The “most moral army” in the world the Israelis say, poor morality what is done in its name

Israeli Soldiers Expose Atrocities in Gaza (IPS)

By Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

Excerpts:

The report includes the testimony of one NCO (non-commissioned officer): “A company commander with 100 soldiers under his command saw a woman walking down a road some distance away, but close enough that you could’ve gunned down whoever you identified…She was an elderly woman – whether she raised any suspicion, I don’t know. But what the officer did in the end was to put men on the roof and with the snipers bring her down. I felt it was simply murder in cold blood.”

As presented in the report, Danny Zamir, head of the army prep-course, who compiled the transcript of the testimonies, intervened: “I don’t get it – why did he have her shot?” The soldier who witnessed the incident replied: “That what’s great in Gaza, you could say – you see someone walking down a track, not necessarily armed, and you can simply shoot them. In our case, it was an elderly woman. I didn’t see her with any weapon. The order was to bring the person down, that woman, ‘as soon as you sight her’. There are always warnings, and there’s always the saying – ‘it could be a suicide bomber’. What I felt was a lot of bloodthirstiness. Because, we weren’t in many engagements, our battalion was only involved in a very limited number of incidents with terrorists.” …

In the report, another infantry squad leader gave this account of an incident where an IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) sniper shot and killed a Palestinian woman and her two children: “There was a house with a family inside….We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it. A few days later there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof,” the soldier said.

“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One of the women and her two children didn’t understand the instructions. They went to the left. No one told the sniper on the roof that they had been permitted to go, that it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he…he did what he was supposed to, like he was following orders.”

According to the squad leader’s account, “The sniper saw a woman and children approaching him, they crossed the line he was told no one should cross. He shot them straightaway. In the end, what happened is that he killed them. I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because, as far as he was concerned, he was doing his job according to the orders he’d been given. The atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to…I don’t know how to describe it…The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, are very, very much less important than the lives of our soldiers. As far as they’re concerned, that’s the way they can justify it.”…

Zamir said the soldiers reported that officers never intervened when troops deliberately damaged property, harassed civilians or wrote ‘Death to Arabs’ graffiti. The report also quotes individual soldiers reporting that, when they tried to remonstrate with fellow soldiers who were causing wanton damage, they were met with the response, ‘Because they’re Arabs’.

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