Hadash petition calls for 'neutral' panel to probe Oct. 2000 riots

The Hadash party has launched a petition calling for the establishment of a neutral commission of inquiry to investigate the riots of October 2000, in which police killed 13 Arab civilians rioting in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

The petition calls for the committee to include international experts. Hadash officials said they intend to acquire the signatures of 250,000 people.

More than 20,000 people marched Friday afternoon in the Israeli Arab town of Sakhnin, protesting Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's decision earlier this week not to seek the indictments of police officers involved in the deaths of October 2000.

The participants carried 13 mock coffins with the pictures and names of the victims.

Hadash Chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh said that "the impressive turnout is a cry of protest against the racist establishment headed by Mazuz, the State Prosecution and the Police Investigation Department, whose decisions legitimize the killing."

Balad Chairman MK Jamal Zahalka slammed the law enforcement agencies, saying "the fingers that wrote Mazuz's decision are the same ones that pulled the trigger and killed 13 of our sons. The pen and the rifle carry the same fingerprints."

Zahalka added that the Arab public gave the legal system a chance to put the perpetrators on trial, but it failed to do so because it continues to treat Arabs as the enemy.

The chairman of the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee Shauki Hatib said: "We are still subjected to the aftermath of the Nakba ['The Catastrophe,' the Palestinians' term for the aftermath of the 1948 War]. They wanted to go back in time but we know well that their malicious intentions are still there. Today's protest is the first in a series of measures we are about to take; we will appeal for international legal aid and bring the murderers to justice."

Hatib added that Mazuz's decision gives legitimacy to the killing of Arabs, and that there are different degrees of equality before the law according to ethnicity.

"If there's a reasonable Jew in this country," he added, "he should condemn this decision."

	Israeli Arabs protesting in Sakhnin on Friday (Dror Artzi)