writes in Electronic Intifida Rights and Accountability 3 December 2021
To mark International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the Israeli military tweeted a photo of its communications tower in Tel Aviv lit in purple on Friday.
The military claimed that the gesture was “in honor of people with disabilities in Israel and around the world.”
Twitter users quickly seized on the irony and hypocrisy by highlighting Israel’s myriad crimes against Palestinians with disabilities.
Earlier this week, an Israeli and a Palestinian human rights group published a report exposing Israel’s sham investigations into the killing and maiming of protesters during Gaza’s Great March of Return.
At least 223 Palestinians were killed during those protests, which began on 30 March 2018 and concluded in December 2019.
Seven persons with disabilities were killed during the protests, according to Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group.
A UN commission of inquiry found that Israeli snipers shot at persons with disabilities “knowing they were clearly recognizable as such” during the Great March of Return.
Additionally, more than 13,000 Palestinians were injured during the protests – “some 8,000 by live fire, about 2,400 by rubber-coated metal bullets, and almost 3,000 by tear gas canisters that hit them directly,” B’Tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights stated in their joint report this week.
Those figures do not reflect the thousands more people injured from tear gas inhalation during the protests.
“Of the persons wounded, 156 lost limbs,” the rights groups state. “None of these cases were investigated.”
B’Tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights described Israel’s self-investigation mechanism as a “smokescreen” intended to deter the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.
The tribunal in The Hague only pursues war crimes cases when states are “unwilling or unable” to carry out meaningful domestic investigations.
Israel is unwilling to investigate abuses against Palestinians by its forces, and therefore “the responsibility to ensure accountability for these violations now lies with the ICC,” B’Tselem stated.