Dozens of organizations demand justice over Israel's extrajudicial killings

More than 80 Palestinian and international civil society organizations have written to a UN Human Rights Council body, censuring the recent extrajudicial killing of a young Palestinian man by Israeli forces and demanding accountability for the occupying regime over its “shoot-to-kill” policy.

In their appeal submitted to the UN Special Procedures, 83 groups from across 16 countries said the killing of Ahmad Erekat, a 28-year-old resident of West Bank village of Abu Dis, and countless other Palestinians, must be understood within the context of the Tel Aviv regime’s “widespread and systematic shoot-to-kill policy targeting Palestinians.”

The Special Procedures are independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to address thematic or country-specific human rights issues.

“Under international law, the killing of Ahmad Erekat amounts to an extrajudicial execution and a willful killing, giving rise to individual criminal responsibility as a war crime at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ahmad is the 21st Palestinian killed by the Israeli occupying forces throughout the occupied Palestinian territory during the first half of 2020” the appeal read.

Erekat was shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near the city of Bethlehem on 23 June.

The regime forces denied him access to medical care and prevented a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance from reaching the scene, leaving the man bleeding to death.

Since then, Israeli authorities have been withholding Erekat’s body, prolonging his family’s suffering and denying him a dignified burial. 

Israeli police claim that Erekat intended to commit a car-ramming attack, but his family members suggest it was an accident that happened while he was rushing through the checkpoint to pick up his sister ahead of her wedding. 

A video of the incident shows that the unarmed Palestinian victim was actually raising his hands in the air, posing no threat to Israeli soldiers.

“Israel’s pervasive impunity must be seen as part and parcel of its institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, which constitutes the crime of apartheid,” the organizations wrote.

They estimated that Tel Aviv was withholding the bodies of 63 Palestinians in addition to at least 253 unidentified bodies languishing in Israel’s so-called “cemeteries of numbers.”

The organizations also urged the UN Special Procedures to “recognize Israel’s systematic shoot-to-kill policy as contributing to the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime of systematic racial oppression and domination over the Palestinian people as a whole, which, embedded in a system of impunity, prevents Palestinians from effectively challenging Israel’s apartheid policies and practices.”

They further “called for international justice and accountability to put an end to Israeli impunity and urged the UN human rights experts to publicly condemn the killing of Ahmad Erekat, to call for the unconditional release of Ahmad’s body as well as the bodies of all Palestinians punitively withheld by the Israeli occupying authorities, and to call on Israel, the Occupying Power, to revise its rules of engagement for the use of live fire.”

The UN Special Procedures should work towards “the immediate opening, without any further delay, of a full, thorough, and comprehensive ICC (International Court of Justice) investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine,” read the appeal.

According to Ahmad’s cousin and senior Palestinian Liberation Organization official Saeb Erekat, Ahmad was “executed, murdered in cold blood and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu bears responsibility.”

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