Australian media analyst/publisher/journalist Mike Hitchen has just written a post on his blog, here, reporting that the Campaign to Ban Landmines has strongly condemned the IDF move — leaked and widely reported authoritatively in the Israeli media, though only coyly hinted at by the IDF spokespersons — to plant new mines in the Golan to deter protesters coming across from Syria in September.
Israeli soldiers were reportedly stunned to see Palestinian protesters coming from Syria and crossing old minefields in the Golan in protests on May 15 [Nakba Day, marking the dispossesion of some 700,000 Palestinians in the fighting that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel in 1948] and June 5 [Naksa Day, commemorating the 1967 war].
Reports about what happened are contradictory. A recent news story suggested that old landmines failed to go off during both protests, which is a justification for planting new landmines. Earlier reports said that new mines had been planted between May 15 and June 5. A number of protesters were reportedly killed by landmine explosions set off, according to the IDF Northern Command, when brush fires set off by their Molotov cocktails exploded some mines [not clear whether these were new, or old, and the explanation is curious]…
The IDF spokespersons have not responded to multiple requests from this journalist for clarification, and correct information.
In September, the Palestinian leadership has announced, it intends to move to upgrade Palestine’s status at the UN. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has recently called for non-violent popular demonstrations in support of the move, at the same time. The IDF has publicly announced it is making various types of massive preparations in anticipation of possible protests in the coming weeks.
In Mike Hitchen’s post, he reports that Kasia Derlicka, Director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), said that “There can be absolutely no justification for the use of these indiscriminate weapons, and to hear that these mines are aimed at civilians is particularly shocking … Earlier this year the Israeli government began clearing some of its deadly minefields, in recognition of their lethal humanitarian impact. Now, at the same time, to use this inhumane weapon against civilians is absolutely disgraceful”.
On Twitter, on 15 August, the @IDFSpokesperson called our attention to a video dated 28 July, on which the Golan Brigade Commander is speaking, apparently to journalists [well, they are holding microphones], in a public information exercise to show off [as deterrence, as well as reassurance to the Israeli public] the new fence that the IDF has built in the Golan since May and June, to ward off more protests. This video [subtitled in English] is posted on the IDF Spokesperson website here, and it is also on Youtube here.
In the video, the IDF Golan Brigade Commander, Colonel Eshkol Shukron, says that the IDF will not tolerate “border provocations” by “terrorists or civilians from Syria“:
The new fence, he said very suggestively, is only “one of a number of components” that Israel is deploying on the Golan to stop further protests [the IDF calls them “provocations”, “infiltrations”, and “riots”] … but made no mention of landmines.
The IDF language here does raise a problem — it is linguistically, and conceptually, turning unarmed civilian demonstrators into military [security] threats, and effectively describing them as legitimate targets.
IDF use of the language of propaganda, as here, is both unnecessary and dangerous — and gives rise to serious alarm about how events will be handled in the coming period.
As @shunradan [Daniel Shunra] noted in a Tweet today, most of the demonstrators who rushed across the Golan on May 15 and June 5 were Palestinian in origin, and thus, he wrote, not “foreign civilians but LOCAL civilians who want to come home”.
Our own most recent report is posted here. In it, we note that, last week, “the latest edition of the Bemachaneh (On the Base) military magazine says that ‘Anti-personnel mines have been placed beyond the Golan border fence but on Israel’s side of the border … The mining in the area of the Golan territorial brigade is the first phase of activity that will extend to all of the border covered by the Israel Defense Forces’ 36th Division’.”
Bemanchana magazine is frequently cited as a source of material published on the IDF Spokespersons’ own website.
Mike Hitchens reports, in his post, that “Major Ariel Iluz of the Israeli Defense Force engineering corps said [in the Bemanchana piece, apparently] new antipersonnel mines were recently planted in existing minefields ahead of expected protests around a UN vote on an independent Palestinian state in September”.
Hitchens noted that “Israel is party to Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Article 3.7 of this protocol prohibits ‘in all circumstances to direct weapons to which this Article applies, either in offence, defence or by way of reprisals, against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians or civilian objects’.”
And, Hitchens reported that ICBL’s Derlicka said: “The use of antipersonnel landmines has become so stigmatized, it is extremely rare even among those who have not joined the Treaty. Recently only two states have planted them – Libya and Myanmar – states that have shown little respect for international humanitarian law and the impact of their military actions on civilians”.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the June 1967 war, and annexed the territory in 1980 — a move which the UN has called “null and void”. Syria has said that the goal its participation in peace negotiations with Israel would be the full return of this occupied territory. A UN Observer Force [UNDOF] has been deployed between the two sides for the last 43 years.
Hitchen added, in his post, that “This is the first confirmed [emphasis added here] use of antipersonnel mines by Israel in more than a decade. Israel is not among the 156 States Parties to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which comprehensively bans all use of the weapon. The ICBL holds use of antipersonnel mines in an armed conflict as a violation of international humanitarian law because of the inherently indiscriminate nature of the weapon. In this case, the ICBL believes that using antipersonnel mines to prevent border crossings is unlawful as it is an unnecessary and disproportionate use of lethal force”.
Hitchen noted that “The ICBL is calling on Israel to immediately clear the minefields, in order to prevent more civilian casualties. In a recent high profile case, 11-year-old Daniel Yuval lost his leg after stepping on an Israeli mine in the Golan Heights”.
A NYTimes report on Daniel Yuval’s experience is published here. This NYTimes report, dated May 2010, says that “Seventy-three members of the 120-seat [Israeli] Parliament [or Knesset] have co-sponsored a bill aimed at establishing a national authority for clearing mines ‘that are not required for security purposes’. The bill needs three readings in the coming few months and the backing of the government, which has not yet expressed its views. The fact that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have been known occasionally to use land mines recently could pose a problem. But those monitoring the issue in Israel say that they sense momentum and that most of the 260,000 land mines lining the borders — some from wars of decades ago, others placed there by the nation’s enemies — may finally be set for removal in the coming 5 to 10 years, at a cost of about $60 million. The shift comes as 68 American senators have urged President Obama to consider signing the international treaty that bans land mines. Neither the United States nor Israel deploys such mines anymore, analysts said, but like China, India, Russia and most of the Middle East, they have both declined to sign the treaty and get rid of them”.
We’ve previously published these blog posts [most recent listed first]:
17 June – here, and
16 June – here,
And our even earlier posts on this are:
9 June – here;
8 June – here;
and 7 June – here.