WASHINGTON, March 5 (IslamOnline) - Israel again remained solely immune from U.S. criticism over human rights violations against Arabs and Palestinians as State Department officials here suggested that abuses and aggression by the Jewish state were "justified".

In the annual Human Rights Report by the U.S. State Department released Monday, U.S. criticism of Israel was very tempered and the report gave Israel excuses by saying the Israelis sometimes use excessive force in contravention of their own rules. The report said these acts were done because of so-called “terrorist attacks.”

The targeted killings and assassinations, which is an official adopted policy in Israel and resulted into the death of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, passed unscathed from the censure the U.S. directed to many other countries. Some analysts here said the U.S. policy itself was not consistent with human rights.

Palestinian groups, including members of the security forces and Fatah's Tanzim, were criticized for killing 208 Israeli “soldiers” and civilians.

A U.S. ally, Israel was berated for its use of "excessive force in contravention of their own rules of engagement, killing 501 Palestinians and injuring thousands in response to terrorist attacks, violent demonstrations, and other clashes in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza," according to the report.

The 6,000-odd-page report also described the collapse of the five-year- old Taliban regime as ''a triumph for human rights'' and proclaimed that Washington's ''fight against terrorism is part of a larger fight for democracy.''

It criticized some U.S. allies in the ''war against terrorism'' - including China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan - for using the anti- terrorism campaign to justify their own abuses of the rights of ethnic minorities and, in the case of Uzbekistan and China, of Muslims.

Critics appeared relatively satisfied that the Bush administration stuck to the high standards of reporting reached by the State Department under former President Bill Clinton, the first administration whose global outlook was not dominated by the Cold War.

The exception to this assessment was Israel, whose abuses of Palestinians - including the use of excessive force and targeted assassinations - were repeatedly put in the context of responding to Palestinian ''terrorism''.

Assistant Secretary Lorne Craner in a press conference here defended the report on Israel and said that the report does “talk about” targeted killings by Israel but he failed to elaborate why it was just mentioned in passing.

“We mention rules of engagement because, in the case of Israel, unlike many countries that we deal with, Israel has a set of standards that it tries to stick to, and it has many self-correcting mechanisms that it tries to get at in terms of working through and figuring out these problems,” he claimed.

In describing recent Israeli abuses - which resulted in more than 500 Palestinians killed and thousands injured - the report noted repeatedly that Israel's actions were carried out in response to terrorist attacks, violent demonstrations, and other violent clashes. Asked about this Monday, Craner told reporters, ''I felt they could use more context.''

But the report has generally won approval of human rights watchdogs. ''In general, it is very candid and very thorough,'' said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, who nonetheless noted some problems with countries, such as Colombia, for which a poor assessment could force immediate and important policy changes.

The reports were mandated by Congress in 1976 and introduced by former President Jimmy Carter. They have grown steadily in length and now constitute the world's single most comprehensive analysis of human rights conditions.

Many foreign governments dislike the country reports, saying they exemplify U.S. haughtiness toward the rest of the world. Some also argue that, by failing to measure economic and social rights performance, the analyses show an ideological blind spot.