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International Press Watchdog Slams “Unacceptable” Israeli Report
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Al Beshawi, IslamOnline's contributor from Palestine was killed by Israeli troops in July
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PARIS, Dec. 29 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In an open letter to the Israeli Minister of Defense, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the international press watchdog Reporters Without Boundaries (RSF) slammed the report recently released by the Israeli occupation army which gave details on cases in which foreign journalists were shot, news agencies reported.
RSF general secretary, Robert Ménard, slammed the report entitled "Report on injury of foreign journalists covering the violence in the West Bank and Gaza and operational procedures implemented by the Israeli Defense Forces". The report was made public on 18 December 2001 by the spokesperson of the Defense Ministry.
The report gave details on seven cases in which foreign journalists were shot during intense clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.
In four instances, the report claimed it couldn't be proven that the bullets were fired by Israeli soldiers. It further found no evidence in the three other cases.
The report, Ménard said, was a response to complaints addressed on numerous occasions to the Israeli authorities by a large number of journalists from local (Israeli and Palestinian) and international media, following the proliferation of serious acts of violence committed against them since the beginning of the second Intifada, or uprising.
"At least 45 journalists have been injured by bullets in the Occupied Territories since 29 September 2000,” said Ménard. “In almost all cases, it appears highly probable that the shots were fired by the Israeli armed forces."s
"Unfortunately, the content of the report has proved to be highly disappointing, for it provides very little new information and corresponds only very partially to the commitments made by your government," Ménard told Ben Elizier.
He added that although the Israeli Defense ministry has met its commitments by making this report public, this has taken place very late - over one year after the incident, in some cases.
"This substantially reduces the chances of being able to reconstruct scenarios of these events and thus of identifying individual and collective responsibilities,” said Ménard.
"We think that you should have reacted in each of these cases with the same promptness as you did on two particular occasions, i.e. when Yola Monakhov and Ben Wedeman were injured,” he added. “In the cases of these two journalists working for major U.S. media, your services proved to be highly efficient, and we deplore the fact that all investigations were not undertaken with the same rapidity."
There were also seven cases of journalists injured by bullets that were mentioned in the report put out by the Israeli government. The report does not feature cases of Palestinian journalists working for Palestinian media and the actual list of injured journalists is much longer reaching to 45, Ménard added.
Furthermore, the report failed to note the fact that in the majority of the 45 cases cited, the journalists were injured when they were outside the field of fire, said the letter. Even worse, sometimes they were still well away from any incident as if they had been deliberately targeted.
The report also lacked the reliability of the investigation as absolutely no new information concerning the seven cases were added. "All the details mentioned were already present several months ago in statements made by the ministry to the Israeli press and in various public declarations by the Israeli government. They were furthermore recorded, often with more detail, in the report that we published in July 2001," said Ménard.
The Israeli government itself recognized the superficiality of the investigations, imputing the failure to furnish more information to the fact that the cases at question are not recent.
"This is only a part of the explanation; we could, in many cases, mention sources of information that were disregarded, starting with the victims themselves," he said.
The Israeli government only gathers information about the incidents in which journalists were involved when there is a real political will at hand.
"In several cases the incidents reported to you have not been properly investigated,” Ménard told Ben-Eliezer. "This situation is unacceptable."
The RSF general secretary added it was shocking how the report ignored the case of Bertrand Aquirre, the French TFI journalist who was hit full in the chest by an M16 bullet in Ramallah.
"The scene was filmed by three television crews,” said Ménard’s letter.
"The films, broadcast throughout the world and which we viewed several times, clearly show an Israeli border guard get out of his car, take aim, adjust his gun and fire a shot - one only - in the direction of the journalist.
"Bertrand Aguirre immediately collapsed and owes his life to his bullet-proof jacket. In view of the strong reactions to this extremely violent incident, a serious inquiry seemed to have been launched. Testimonies and evidence were collected.
"Yet, under a false pretext, the case was closed on 12 September 2001. We are particularly shocked to find no trace of this affair in your report which discusses, at length, another incident that took place two months later, on 13 August 2001."
Ménard ended his letter by saying that he is disappointed with the fact that it took over a year to study fewer than one out of six cases.
"This causes us to fear that, in the vast majority of cases, no satisfactory conclusions will ever be reached on the circumstances in which dozens of journalists have been injured,” he said. "Consequently, it will not either be possible to take punitive measures against the members of the Israeli armed forces involved.”
"What is the value of the assertion that the press is free to work in the Territories if the Israeli armed forces feel they can use their arms against journalists without being accountable for their acts?"
On July 26, RSF said that during a period of 10 months (from the start of the Intifada till July), thirty journalists, including 21 Palestinians, have been shot and wounded by the Israeli occupation army.
"The results of this investigation are available in a 37-page report that blames the Israeli army for almost all of these incidents," said RSF at the time.
On July 31, IslamOnline's reporter in Palestine, Mohamed el-bishawy, was killed by Israeli troops in the occupied city of Nablus as he covered a meeting for political leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas.
El-Bishawi, 28, was one of the eight Palestinians - including two Hamas leaders and two children - who were killed in the Israeli attack on a Hamas office in Nablus.
The IslamOnline freelance reporter was in Nablus on a reporting assignment when Israeli Apache planes bombarded a seven-story building that housed the Hamas office in the supposedly Palestinian-ruled town.
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