For years, death squads, generally disguised as civilians or in Arab dress, have vigorously carried out their lethal work of eliminating the "wanted" on their hit list of "hard-core activists" (many of them teenagers) — and anyone who gets in the way.
Neither the protests of human rights organisations nor the signing of the Oslo agreement has deterred the death squads. Many of the nearly 60 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces and settlers since September 13,1993, were executed by undercover agents. Israel has admitted that some were bystanders, like 17-year-old Abbas Saidi, who was gunned down on January 3, 1994, "by mistake" as soldiers in plain clothes pursued a "wanted" man in Gaza's Shati Camp.
Among those recently murdered by the special units was 32-year-old Abdul-Rahman Yusif Aruri. NASEER ARURI, an adviser to the Middle East Justice Network, here describes the circumstances of his cousin's death.
On Tuesday, December 7, I learned from reading the New York Times that my cousin Abdul-Rahman Yusif Aruri had been assassinated by an Israeli death squad. Subsequent reports by Agence France Presse (December 6 and 8) and from people back home conveyed a gruesome picture.
According to these sources, Aruri was killed in front of his own house in his village Arura, near Ramallah in the West Bank. He was shot twice in the back of his head at close range with a silent revolver, as his eight-months pregnant wife, three children and relatives watched from the window in horror and disbelief.
Premeditated execution
In a sworn affidavit, his sister-in-law and neighbour Halima said she heard a car pull up and saw six or seven people get out. They asked for the owner of the house, and when Abdul Rahman came out with his hands on his head, one of the men asked his name three times. Upon giving his name, he was shot in the head.
Mohammad Aruri, a 45-year-old cousin, was in the house with Abdul-Rahman. He described how the victim put on a pullover when he heard the car, sure that the Israelis had come to arrest him again. "I heard two shots and then saw his body on the ground, with blood oozing from his head", the cousin said. Eyewitness accounts report the killing as a premeditated execution; moments after the victim fell to the ground, an Israeli agent asked a relative to identify him as "Aruri".
This is a classic case of execution — both in the manner it was carried out, and in the way it was officially explained. It did not matter that he came out with both hands on his head, bearing in one hand the receipt for the benign orange ID card which would allow him to travel to Jerusalem and enter Israel. He received it two weeks before from the military headquarters in exchange for the green ID card which identifies former prisoners who cannot go to Jerusalem or Israel.
Jailed for seven months in August 1992, he was in December 1992 expelled to Lebanon with 413 reputed Islamist activists. However, his expulsion was ruled a "mistake" by the Israeli army, and he returned home on January 24, 1993.
Official explanation
The death squads typically arrive without uniforms, dressed in Arab clothing, in a car with an Arab licence plate. They home in on their target in the manner of an ambush. The official announcement of death is prepared in advance. In my cousin's case, according to the New York Times, an Israeli Army spokesperson said he was suspected of taking part in the December 1 killing of two Israeli settlers. As he was spotted in his village he made a "suspicious move", a gesture as if he were armed. An officer shot him — then found he was not carrying a gun.
My cousin was not on any "wanted" list. He ran a grocery store in the village and worked there every day. After his death the Israeli army seized his body and kept it for two days before returning it to his family. The fact that Muslims, like Jews, bury the dead shortly after death occurs made no difference to his killers.
Atrocities
During my six years (1984-90) as a board member of Amnesty International-USA, I dealt with the phenomenon everyone in the organisation called "EJE" — extra-judicial execution. Our involvement was supposed to be detached; I never thought my family would enter the gloomy statistics.
For most human rights activists, EJE is synonymous with places like Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina under the military. The idea that Amnesty would produce a report on death squads in Israel seemed unthinkable.
But it happened in January 1990, when the organisation's newsletter warned that "the Israeli government had effectively condoned and even encouraged extra-judicial executions of Palestinians by its security forces in order to help control unrest during the intifada". The number of Palestinians executed between April 1988 and May 1992 was put at 86 by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights, B'Tselem.
Since the more "dovish" Labour government assumed power in July 1992, the human rights situation in the occupied territories has grown worse. A recent report by Amnesty International shows that during the first six months of 1993 Israeli occupation forces shot dead 110 Palestinians, including 30 children. According to the same report, many of the killings were, in fact, assassinations.
The historic handshake of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn has not brought improvement. The escalation of violence since September 13 has caused President Clinton, the man who oversaw the White House handshake, to condemn the killings of the Israeli soldiers and settlers — but not the ongoing executions of Palestinian civilians by so-called Israeli undercover agents.
Peace and stability in the Middle East will not be served by an arrangement where the "victor" imposes terms on the "vanquished". A balance must be struck between parity and equality on the one hand, and political, military and economic forces in the Palestine-Israel region. Otherwise, my deceased cousin, who was not charged, tried or even questioned in connection with the killings of Israelis, will be a simple entry (number 1148 since the intifada) into the kind of statistics that can only breed new violence and future wars. [Naseer Aruri is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Reprinted from Breaking the Siege, newsletter of the Middle East Justice Network.]