Ramallah: The Israeli police department has partially admitted to the use of live ammunition against Palestinian protesters who throw stones at occupation forces.
Responding to an administrative petition submitted by the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) to the Lod Central Court urging the Israeli police to publish its policy regarding the use of live ammunition, the Israeli police force partially admitted that the Israeli attorney general had allowed the occupation forces to use live ammunition against Palestinians pelting stones without fear of consequences for their actions.
The Israeli Hebrew news site NRG reported on Tuesday that the Israeli attorney general granted his approval for the use of live ammunition last December amid rising tensions in occupied East Jerusalem, but such approval remained a classified matter and the Israeli police had refused to respond to Adalah’s petition then.
The attorney general’s approval allows occupation forces to use live ammunition until 2019.
The Israeli police acted in keeping with instructions from the Israeli security cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who had announced that his government was changing its policy towards protesters last December. “We can not accept the current situation, and we plan on giving our soldiers and police officers the tools they need to act very strongly against stone throwers and against firebomb throwers,” Netanyahu had said then.
The Israeli police had announced that the policy on use of live ammunition was changing but categorically refused to publish those policy changes citing Israeli national security threats.
Adalah, Palestinian lawmakers and Palestinians in the 1948 areas strongly believe that the Israeli police’s use of live ammunition against Palestinian stone throwers is a virtual judicial licence to kill more Palestinian civilians.
Mohammad Bassam, a lawyer with Adalah, said in a statement that the claims of the occupation forces that they use the rifles to scare off Palestinian stone throwers when lives of occupation soldiers in the field were in danger and that the weapons were usually fired at the stone throwers’ legs were totally untrue and baseless.
