HAARETZ (ISRAEL) – Questions are surfacing about Israel’s use of tear-gas grenades, as
security officials investigate the recent death of a protester at the
weekly demonstration near the separation fence at the West Bank village
of Bil’in. A 36-year-old woman, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, died on Saturday
morning.
The medical report filed in the Ramallah hospital where Abu Rahmah was taken shows that her death was caused by respiratory failure resulting from the inhalation of tear gas.
Haaretz obtained the medical report on Sunday from Jawaher’s brother, Ahmed Abu Rahmah.
Jawaher Abu Rahmah was the sister of Bassem Abu Rahmah, who was killed in April 2009 when Israeli soldiers fired a tear-gas grenade at his chest at a demonstration at the fence in Bil’in. Ahmed Abu Rahmah has three surviving brothers; their father died five years ago.
“My entire family is ruined,” he said on Sunday. “The whole house feels a sense of catastrophe.” He said he bears no hatred toward Israelis. “They are people just like myself. We don’t seek vengeance against Israel. We want the return of our lands, and the struggle won’t end until our property is restored.”
The Israel Defense Forces uses crowd-dispersal tear gas known as CS, which was developed half a century ago in Britain and the United States. It is used by armies and police forces around the world. In recent years, a number of studies have cast doubts about this type of gas; there have been reports of several deaths caused by the inhalation CS tear gas.
Click to read full article on IDF use of dangerous tear gas.
© Copyright 2011 Haaretz
Article written by Avi Issacharoff and Anshel Pfeffer
Photograph by flickr user Mark Z.
Actually, at first the IDF admitted that it was pblarboy them who had killed al Durah. Later, they began backing off the claim and it was only after it became abundantly clear they hadn’t killed him that they finally, belatedly, removed the stain of responsibility from their own shoulders. Karsteny shouldered all the costs of his efforts and held fast to the truth despite the fact that he was facing an established myth.The problem here involves a few challenges for Israel. First, it can’t extricate itself from the Palestinians because they don’t want to be extricated. The little Qassam museum in Sderot is testament to that. So is the Washington Post interview with Abbas about Olmert’s peace offer where the only justification he gave for walking away from a Palestinian state was that the gaps were too wide. This, even though they would have had a capital in east Jerusalem. What this means is that Israel faces a number of different wars. It faces the Iranian front, led by two proxy armies on Israel’s borders pointing real missiles at Israel. It faces belligerent Arab states that seek to undermine Israel internationally and diplomatically even as they continue to prepare for war against the Jewish state. And, when not facing a terrorist war by the Palestinians, Israel has been facing a propaganda war by them.The goal of the propaganda is straightforward: to isolate Israel diplomatically and eliminate support from the Western public at large to a degree that would influence Western governments to slow or eliminate support for the Jewish state. Events such as Al Durah and Cast Lead are used in this context and quite effectively, often with the support and assistance of many Leftist Jews within and outside of Israel. I have been present at demonstrations critical of Israel where there were more Jewish activists by a factor of 10-1 over Arab activists. This has come to help the Palestinian cause immensely, since apparently any Jew who attacks Israel gains automatic credibility as a good Jew of the peace and justice kind. Apparently the rest of us are bad Jews who like to kill and maim, when we’re not manipulating the press and non-Jewish countries’ governments. Let’s take Cast Lead as an example. Where is B’Tzelem now that Hamas itself has rejected B’Tzelem’s civilian/militant death count for Cast Lead? Where is HRW? Where are all the college-circuit speakers in the US, Canada and the UK, such as Finkelstein, who walked around parroting false NGO claims against Israel, sordidly attacking the morality of Israel’s war, ignoring or justifying the thousands of rockets launched against the Western Negev and falsely using as the foundation of their attacks the high civilian death count in Cast Lead? Where is Goldstone for that matter?What exactly was Israel supposed to do? It put out accurate numbers of Hamas dead and chances are that if those were accurate, so were their other numbers of an additional 400 civilian dead. Did it get credit for its accurate reporting? No, it was vilified. Now, two years later, that it has been proven right about the numbers, are you and others who support the Palestinians going to apologize and claim that many of the claims made against Israel were false and unfair? Of course not. Instead there will be new attacks or more justifications for the old attacks.Did Israel get credit for waiting years for belligerence to stop from Gaza? No. Was Hamas ever seriously criticized for shelling civilians all the time and at random? No. It was understood and accepted that their priority is attacking Israel, just like today when they continue to amass pilestocks of weapons while promising Israel’s destruction and enjoying the support of the many people demanding the blockade be removed.Israel can’t win. It offers peace and gets war. It faces complex challenges from real enemies who openly wish for its destruction, and when it seeks to handle them, it is attacked in a unique manner by international institutions and organizations who openly excuse far greater sins by other nations. Once every couple of years, it faces stories like Al Dura, Jenin, Rachel Corrie, Cast Lead, et cetera, stories whose worst variants are pushed as solid truth by pro-Palestinian supporters.What’s surprising is that Israel hasn’t become what its detractors say it is. After all, if it is going to be criticized viciously, you would think it would learn to act as described. It has nothing to lose, since it will be criticized in the same way. And yet, it continues to seek to minimize casualties on the other side, to offer peace, and to express information about events to the best of its ability. Sometimes they get things wrong, but the track record suggests otherwise. It suggests that in two or three years from now, somebody will find out that this tear-gas death in Bil’in might have been something other than what was described. And then nobody will say anything, and I guess somebody will write commentary about how Israel never learns from its previous mistakes.I know! They should let the nice, unarmed demonstrators at Bil’in proceed to the fence every week and dismantle it all. Surely that will lead to justice and peace, and certainly much faster than something as ridiculous as a Palestinian leader signing a peace treaty with Israel.