For those of us who need some small insight into the mentality of the IDF during this campaign
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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May-June 2009, pages 16-17
Gaza on the Ground
Israel Rejects Own Soldiers’ Accounts of Gaza Atrocities
By Mohammed Omer
A photograph in the March 20, 2009 edition of Haaretz shows a T-shirt printed at the request of an IDF soldier in the sniper unit reading, “1 shot 2 kills” (Haaretz.com).
FOR THE FIRST time in its history, the Israeli Military College has published very damaging statements and accounts by its own soldiers, describing their killing of innocent and mostly unarmed civilians and their wanton vandalism during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip
Haaretz reported a soldier as saying that the Israeli army took over a Palestinian house and placed its entire family in a single room while soldiers took up position on the roof. Several days later, these soldiers withdrew and left the family in the room. When another Israeli military unit entered the house, it placed machine guns on the rooftop and the head of the unit then allowed the family, consisting of a mother and her two children, to leave the house. The soldier in charge of the artillery immediately opened fire on them, killing them all.
Another soldier said that the commander of one of the military detachments ordered his soldiers to shoot an elderly Palestinian woman from a range of 100 metres. When one of the soldiers contested this order by saying that there must be limits and that it was unacceptable to attack an old woman, the commander responded, "every person here is considered a saboteur or terrorist," and the soldiers shot her dead.
Israeli television Channel 10 broadcast a documentary film showing a unit commander ordering his soldiers to destroy homes over their occupants' heads. He told them, "I want a completely clean area. The houses must be pulled down over their heads, and anyone found in the areas we advance upon must be treated as an enemy and immediately killed." The same channel also broadcast the testimonies of soldiers who said that they spat on food before it went to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The confessing officers and soldiers have suggested that they understood their military directives to have allowed them to do anything in order to protect their lives. Their testimonies further reveal that the rabbis who met with soldiers during the war had stressed to them that this was a religious war and that they should not treat lightly anyone who threatened "Jews remaining on the land of their fathers and forefathers," and that such threats should be treated "without mercy". These soldiers said that the rabbis' sermons played a major role in their making light of the lives of innocent Palestinian civilians, such that they even felt that it was their duty to kill them.
One of these soldiers said that his colleagues had written "Death to Arabs" on the walls of Palestinian houses, and that they had spat on anything that reminded Palestinians of their loved ones. The confessing officers and soldiers said that their leaders had stressed to them that their lives were much more important than those of Palestinian civilians. They further noted that killing in cold blood and the random opening of fire had not only taken place in the units they had served in, but in all of the fighting units that took part in the war. And these killings, they stressed, took place without any apparent regret or hesitation.
In addition to these reports, a Palestinian human rights organisation has announced that it found a military document confirming that the army issued orders to open fire on Palestinian emergency relief teams during the war, with the aim of killing them. The Palestinian Human Rights Centre, whose headquarters is in Gaza City, told
Al-Ahram Weekly that its researchers found the document in the home of Sami Darduneh in Jebel Al-Ris, east of Jabalya Refugee Camp, which soldiers had turned into a temporary military base. The document indicates that clear instructions were given to shoot to kill Palestinian emergency relief teams attempting to rescue the injured and remove the killed. Issued on 16 January, just days before the end of the war, the document also calls for opening fire on anyone crossing Salaheddin Street, which runs north-south through the Gaza Strip and then turns east towards the area in which occupation forces were found.
This document indicates that the army did not tell the truth when it claimed that it had not targeted emergency relief teams. It also shows that the army's actual firing directives issued to Israeli soldiers contradict the army's claims that soldiers were instructed to first fire warning shots into the air and then to fire at the lower body.
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