GENEVA, Dec 5: Israel was urged to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention at a conference on Wednesday, marking the first time a signatory has been formally reminded of its obligations under the humanitarian code which protects civilians in wartime.

The call came in a final declaration adopted by 114 of the 189 signatory states which attended the special conference on applying the 1949 Convention in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.

Israel, which ratified the Convention in 1951, and the United States boycotted the conference

“The statement adopted at the meeting is clearly one-sided and contains sections with unsubstantiated allegations against Israel,” Israeli ambassador Yaakov Levy later told journalists.

Levy said the declaration contained no reference to Palestinian violence and said the conference risked turning a humanitarian instrument “into a tool for political attacks against one party, thus rewarding a deliberate policy of instigating violence”.

The final declaration focuses on Israel’s obligations as an “Occupying Power”, also providing the first formal statement that contradicts Israeli claims that the Convention does not apply because it regards the territories as “disputed territory”.

Apart from emphasising that civilians in the territories must not be harmed, the declaration also reaffirmed “the illegality of the (Israeli) settlements” in the territories and their extension.

Switzerland, which presided the conference as the depository of the Convention, said the declaration was balanced and also reminded Palestinians that they must respect civilians by clearly ruling out the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.

“If an Israeli helicopter shoots at civilians in the Occupied Territories, it’s a breach of the Geneva Conventions. If somebody blows up a pizza shop in the centre of Jerusalem, it’s also a breach of the Conventions,” Peter Maurer of the Swiss foreign ministry told journalists.

Arab diplomats said they hoped the declaration would put further pressure on Israel to accept international monitors in the region and to end its settlement policy.

Maurer said the declaration sent “an important political signal”, and that Israel had a special obligation as an occupying power under the Convention.

Copies of speeches by delegates during the closed door conference showed that there was widespread condemnation of extra-judicial killings of Palestinians, the closure of occupied territories, the destruction of Palestinians’ houses and Israel’s ongoing settlement policy, as violations of the Fourth Convention.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the killings and targeting of Palestinian and Israeli civilians in the unfolding wave of violence that swept the Palestinian Occupied Territories,” Jordan’s foreign minister Abdel-Elah Khatib said.

However, Khatib warned that a recent spate of attacks on the Palestinian authority “also hampers the Authority’s ability to prevent acts of violence”.

In one of the toughest speeches, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) condemned what it called Israeli “atrocities”.

“These grave breaches should be considered as war crimes and should be dealt (with) adequately within the framework of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other relevant UN resolutions,” Rajmah Hussain of Malaysia, the OIC representative said.

EU Ambassador Jean-Marie Noirfalisse, of Belgium, called on the Palestinian Authority “to make every effort to halt the violence against Israel”.

“The EU condemns the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force to contain violence,” Noirfalisse said.—AFP