Court petition seeks to compel Israel army to investigate deaths of Palestinian civilians

The Israeli High Court of Justice is to consider a petition filed by human rights NGO Yesh Din, which argues that the Israeli military’s approach to investigating the deaths of Palestinian civilians is severely flawed.

The impetus for the legal challenge is the killing of Samah ‘Abd Al-Muamen ‘Abdallah, an 18-year-old Palestinian killed by an Israeli soldier as she sat in the backseat of a car in November 2015.

The Israeli army admitted that she was shot by mistake, claiming that occupation forces were responding to an attempted stabbing close by.

As Yesh Din explains, official Israeli army policy “requires an investigation of every incident resulting in the death of a Palestinian civilian, with the exception of incidents that are ‘clearly part of a combat situation’” – and it was on these grounds that the military refused to investigate Samah’s death.

According to the court petition, the definition, however, of a “combat situation”, “does not comply with international law”, and as such, “renders the Attorney General’s commitment to the High Court to investigate the deaths of Palestinian civilians effectively meaningless”.

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The petition emphasises “the distinction made in international law between clear-cut combat situations and civilian incidents, such as disturbances of the peace or individual acts of violence, to which the appropriate response is enforcement through policing.”

The petition argues that “when a lone perpetrator attempts to stab or run over civilians, such as in the incident that lead to Samah’s death, the attack does not belong in the category of a combat situation but rather of sporadic violence, disturbances of the peace and riots, to which the forces respond with policing rather than combat activity.”

Yesh Din cites figures provided by fellow rights group B’Tselem, which says that while 69 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank in 2015, only 21 investigations were opened. In 2016, 56 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, yet only ten investigations were immediately launched.

Abd Al-Muamen Abdallah, Samah’s father, said:

Israeli soldiers murdered my daughter in cold blood. At first they claimed she’d been holding a knife, then they said she was shot by mistake. I lost my eldest daughter right next to me, and her blood spattered over her siblings. If she was Israeli, they would have opened an investigation. But in my case, no one took any notice.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, felt no need to justify the lack of investigations into fatal shootings, saying that “most of those killed were terrorists trying to kill civilians and soldiers”.