A Palestinian rights group has called on the United Nations experts and rapporteurs to hold the Israeli regime to account for its extrajudicial killings of Palestinians across the occupied territories, which have left 41 people dead since the beginning of the current year.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) urged UN officials, particularly the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East al-Quds, to use all available means to pressure the occupying Tel Aviv regime to put an end to its practices against Palestinians and targeting their lives.
“On a daily, systematic, and widespread basis, Israel continues to violate Palestinian rights and use excessive force against unarmed Palestinian civilians throughout the occupied Palestinian territories,” it said in its urgent appeal, Palestine’s official Wafa news agency reported.
“The occupying Israeli forces shoot to kill Palestinians, who are protected under the International Humanitarian Law (IHL), particularly at military checkpoints and at their own discretion. Israeli troops have targeted and taken the lives of many Palestinians, including children and women, at checkpoints in the absence of imminent danger to the lives of Israeli soldiers. These Palestinians were killed allegedly because they attempted to carry out operations or on grounds of mere suspicion,” it added.
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The ICHR pointed to the killing of Ghada Ibrahim Sabateen, a 47-year-old Palestinian widow and mother of six children, near an Israeli checkpoint at the eastern entrance to Husan town, located nine kilometers west of Bethlehem on April 10 and said she “was directly targeted without any justification.”
It added that a soldier opened fire on and wounded her and then left her on the ground for a long time while not allowing anyone to help her until she bled to death.
On the same day, Maha al-Za’tari, a female citizen of the southern West Bank city of al-Khalil, was targeted and killed in cold blood, without any justification.
Tensions have been rising around the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the occupied Old City of al-Quds amid an uptick in Israel-Palestine violence.
The al-Aqsa compound sits on a plateau, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move not recognized by the international community.
The contested site is holy to Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and has been the focal point of the decades-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
