UK-Israel: Dichter cancels trip in fear of war crimes arrest
01 January 2008
In December 2007 the Israeli Public Security Minister, Avi Dichter, pulled out of an invitation to speak at a seminar at Kings College, London, because of fears that he would be arrested for war crimes. The charges arose from the Israeli government's assassination of a senior Hamas commander, Sheikh Saleh Shehadah, which also killed 13 civilians in a "targeted strike" in Gaza in 2002 - Dichter was the head of Israel's internal intelligence agency, Shin Bet, at the time of the massacre. The Israeli Foreign Ministry is reported by
The Independent newspaper to have advised Dichter that an "extreme left" group was likely to file a legal complaint over the deaths in the attack. The killings were the subject of a 2002 legal case in the United States brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, but that was dismissed in 2007.
The assassination of Shehadah, and the "collateral damage" that accompanied it, occurred around midnight on 22 July 2002, when the Israeli Defence Forces dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in al-Daraj, a densely populated residential area in Gaza City in Occupied Palestinian Territory. It killed eight children and seven adults and wounded more than 150 others, but a spokesperson for Dichter claimed that it "is clearly not a case where civilians were targeted". Novertheless, in the United States the Bush administration initially described the killings as a "deliberate attack against a building in which civilians were known to be located", while simultaneously holding that no one should, or could, be held accountable for the deaths. In 2007, district New York district judge, William H. Pauley III ruled that Dichter had immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act because according to the Israeli government he was carrying out official duties.
Dichter is not the first Israeli military figure to avoid charges. In September 2005 a retired Israeli army general, Doron Almog, refused to leave his El-Al flight at Heathrow airport after being tipped off by Israeli diplomats that police would arrest him on war crimes charges, relating to civilian house demolitions and "targeted" killings in Gaza. Lawyers representing Palestinian citizens had requested that the Metropolitan police act over the destruction of more than 50 Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israeli army as retribution for a militant attack. The plane returned to Israel with Almog on board. Recent papers obtained by the BBC show that British police refused to enter the plane because they feared an armed confrontation with armed Israeli security agents who were on board.
In 2006 former Israeli military chief, Moshe Ya'alon, cancelled a trip to London in fear of arrest for alleged war crimes.
The Center for Constitutional Rights: http://ccrjustice.org; Independent 7.12.07; BBC News 19.2.08