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One popular committee member said: "once, soldiers broke into my home and told my mother that if her son did not stop, they would break his legs and he would never walk again." Others recounted death threats. Parents are told "we are going to take revenge on you and on your children." Leaflets are distributed promising "punishment (and) final warnings" to communities that keep protesting.
Home demolitions are also threatened. Farmers are told their land and crops will be destroyed. Force follows, including beatings, live fire, tear-gassing, willful killings, including against children. Soldiers justify it as "crowd (or) riot control" and that soldiers fire only in self-defense.
In fact, actions are grossly excessive against activists and peaceful demonstrations, and include ambushes, shootings from rooftops and concealed locations, and extreme aggression against a civilian population. At an early 2004 Biddu protest, soldiers unleashed a massive attack, killed two, injured 70 others, some severely, and caused an elderly man to die of a tear gas-induced heart attack. Numerous other demonstrations, then and now, were disproportionately attacked by "massive retaliatory violence" with dozens killed and thousands more injured throughout the West Bank. Prominent activists are targeted for removal, willful disabling, or death.
Illegal weapons are used, including bullets that break into pieces on contact leaving shrapnel slivers inside bodies that are very hard or impossible to remove. Besides willful killings, legs are targeted to inflict disabling injuries, including against children. Head shots are also used with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters dangerous enough to cause cranial fractures and permanent memory problems. Ambushes and other surprise attacks are employed using indiscriminate fire with lethal weapons unrelated to crowd or riot control.
Indiscriminate attacks also occur that are passed off as unfortunate errors, when, in fact, they're deliberate, for revenge, and "constitute an integral part of" oppressing popular resistance and right of Palestinians to be free. Innocent civilians are wounded, disabled or killed in cold blood because soldiers are ordered to do it.
Collective punishment is systemic and longstanding in the form of:
-- night terror raids to intimidate entire communities and villages; children are especially affected by shooting, explosions, and shouting through loudspeakers;
-- harassing curfews on entire villages prohibiting anyone from leaving homes on threat of being shot or arrested; while in force, soldiers break into homes, search them, and arrest occupants for interrogations that include beatings, humiliation and torture;
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