Israeli high court endorses killing Palestinian militants
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 14, 2006
JERUSALEM – The Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Israel’s policy of targeted killings of Palestinian militants, allowing the army to maintain a practice that has drawn widespread international condemnation.
The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel fixed some legal limits, but it did not insist on prior court approval for the attacks, leaving the limits only theoretical and endorsing the killings in practice.
Israel has defended the killings as necessary to prevent terror attacks, including suicide bombings. But the original justification of stopping “ticking bombs” has been expanded over the years to targeting militant leaders, including field commanders and the founder of Hamas.
Palestinians and human rights groups, who have denounced the killings as assassinations and summary executions without trial, criticized the court for giving legal legitimacy to the practice.
During the last six years of conflict, Israel has routinely targeted militants in airstrikes. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem estimates that 339 Palestinians have been killed in the targeted operations since 2000. Of those, 210 were the targets and the rest were bystanders.
Israel has not carried out such an airstrike since a cease-fire went into effect in Gaza at the end of November.
Targeted killings are usually carried out by attack helicopters or unmanned drones firing missiles at cars, acting on intelligence information from agents and informers on the ground. The tactic has since been adopted by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This was the last decision before retirement by Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, who has often set judicial standards for human rights.
Barak and his two colleagues ruled that “it cannot be determined in advance that every targeted killing is prohibited according to customary international law,” while also noting that the tactic was not necessarily legal in every case. Every case needs to be evaluated individually to determine its legality, the court said.
Israeli army Col. Pnina Sharvit, head of military’s international law department, said that “everything in the decision is compatible with our existing policy.”
