The Israeli military has indicted two of its soldiers for endangering the life of a Palestinian boy during the three-week war in Gaza more than a year ago.
The soldiers face charges for instructing the boy to open several bags suspected of being booby-trapped while searching a building in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza, the military said in a statement on Thursday.
The bags turned out to be harmless.
An Israeli military official said the soldiers could face up to three years in prison.
'Unrelated' to Goldstone
The army said it opened the investigation after the incident was brought to its attention by the United Nations, but emphasised it was "completely unrelated" to a report issued by UN investigator Richard Goldstone.
A team of UN investigators led by Goldstone said it found evidence that Israel and Hamas fighters committed war crimes during the conflict.
The two sides deny the accusations.
The UN General Assembly ordered Israel and Hamas to carry out investigations or face possible action from the US Security Council.
Israel has rejected the report and insists it is capable of investigating itself - a claim international human rights groups dismiss.
EU backs Goldstone
On Wednesday, the European Parliament backed the findings of the Goldstone report and urged its 27-member states to monitor Israeli and Palestinian probes into war crimes in Gaza.
It also urged Israel to immediately open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip to alleviate the worsening humanitarian crisis there.
The assembly is the second institution after the United Nations to back the report, with just over 50 per cent of politicians passing the resolution.
But the move was sharply criticised by Israel, which says it has opened 36 criminal investigations into complaints of improper conduct by its troops during the fighting in Gaza, much of which occurred in residential areas.
Last month a senior Israeli field officer involved in the war in Gaza was reprimanded over artillery shelling in a heavily populated area that hit a United Nations compound.
Some 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis, were killed in the offensive Israel launched in December 2008
Source aljazeera
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Showing posts with label soldiers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soldiers. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Monday, March 23, 2009
Newsest Israeli Military Fashion.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it."
There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit’s commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about. Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere. For example, shirts declaring, "We won’t chill ’til we confirm the kill" were banned in the past (the IDF claims that the practice doesn’t exist), yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year.
The slogan "Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him."
Does the design go to the commanders for approval?
The Givati soldier: "Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant. We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average."
What do you think of the slogan that was printed?
"I didn’t like it so much, but most of the soldiers wanted it."
Palestine monitor
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There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit’s commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about. Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere. For example, shirts declaring, "We won’t chill ’til we confirm the kill" were banned in the past (the IDF claims that the practice doesn’t exist), yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year.
The slogan "Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him."
Does the design go to the commanders for approval?
The Givati soldier: "Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant. We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average."
What do you think of the slogan that was printed?
"I didn’t like it so much, but most of the soldiers wanted it."
Palestine monitor
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