only made in two cases. 86 files were closed on grounds of “perpetrator unknown”, seven files were closed on grounds of “insufficient evidence”, and two files were closed on grounds of “absence of a criminal culpability”.

As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper pointed out, “These statistics mean that of the 106 cases in which investigations were completed, 89.6 per cent were closed under circumstances that testify to a failure in the investigative process.”

Yesh Din concluded the report by saying that Israeli officials’ statements on the fight against nationalistic crimes are empty of substance and the establishment of a new unit to combat these crimes has not contributed to improving the performance of legal authorities.

Although not mentioned in the group’s report, Arabs48 noted that those few files where indictments were made against Israeli soldiers or settlers ended with lenient sentences.