UN expert says settlements, house demolitions are war crimes

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=176611&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0

UN expert says settlements, house demolitions are war crimes

By The Associated Press

GENEVA - Israel's policy of building settlements in Palestinian territories and destroying Arab homes and farmland is a war crime, a United Nations investigator said Friday.

"Israel has used the current crisis to consolidate its occupation" of Palestinian areas, said Miloon Kothari, the housing expert of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Yaakov Levy, Israel's ambassador to UN offices in Geneva, rejected Kothari's "wild compilation of one-sided accusations."

Kothari, an Indian architect who visited Israel and Palestinian territories earlier this year, told reporters, "The serial and deliberate destruction of homes and property constitutes a war crime under international law."

The building of new Jewish settlements is "incendiary and provocative" and settlers are "free to indulge in violence and confiscate land," he said.

Kothari cited international accords like the Geneva Conventions on warfare, which govern the behavior of
occupying powers. The 1949 agreements bar the colonization of occupied land, but lack legal measures to ensure compliance.

Israel has built more than 100 Jewish settlements - home to about 200,000 Israelis - on land conquered in the 1967 Six Day War and is continuing construction. It claims the territory it seized is disputed, rather than occupied and that
the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

"The issue of settlements is a political issue on which Israel and the Palestinians disagree," Levy told The
Associated Press. Both sides discussed settlements ahead of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and
Palestinians and during later talks in 2000 and 2001, he said.

"We made detailed suggestions on how to solve the issue, but the Palestinians broke off negotiations. The
difficulties were caused by a conscious Palestinian decision not to work with us and resort to a policy of violence."

In a 27-page report, Kothari said Israel claimed that settlement expansion was necessary because of "natural" population growth. But while settler numbers have risen by 12 percent a year, the Israeli population has been growing by just 2 percent a year, he said.

"The active and sustained implantation of Jewish settler colonies serves the ... purpose of acquiring territory and natural resources and limiting the living space of the Palestinian host population," he said.

Kothari criticized the destruction of homes during Israeli military incursions like the battle in Jenin refugee camp.

Israel launched its operation in Jenin and other areas earlier this year after a series of deadly bombing and shooting attacks against Israelis by Palestinian militants.

Kothari said the widely publicized destruction of homes during military operations, meant to "cause optimum material and psychological harm," was just a small part of an ongoing takeover of Palestinian areas.

Israel is intentionally destroying olive groves, orange orchards and other Palestinian agricultural land and is responsible for severe "misuse of and hoarding of water resources," including cutting off pipelines to Palestinian villages, he said.

Thousands of homes had been bulldozed and thousands more are threatened with demolition, he said, citing studies by Israeli human rights groups with which he had been in contact since his visit.

Kothari said he has asked for Israeli cooperation during his visit on an academic invitation in January, but the "policy has been not to engage."

"I think this is largely because they do not have sufficient answers," he said. But Levy claimed Kothari had traveled to the region "under false pretenses" without Israeli permission to investigate the Palestinian situation for the United Nations and "only looks at the issue as a biased person."

Israel may continue to deny the truth and it, like the US may not cooperate with the Inernational Court, but in the coming years, as Israelis and world Jewry continue to commit genocide and war crimes, it will little matter that The Hague cannot prosecute.

The US may be able to veto security council resolutions against the terrorist state of Israel, but the law abiding moral countries of the world will, step by step isolate and apply economic and weapons sanctions against the rouge state of Israel in the coming years.

Israel will dry up like the fetid malignant shitty little country it is, and all the nukes and all APAC's power will not prevent the countries of the world from isolating and refusing to do any kind of commerce with the jew terror state.

Israel says it wants to join the EU, and all Europe chokes. Israel will never be admitted to the EU. Israel is a doomed Frankenstein experiment. And American will never let doomed Israeli's migrate to the US when Israel collapses and must pay for 38 years of the most sordid war crimes.

And when that times comes the world must make American Jewry pay reparations to Arabs for 38 years of Jew war crimes. Let's see, Germany paid 90 billion for a NAZI policy lasting only three years, American jews should be forced to pay at least $300 billion in reparations.