The Associated Press this week carried a story reporting that “In the past seven years, the Israeli military has indicted just 10 percent of soldiers suspected of criminal offenses against Palestinians, an Israeli human rights group reported Tuesday … The Yesh Din group said just 9 percent of investigations led to convictions. The conviction rate was less than 7 percent when the investigations focused on the killing and injury of civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it said. ‘The low number of investigations opened and the minute number of indictments served reveal the (military’s) de facto derogation of its duty to protect the civilian Palestinian population against offenses committed by its soldiers’, said Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal counsel … Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said that ‘Israel is a country in which we pride ourselves on our independent and professional judiciary’, he said. ‘No one — no institution and no individual — is above the law’. The military said it was looking into Yesh Din’s report”. The AP report is published here.
