Ramallah, 01-08-07: The Israeli military‘s token investigation into the killing of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl became yet another whitewash today, as the Jerusalem District Prosecutor‘s Office ruled not to indict Israeli Border Police officers suspected of killing Abir Aramin in the Palestinian village of Anata near Jerusalem in January 2007.
Jerusalem prosecutors decided to close the investigation due to what they said was a lack of evidence on the exact nature of Abir‘s death.
The ruling was based on findings of an investigation conducted by the ‘Judea and Samaria‘ police department (Israel‘s police authority in the West Bank), whose pathologists claimed it was impossible to determine exactly what the cause of Abir‘s death was.
Yet eyewitness accounts indicated that Abir was hit in the head whilst on her way home from school by a stun grenade thrown by Israeli border police officers at a group of Palestinian children. She died two days later on 20 January 2007.
This is just the latest in a series of whitewashes over the Israeli military‘s killing of Palestinian civilians, a common practice within the Israeli military whose soldiers "act within an institutionalised culture of impunity," said Palestinian National Initiative leader Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP today.
He cited the example of the Israeli army‘s investigation into the killing of 17-year-old Bushra Bargish who was shot in cold blood during an Israeli military raid in Jenin on 21 April 2007. Bushra was shot in the forehead by an Israeli sniper while in her bedroom as she was preparing for an exam. Contradicting all eyewitness accounts, the Israeli military‘s investigation justified her killing by saying that shots were fired at the soldiers from a window in the same building in which Bushra lived, and that she was hit in the ensuring ‘exchange of fire‘.
Abir and Bushra‘s deaths clearly reveal that the Israeli military can kill Palestinian children with immunity, exposing "the true face of Israel‘s inhuman occupation", concluded Dr. Barghouthi.