Amnesty International said last night it was disappointed at the Palestinian Authority's summary rejection of its new report on suicide-bombings, which defined these and other attacks on Israeli civilians as "crimes against humanity".
Amnesty urged the PA to prevent the attacks and bring their perpetrators to justice.
"The PA have rejected the report, although I have the feeling that they never read it," Ms Liz Hodgkin, from the Middle East Program at Amnesty's International Secretariat, told The Irish Times.
Israel welcomed the report, which covers 130 attacks in which 350 Israeli civilians were killed since September 2000. (Some 1,750 Palestinians - including 70 suicide-bombers - and 560 Israelis have died in the intifada to date.) The Justice Minister, Mr Meir Sheetrit, said Amnesty had finally "seen the light" after years of what he called "skewed" reports about Israeli human rights abuses. Ms Hodgkin said, however, the report reflected no changes in Amnesty's past positions, and noted that it had always condemned the killing of civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Acknowledging that this was the first in seven reports issued by Amnesty since the intifada erupted to focus specifically on Palestinian attacks rather than on Israeli violations, she said this stemmed from the marked upsurge in suicide-bombings since March.
Although PA President Yasser Arafat said yesterday he condemned suicide bombings, the PA's cabinet secretary Mr Ahmed Abdul Rahman asserted that "all that is happening to Israeli citizens is a normal consequence for their occupation and rejection of Palestinian rights".
However, the report, entitled Without Distinction - Attacks on Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups, rebuts the assertion that suicide-bombings and other attacks on civilians are a justified response to occupation. "No violations by the Israeli government, no matter their scale or gravity," can justify the killings.
It reports that Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, for instance, asserted to its researchers that the Palestinians were "entitled to defend and liberate their land by all means under all international declarations and laws". Contrary to such claims, the report states, "attacks on civilians are not permitted under any internationally recognised standard of law", whatever the context. "Not only are they considered murder under general principles of law in every national legal system", it adds, but "in the manner in which they are being committed in Israel and the Occupied Territories, they also amount to crimes against humanity".
Amnesty also dismisses an assertion, made to its researchers by the head of Mr Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO in the West Bank, Mr Marwan Barghouti, that Israelis living in the occupied territories are not civilians because "'it is all an occupied country". While Amnesty says that Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are "unlawful under the provisions of international humanitarian law" the report states that the settlers do not lose their civilian status unless they are taking "a direct part in hostilities". Coincidentally, Israel announced it planned to try Mr Barghouti in a civil court for his alleged involvement in a series of attacks on Israeli civilians. The Fatah leader was arrested in April.
Amnesty's report cites Israeli claims that Mr Barghouti holds "direct authority" over the Al-Aksa Brigades, responsible for 20 of the attacks cited in the report. It also says some members of the Brigades told its researchers that they follow orders from Mr Arafat, while others said they acted on their own initiative.
Overall, Amnesty ascribes blame for the persistence of the attacks both to Israel, because of its behaviour during incursions into Palestinian areas, and to the PA, because of "collusion or inaction by officials sympathetic to the armed groups". Ms Hodgkin said she doubted the PA could do anything to thwart the bombers, "since the Israelis have reoccupied the West Bank".
Three Lebanese security officers were killed last night when gunmen opened fire on them in the southern port city of Sidon. - (Reuters)