Category:[world] [WORLD] [Middle East]

JERUSALEM - Amnesty International marked 40 years since the outbreak of the 1967 Middle East war with a call for Israel to dismantle West Bank settlements and roadblocks, for the Palestinians to end attacks on Israeli civilians and for the international community to monitor both sides.

A Palestinian man pulls his camel at Jaffa Gate, in Jerusalem's Old City, Sunday June 3, 2007. [AP]

"For 40 years, the international community has failed adequately to address the Israeli-Palestinian problem; it cannot, must not, wait another 40 years to do so," Amnesty regional director Malcolm Smart said in a statement accompanying a special Amnesty report released Monday, entitled "Enduring Occupation."

Since the outbreak of the current wave of Palestinian-Israeli violence in 2000, about 4,330 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 1,111 on the Israeli side. Amnesty said human rights violations by both sides highlighted the need for an international watchdog.

"Amnesty International is calling for the urgent deployment of an effective international human rights monitoring mechanism to monitor compliance by both parties ... with their obligations under international law," it said.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Israel already had sufficient oversight built into its own systems, and that it "is the only Middle Eastern country where human rights are at the center of our political culture."

Raji Sourani, head of the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said what was needed was a peacekeeping force, rather than monitors with no mandate to intervene, citing a six-nation monitoring group deployed in 1994 in the West Bank town of Hebron as an example of passive observers.

"We are calling for international protection forces," he said. "We have experienced monitoring in Hebron and elsewhere. It is not effective at all. It's shown to be impractical."

Israel defeated three Arab armies in the Six-Day War, which erupted on June 5, 1967, putting it in control today of about 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

Israeli troops and settlers pulled out of Gaza in 2005, but the Israeli military still keeps a tight grip on Palestinian movement there.

In the West Bank, Israel is building a network of walls, trenches and barbed-wire fences it says is meant to keep out attackers, but which puts some 8.5 percent of Palestinian land on the "Israeli" side.

The Amnesty report called on Israel to "lift the regime" of blockades and other restrictions, including the "fence/wall inside the West Bank."

It also appealed to Palestinian militants "to end immediately attacks on civilians and on the Palestinian Authority to take effective action to stop and prevent such attacks and bring to justice those responsible.

Amnesty: Watchdog needed for Israel(Over)
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