The army has introduced new rules of engagement allowing troops to shoot to kill Palestin-ians carrying out reconnaissance of military activity, an Israeli civil rights group said on Wednesday.
A spokesman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said that soldiers arriving for reserve duty last week in the area of the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip were told they were to shoot to kill Palestinians watching them through binoculars.
The army denied the report, saying that Palestinian lookouts were subject to the standard procedure for apprehending a suspect. That means a verbal warning, a warning shot and, if necessary, a shot to wound the suspect.
``There is no shoot to kill policy,'' an officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The disclosure is just the latest in a series of complaints by human rights groups and Palestinians that Israeli soldiers often do not follow the formal open-fire procedures, shooting at unarmed Palestinians.
Since violence erupted in September 2000, 2,532 people have been killed on the Palestinian side -- including armed attackers, bombers and unarmed civilians -- and 892 people on the Israeli side.
In a letter to the military's chief prosecutor, the group said one of the soldiers reported that the order was given at repeated briefings following the arrival of his paratroops unit on Oct. 29 at Netzarim, where the Jewish settlement is ringed by army installations.
Just five days earlier, Palestinian gunmen had raided a military post at Netzarim and killed three soldiers, two of them women. The next day the army blew up three tall buildings near the post, which they said had been used by Palestinians to carry out surveillance before the attack.
Haaretz newspaper quoted a senior official of Islamic Jihad -- which carried out the Netzarim raid together with Hamas -- as saying that the two militant Islamic groups spent three months reconnoitering the target.
The association's letter said the order to shoot to kill when the target does not constitute an immediate threat, ``is clearly illegal ... and must be urgently revoked.''
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