Israel clashes with rights group over number of dead Palestinians

JERUSALEM - The Israeli army gave a rare accounting on Wednesday of Palestinian non-combatants it had killed, drawing charges from a leading rights group that it had obscured the figures amid a heated debate on military ethics. Closing ranks with troops implementing his tough policies against a more than four-year-old Palestinian uprising, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a former general, told reporters the Israeli army is "more moral than any other army I know of".

Senior military officials said Israeli sweeps for West Bank militants over the past year killed 148 Palestinians, 29 of them non-combatants.

But the Israeli rights group B'Tselem put the number of non-combatant deaths at 111 -- more than three times as many.

"The difference is over definition. The Israel Defence Force (army) has often killed unarmed Palestinians on its wanted list, or stone-throwers during protests, and does not count them as 'innocents'," Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem told Reuters.

Israel insists its troops resort to lethal force only when threatened, and says militants behind waves of suicide bombings endanger fellow Palestinians by operating in population centres.

But a rash of abuse allegations has drawn reluctant admissions from the top brass that the "purity of arms" doctrine touted by the military as its hallmark may have been tarnished by 37 years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

"In some places there seems to be a dulling of the senses, stemming from ongoing service in the (Palestinian) territories and combat," said chief of staff Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya'alon.

In the latest case, witnesses said Israeli commandos executed a West Bank militant last Friday after he had been wounded and disarmed. The army cleared them of wrongdoing.

Yaalon pledged to invest in "re-educating" conscripts on human values -- a challenge given figures issued by the army's own manpower branch this week indicating that as many as one in five drafted Israeli youths openly profess anti-Arab views.

The military, long seen as the Jewish state's bulwark against Middle East foes, is an emotive issue for most Israelis.

The mother of a commando captain killed in a West Bank raid last summer accused B'Tselem of siding with Israel's enemies.

"We are at war, and all sorts of organisations refuse to call it a war," Leora Vardi told the daily Maariv. "They are presenting our heroes as murderers."

- REUTERS