UNITED NATIONS, March 18: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Israel’s recent offensive resembled “all-out conventional warfare”, resulting in illegitimate attacks on civilians, ambulances and schools, according to a letter obtained on Monday.
The blunt letter, unusual for Annan, was sent to Sharon on March 12 during a week of increasing world criticism of Israel’s use of heavy weaponry against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that Israel occupied after the 1967 war.
“Judging from the means and methods employed by the Israel Defense Force — F-16 fighter bombers, helicopter and naval gunships, missiles and bombs of heavy tonnage — the fighting has come to resemble all-out conventional warfare,” he said.
“Israel is fully entitled to defend itself against terror,” Annan wrote. “But this right does not discharge it of its obligation to respect the fundamental principles and rules of international law.”
Specifically, Annan pointed to the killing and injuring of civilians and the firing at hospitals and schools, in one case shooting to death a UN guard who was escorting a wounded man to a hospital. All these actions violated the principle of protection of civilians.
He called “unfounded and unsubstantiated” statements by Israeli government spokesmen that ambulances may have been used to smuggle Palestinian militants and weapons.
“These allegations can only result in further danger to medical workers and further impede their vital mission,” Annan said in the letter.
Annan requested Sharon initiate a “full investigation” into Israeli soldiers firing at ambulances and medical personnel “and that you take immediate steps to ensure that they are not repeated in the future”.
On Friday Israel pulled its forces out of Ramallah, where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been under virtual house arrest for close to three months, and two other West Bank cities amid intense international pressure to end an offensive Sharon said was aimed at hunting down militants.
But Israeli tanks and infantry still remain in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and its environs and in some 20 percent of Palestinian Authority land in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian security officials.
In his letter, Annan said hundreds of innocent civilians had been killed and many buildings and homes destroyed. Tanks went into densely populated refugee camps and heavy explosives were dropped close to schools, including one run by the United Nations for blind Palestinian children.
The letter was written last Tuesday, the same day he delivered some of his harshest criticism of Israel to the UN Security Council, using the words “illegal occupation”, a phrase both the US and British ambassadors questioned.
Asked about this at a Wednesday news conference, Annan pointed to U.N. resolutions that defined actions under occupation as violations. But some U.N. experts admitted that no resolution called the occupation itself illegal or legal.
Using milder language, the U.N. Security Council late on Tuesday followed up, with the United States taking the unusual step of responding to a Syrian proposal with its own measure, and inserting a key phrase that “a vision of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders.”
While nothing in the resolution differed from speeches by U.S. officials, the United States had blocked any such measure in the Security Council, saying it would only inflame passions and not resolve the conflict.
Nevertheless, Annan in the past had been one of the few U.N. officials accepted by Israel as well as Palestinian leaders as a man of good will, going out of his way to defend Israel’s isolation at the United Nations.
“It sometimes seems as if the United Nations serves all the world’s peoples but one: the Jews,” he said in late 1999, adding that Israel sometimes received a more intense focus than others in comparable situations.—Reuters
