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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Bulldozers and Human Rights

Rights Group Calls on Caterpillar to Halt Bulldozer Sales to Israel
By Jim Lobe (23 Nov 2004, OneWorld.net)

WASHINGTON -- A major U.S. human rights group has called on Caterpillar Inc., the Illinois-based heavy-equipment giant, to immediately suspend sales of its D9 bulldozer to the Israeli army on the grounds that they are being used to violate international humanitarian law in the occupied territories.

The appeal by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) coincides with the announcement Monday by a U.S. Jewish peace group [Jewish Voice for Peace] that it has filed a shareholder resolution urging Caterpillar to review whether the sale of the D-9 bulldzoer violates its own corporate code of conduct.

[...]

HRWs appeal comes one month after it released a blistering report on Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the southern Gaza strip. The report, Razing Rafah, found that claims by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) that such operations are dictated by military necessity were false and that the true intent appeared to be to expand the buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt to facilitate long-term Israeli control over the area.

The report, one of the hardest-hitting against Israel ever released by HRW, came in the wake of a 17-day IDF operation into the Jabalya refugee camp in central Gaza that left at least 110 Palestinians dead, about half of whom are believed to have been civilians. It was the biggest and most lethal IDF operation in Gaza in the last four years.

Some 70 Palestinians houses were totally destroyed and 200 others partially destroyed, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). The report noted that IDF operations in Rafah over the past four years had rendered some 16,000 people or ten percent of its population homeless since 2000.

Mondays appeal by HRW followed an exchange with Caterpillars CEO, James Owens, that began three weeks ago when HRW, in a letter to him and to the companys board of directors, called for suspending all sales of D9 bulldozers, which HRW described as the IDFs primary weapon to raze Palestinian homes, destroy agriculture and shred roads in violation of the laws of war to Israel.

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