Rights group: Only 6% of abuse claims against IDF yield charges

The Israel Defense Forces indicted just 6 percent of all soldiers accused of criminal offenses against Palestinians between September 2001 and the end of 2007, an Israeli human rights group said Wednesday.

The Yesh Din group said that from the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising, more than 1,200 investigations into suspect activities by Israeli soldiers were conducted, but only 78 of the investigations resulted in charges being filed.

The Yesh Din report, which bases its data on information provided by the military prosecution, also found that although some 2,000 Palestinian civilian noncombatants were killed by IDF fire during that time, according to human rights groups (defense officials say the number is far lower), only five soldiers and officers have been convicted of killing civilians, four of them on negligence charges. A total of 13 have been indicted.

"A soldier who hits a bound Palestinian detainee or shoots an unarmed civilian knows the chances he will be tried or investigated are negligible," said Yesh Din research director Lior Yavne, who compiled the report. "The IDF has failed to uphold its obligation to protect the occupied population in the territories from the offenses of soldiers."

The military said the group failed to provide an advance copy of the report for study and it could not therefore immediately comment on specific allegations but added that it had enlarged its military prosecution staff and "works tirelessly" to maintain ethical standards.

In the 78 indictments, 135 soldiers were charged with crimes, and 113 of those soldiers convicted, the report said. Many of the cases, including an incident where a soldier shot a Palestinian with rubber bullets at close range and was publicly criticized by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, resulted in minor convictions, such as "inappropriate behavior," the group said. Only four soldiers at the time of the report's publication had been convicted of manslaughter.

"To me, it means that the Israeli military is not doing enough to protect Palestinian civilians from criminal actions by its own soldiers," said Yavne.

The military said each case is dealt with according to its own particular circumstances and the evidence available.

"As such, it is not possible to derive any sort of ethical conclusions about the attitude of the (army) to illegal behavior by soldiers from a statistical analysis," it said.

The IDF said it takes seriously any unnecessary harm to Palestinian civilians or damage to their property, "and thoroughly examines every complaint."

"Every case is examined in its own right, without taking quotas or statistical measures into consideration," the IDF spokesman said. "You can't draw conclusions about the IDF's attitude toward inappropriate behavior or the way it deals with it from a statistical analysis of the data."