Last Update: 22/03/2004 11:45
Tens of thousands march in funeral procession for Yassin
By Amos Harel and Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondents, News Agencies and Haaretz Service
Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed at daybreak Monday when Israel Air Force helicopters fired missiles at a car carrying the wheelchair-bound head of the radical Islamic group as he left a mosque near his house in Gaza City.
Witnesses said Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin and his bodyguards around 5 A.M. local time as they left the mosque. Yassin was killed instantly and up to seven bodyguards, reportedly including Yasin’s son, were also said to have been killed. Hamas officials confirmed that Yassin had been killed.
Within hours, tens of thousands of mourners jammed the streets of Gaza City for the funeral procession of Yassin and the seven others killed in the air strike. Twenty-one Palestinian police officers formed an honor guard as the coffin holding Yassin’s mangled body was carried out of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Palestinian hospital sources said 15 people were wounded in the strike.
Israeli troops open fire in West Bank
The activists were demonstrating against Israeli army bulldozers which were razing and leveling a wide area of Palestinian-owned agricultural land at the village of Kharabtha Bani Hareth, west of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the witnesses said.
The soldiers fired tear gas canisters as well as rubber-coated metal bullets at the protestors, the medics said, adding that one of the wounded was a foreign peace activist who was hit in his eye by a rubber bullet.
Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian Initiative organization in Ramallah, told reporters that the protest was aimed at denouncing the construction of security wall.
Part of the wall which would pass through the village “would swallow wide areas of lands cultivated with olives,” Barghouti said, adding that more than 2000 trees of olives, almonds and figs would be outside the wall.
IOF Demolish More than 40 Palestinian Houses in 5 Days
21/03/2004
Palestine Media Center – PMC
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) early Sunday demolished seven in A’basan village east of the central Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis and two more in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, to raise the number of Palestinian homes destroyed in five days to more than forty.
The demolition of houses or destruction of other private property of Palestinians in occupied territories is explicitly forbidden by the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 53), as is collective punishment (Article 33).
Special Rapporteur on the situation in occupied Palestine submits report
Under its agenda item on the question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine, opened briefly in advance of general consideration later in the session, the Commission has before it the report of its Special Rapporteur, John Dugard (E/CN.4/2004/6), which concludes, among other things that the Israeli occupation continues to result in widespread violations of human rights, affecting both civil and socio-economic rights, and international humanitarian law. Israel’s justification for these actions is that they are necessary in the interests of its own national security, the document states, but the Rapporteur finds it difficult to accept that excessive use of force that disregards the distinction between civilians and combatants, the creation of a humanitarian crisis by restrictions on the mobility of goods and people, the killing and inhumane treatment of children, widespread destruction of property and territorial expansion could be justified as a proportionate response to the violence and threats of violence to which Israel is subjected. The construction of “the Wall” within the West Bank and the continued expansion of settlements, which, on the face of it, have more to do with territorial expansion, de facto annexation or conquest, than security, raise serious doubts about the good faith of Israel’s justifications in the name of security, the report states.