Israel, Palestinians taken to task in US human rights report

The three main actors in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the IDF — are committing “significant human rights abuses,” the US State Department says in its new “Human Rights Practices for 2012” report.

The extensive annual report, released Friday, provides a detailed picture of human rights issues in countries throughout the world, according to US government researchers. “Israel and the Occupied Territories” were bundled together in the list of countries, although given separate reports.

In the analysis of the West Bank and Gaza, the report acknowledged the Palestinian Authority’s democratic nature but noted that the PA has “varying degrees of authority” in the West Bank due to the presence of the IDF and Israeli settlements, and “little authority in the Gaza Strip” due to the “violent takeover of PA government installations” by Hamas in 2007.

The most “most significant human rights abuses across the occupied territories were arbitrary arrest and associated torture and abuse, often with impunity, by multiple actors in the region; restrictions on civil liberties; and the inability of residents of the Gaza Strip under Hamas to choose their own government or hold it accountable,” the report said.

Other alleged human rights violations in the occupied territories included “abuse and mistreatment of detainees,” “restrictions on freedom of speech,” “corruption,” and “violence against women” by the Palestinian Authority; “killing, torturing, arbitrarily detaining, and harassing opponents”; and the launching of “rockets and mortars against civilian targets in Israel” by Hamas.

Both the PA and Hamas engaged in anti-Semitic propaganda, the report found.

In the occupied territories, the IDF was said to have used “excessive” force “against civilians, including killings,” improper “security detention procedures,” imposing “severe restrictions” on Palestinians freedom of movement and participating in the “demolition and confiscation of Palestinian property.”

The report found that all three actors in the territories “took minimal steps to address impunity or reduce abuses.”

In the companion report on Israel, the Jewish state is acknowledged as an open democracy with a free press and a judiciary that prosecutes public officials accused of wrongdoing. However, Israel’s Arab citizens, the report said, faced “institutional and societal discrimination… in particular in access to equal education and employment opportunities,” women were subjected to “societal discrimination and domestic violence” issues, non-Orthodox Jews and certain minority religious groups faced “institutional and societal discrimination,” and foreign workers had “serious labor rights abuses.”

“Terrorist attacks against civilians” were one of the “most significant human rights problems during the year,” as was “the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants.”

The report also cited anti-Semitism throughout the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, from Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s “amen” after an imam called for the destruction of the Jews to the gains made by overtly racist political parties in Hungary and Greece. Many of these parties in Europe also launched political attacks on Gypsies and Muslim immigrants. Even state-controlled media in Venezuela included anti-Semitic statements, the report said.

The worst offenders cited by the report were nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, which were said to be turning up pressure on human rights and other activists, in what the report described as a global crackdown on the “lifeblood of democratic societies.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.