Israeli Soldiers Abuse Dead Palestinians

Mass-selling Israeli daily Yedout Ahronot carried the photos, in which Israeli occupation soldiers were posing next to the bodies of dead Palestinians.

In another picture, a soldier points his weapon at a corpse while pressing his foot into the half-naked body.

A third picture shows a dead man, a cigarette allegedly stuck in his mouth by troops.

Investigations

Yedout Ahronot’s investigation of the scandal includes numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers who photographed the bodies of Palestinians or who were themselves photographed with bodies.

“When walking by a Palestinian shot in combat, several troops would fire into the dead body. One of them even shot four bullets,” one soldier is quoted as saying by the Israeli newspaper.

One account, provided by a soldier serving in the Nahal Haharedi battalion, told of the abuse of the remains of a bomber who blew himself up at the unit’s Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley .

Soldiers from the unit positioned the bomber’s head on a concrete barrier and placed a cigarette in his mouth before taking photographs.

Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon ordered Military Police Friday to investigate the report.

Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz submitted an urgent motion to the Knesset concerning the abuse of dead bodies by Israeli soldiers, Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported Friday.

According to Pines-Paz, the soldiers’ actions “testify to a moral imperviousness and there must be action taken to prevent this from recurring.”

Similar Incidents

Meanwhile, Israeli army opened investigation into an officer accused of shooting a 13-year-old Palestinian girl repeatedly at point-blank range, a lawyer for the girl’s family said Thursday.

Lea Tzemel, an Israeli lawyer representing the girl’s family, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that soldiers fired at the girl, Iman Al-Hams, while she was on her way to school.

Iman Al-Hams was riddled with 20 bullets, mostly in the upper body, by three Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah .

Al-Hams was left lying in a pool of blood because ambulances had been denied access.

Hundreds of Palestinian children and teens have been killed by army fire in the past four years, often in clashes between stone throwers and Israeli troops, according to the AP.

A 10-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl died Wednesday, October 13, of her wounds after Israeli occupation troops shot her in the chest while sitting inside a United Nations school in a Gaza refugee camp.

The army rarely launches investigations into the incidents, the American news agency said.

Abu Ghraib Copied

If true, the photos would come as a grim reminder of the abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad .

Many Arabs complain that Iraqis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip share the same blight of suffering from occupation of foreign troops.

Several graphic photos of Iraqi detainees tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers at the infamous prison were made public by American media in April.

One American soldier was pictured holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked detainee who was sprawling on the floor of a cell block.

In September, four senior officers of an elite Israeli air force unit hit out at the military’s “immoral” policies in the occupied territories in a letter published by Israeli newspapers.

An Israeli reservist said last March that a growing number of reservists are skeptic about the “moral principles” of the army.

Erlik Alhanan said 80 percent of reservists have lost confidence in the declared moral principles of the Israeli army due to the practices in Lebanon , whose southern parts were occupied southern parts for more than 20 years, and attacking Palestinians.