JERUSALEM – A leading human rights organization charged today that Palestinians who order and dispatch suicide bombers are guilty of war crimes and should be brought to justice.

In a 170-page report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat bears ”significant political responsibility” for the ”repeated deliberate killing” of Israeli civilians in the last two years of blood-soaked conflict.

”The scale and systematic nature of these attacks in 2001 and 2002 meet the definition of a crime against humanity,” the report stated. ”When these suicide bombings take place in the context of violence that amounts to armed conflict, they are also war crimes.”

Human Rights Watch asserts that although Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is not a state, it has aspirations to becoming one, has made international commitments, and therefore cannot evade similar responsibilities.

Instead, the report said, Arafat and the Palestinian leadership have failed to prevent suicide bombings, refused to arrest terrorists, and declined to defuse the radicalized political and social climate that encourages attacks on Israeli civilians.

The report focused on the history and activities of four factions that have claimed responsibility for 52 suicide bombings since January 2001 in which an estimated 250 civilians have been killed and 2,000 people injured.

Three of the factions cited by Human Rights Watch – the militant Islamic Hamas movement, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the secular but radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – have an adversarial relationship with Arafat. But the fourth, the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, professes loyalty to the aging leader while operating with local discretion, the report said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 10th, 2002 and is filed under opinion.