Israel mishandled Arab killings 10 years ago: report

Study claims law enforcers rushed to shut down investigations into the killing of 13 Arab protesters.

Hundreds of people take part in a rally in the Israeli Arab town of Kafar Kanna on Friday, marking the anniversary of an eight-day protest in 2000, in which 13 Israeli Arabs were killed.

TEL AVIV // For many in Israel's Arab minority, the killing of 13 Arab protesters by Israeli police a decade ago remains an open wound.

And a report to be made public soon by the Israel Democracy Institute could slow the healing even more. The document - whose writers include prominent lawyers who were granted rare access to all the material from the investigations into the shootings, some of it confidential - states that the police probes into the killings were mishandled and calls on the attorney general to reopen the investigations.

According to a summary of the report, which was posted on the institute's website, the lawyers claim that law enforcers rushed to shut all the investigations even though evidence existed to produce indictments against police officers in at least two cases.

The institute, a think tank based in Jerusalem, also said in the summary that the prosecution ignored witness accounts that might have incriminated policemen and relied on weak testimonies that backed up its decisions to dismiss the cases.

"In light of these findings, it's hard not to raise the question of whether the [law enforcers] would have acted similarly had 13 Jews been killed," it said.

The institute contradicted the findings in 2008 of Israel's then attorney general, who announced there was "insufficient evidence" to indict any of the suspects. A spokesman for the ministry of justice declined to comment on the summary.

For eight days in October 2000, Israeli police used live ammunition to disperse protesters in many Arab towns and villages in northern Israel. They were demonstrating in support of the second Palestinian intifada that had started just days earlier in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Although the protesters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police and passersby, none was found to have used guns. Thirteen male demonstrators were killed by police, and hundreds of others were injured.

Many saw the riots as not just an expression of Israeli Arabs' solidarity with Palestinians, but also as a protest against the inequality and discrimination experienced by Israel's Arab minority as compared with the Jewish majority. A decade later, many Arab citizens say little has changed. Indeed, even the institute's report was titled: "The writing is still on the wall". The report said: "After the October events … the Arab population felt that the state was treating it like an enemy."

In a sign of growing discontent, thousands of Israeli Arabs flocked to the northern Israeli town of Kafar Kanna, one of the sites in which the protests had taken place, on Friday to mark the anniversary of the riots, which have become known in Israel as "the October events".

They waved Palestinian flags, poster-sized photos of the riot victims and signs reading, "We shall not forget, we shall not forgive", and "With blood and fire we'll redeem our martyrs".

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab legislator, said the institute's report bolsters the claim made by many Israeli Arabs that state prosecutors had tried to protect the policemen by curtailing the probes into the killings.

"We have always said that something stinks with the prosecution's decision," Mr Tibi said in an interview. "The state killed the Arabs and then covered up for the suspects. The message conveyed here was that the value of life is not equal in the prosecution's eyes when it comes to Jews and Arabs."

The Or Commission, an inquiry into the killings that was appointed by the government in 2003, lambasted the police for being unprepared for the riots and using excessive force to disperse the protesters. Its recommendations included guiding police to view Arabs as citizens whose rights are equal to those of Jews and directing police officers to use live fire or rubber bullets only when their lives are in danger.

Experts say law enforcement authorities have mostly ignored the recommendations. The institute's report said that in at least two cases, there was sufficient evidence to lead to indictments against police officers. Those cases included the killing of Rami Ghara, a 21-year-old who died on October 1, 2000, while standing at a petrol station after a rubber-coated steel bullet hit him in the eye.

The Or Commission's findings claimed that there was only one police officer in the area who had carried a weapon with such bullets, and that the officer had admitted firing in the direction of the petrol station even though he said his life was not under threat.

Lina Saba, a lawyer who helped write the institute's report, said in an interview with Israeli television that Ghara's case was prematurely closed. "There was an eyewitness who saw the suspect shooting and the deceased falling," she said. The prosecution tended to ignore the accounts of witnesses from Ghara's village except for one villager whose testimony supported their decision to dismiss the allegations.