Israeli Soldiers Allege Indiscriminate Killing in Gaza

[Americanhero1]

Whenever concerns are expressed over civilian casualties inflicted in Israeli military operations, the country's generals and political leaders are quick to insist that theirs is the "world's most moral army." That claim was challenged by human rights observers over Israel's recent offensive in Gaza, although such criticism is reflexively dismissed by Israel as driven by pro-Palestinian bias. But when the allegations of abuses come from Israeli soldiers involved in the fighting, they can't be as easily dismissed.


Defense Minister Ehud Barak was forced to repeat the "world's most moral army" mantra on Thursday, this time to reassure his own countrymen shocked by allegations published in the Israeli media from six veterans of the Gaza operation. The six soldiers, whose identity is being kept confidential, made their claims in an address last month to cadets of the Yitzhak Rabin military academy, of which they are graduates. Among other claims, the soldiers alleged that an Israeli sniper had shot a woman and her two children who walked in the wrong direction after being ordered out of their home by Israeli troops. In a second incident, a sniper supposedly killed an unarmed elderly woman who posed no apparent threat to Israeli troops. And the soldiers ascribed these incidents to overly permissive rules of engagement. See pictures of Israel's Gaza offensive)


"I simply felt it was murder in cold blood, said the soldier who witnessed the scene, quoted in the daily Haaretz. He went on to explain sarcastically, "That's what is so nice, supposedly about Gaza. You see a person waking on a road... He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take that woman out, the moment you see her."


After the anonymous soldiers' testimony was splashed across the media in Israel and abroad, the military police on Thursday said it would investigate the alleged killings. Their allegations renewed an ongoing debate between Israelis who defend the Gaza assault and those who say it failed to accomplish its goal of crippling Hamas, but stained Israel's reputation. On Friday, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman dismissed claims of the gunning down of the mother and her two children as "heresay", but said that the account of the elderly woman's death was still being probed. But those were just two of the incidents alleged by the six soldiers.


Human rights investigators suggest that what the soldiers' allegations and eyewitness accounts from Gaza residents suggest is that, in an effort to maximize the safety of their own soldiers entering Gaza, Israeli commanders may have let their ethical standards slide. Retired general and former security chief Ami Ayalon concurs. The Gaza operation, says Ayalon, "compromised the I.D.F.'s ethos, which was once built on ethics, sacrifice. And today, after the Gaza offensive, it is based on force alone."


A soldier identified as Aviv from the Givati Brigade, one of Israel's elite combat units, reportedly described to the military cadets his inner conflict over obeying orders to use indiscriminate firepower while clearing out an eight-story apartment building. "We were supposed to ... burst through the lower door, start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?"


Aviv explained that his commanders had blurred the boundaries between combatants and civilians: "From [the officers] above, they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained ...inside Gaza City was, in effect, incriminated, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled," Aviv alleged. "On one hand, they really don't have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand [the officers] are telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault." Faced with having to slay the 40 families cowering in the building, he was able to persuade his superiors to let him warn the tenants, giving them five minutes to leave or "get killed."


In the Israeli military offensive, 1,434 Palestinians, including 960 civilians, were killed, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Center in Gaza. Three Israeli civilians were killed in the course of the same operation, and 10 soldiers, four of them by friendly fire. The lopsided death toll, and the fact that so many civilians were killed, has drawn fierce criticism of Israel's by human rights agencies in Israel and abroad. And the consequences could extend from the political to the legal realm.


U.N. human rights envoy Falk said that Israel's apparent failure to distinguish between military targets and civilians could "constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law." He also said that rocket fire by Palestinian militants that indiscriminately targeted Israeli towns could also constitute a war crime, and urged the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the actions of both sides during the recent conflict. With mounting pressure at home and abroad to account for the high Palestinian civilian death toll in Gaza, Israel's claim to have "the world's most moral army" is likely to be subjected to the test of evidence in the months ahead.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090321/wl_time/08599188685600

[Lewinsky Stinks, Dr. Brennan Rocks]

And why didn't these "soldiers" want to go on the record and provide their names?

[ag337]

O.K., I'm really aggravated by these soldiers and their stories.

There were several threads about this topic Friday prior to Shabbat.
And I will reiterate what I've said in the other threads plus add a few other choice adjectives for the soldiers in this topic.

I stated before and I will state again, that when the Israeli army was going into Gaza enacting tactical maneuvers and or bombing specific targets; the Israeli Government and Army took painstaking measures to ensure minimal civilian casualties in Gaza.

This is the only Government and/or Army that would call and drop leaflets on the civilians' country who they are engaging in militarily with, to let the civilians know and find shelter against Israeli bombings and attacks.

So, as far as I am concerned these soldiers are out of line and should either put up or shut up.  They should come out from their cloud of anonymity and give out their names and their supposed factual accounts of what, when and how these things that they are allegeding occurred.

I am so over Jews bashing the reputation of other Jews whether it be truthful  or not.

I'm sure we all remember the scandal of what American soldiers did in the Iraqi Prison Abu Ghraib. 
In my opinion, by the information of what was done to the prisoners and the photos being displayed all over every single media outlet throughout the world; was to the detriment of the moral and image of the United States of America.
This was totally unnecessary.  This could have been kept under wraps, investigated by the U.S. government and/or army and handled accordingly, without putting more scrutiny on the actions of the United States, it's army, it's people, and it's government.

These genius soldiers in Israel should be dealt with quickly and quietly without scrutiny for the world to infer to.

Simply as that.
I am sorry, this is so long, but this topic really ticks me off.

[mord]

Look here             http://jtf.org/forum_english/index.php/topic,33179.0.html

[mord]

These reports were encouraged by yesh din  an extreme leftist group who receives money from the E.U.             

These reports of IDF "atrocities" sound horrible, taken at face value.  They are put out by Yesh Din, a human rights organization based in Israel.

Here is what NGO Monitor has to say about Yesh Din:

    * Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO founded by members of Machsom Watch, claims to monitor legal procedures applied to Palestinian complaints against Israelis – both civilians and members of the security forces in the West Bank – in Israeli civilian courts. It also follows proceedings against Palestinian defendants in military courts.
       
    * Yesh Din is funded by the European Union, the Irish, Dutch, German and British Foreign Offices, the New Israel Fund, the Open Society Institute, and private donors and foundations. As with other European-funded political NGOs based in Israel, Yesh Din’s agenda is one-sided, and ignores Palestinian violations of Israeli human rights, including terrorism.
       
    * Their main activities consist of soliciting reports from Palestinians regarding alleged “criminal behavior by Israeli civilians”, and publishing reports on these topics. In these reports, many of the claims are subjective and cannot be verified.
       
    * Reports generally omit the context of terror and use pseudo-legal human rights terminology and “apartheid” rhetoric to condemn Israeli policy.
       
    * The appearance of academic methods notwithstanding, the methodological problems in the reports reduce Yesh Din’s credibility. In its report on military courts, conclusions are based on a small, unrepresentative sample of 800 cases, out of 42,000 indictment and arrest hearings conducted in the military courts in 2006 alone.
       

The reports of attacks on civilians should be thoroughly investigated, and they most surely will be.  I am not saying that the reports should be disregarded because of their source (Yesh Din), but they definitely should NOT be taken at face value.  They should be scrutinized very carefully.  And, six months from now, when the investigation is complete, I have no doubt that these reports will turn out to be like all the previous cases of claims of "atrocities" (up to and including the worst blood-libel of all, the case of Mohammed Al-Dura): a well-crafted fraud, a fabrication.

But by then, people will have moved on to the next fictional account of The Jews' "atrocities", and the idea will have already been planted in certain fertile minds that The Jews intentionally shoot unarmed elderly women walking down paths, in their lust for blood and in order to forcibly impose their religion on the helpless "Palestinians".  The truth at that point will be, as usual, moot.

The claim that Jewish rabbis tried to turn the war in Gaza into a "holy war" is interesting.  Wouldn't it be horrible if a set of religious leaders exhorted their followers to kill followers of other religions, just for that reason?  Wouldn't it be worthy of criticism, if there was well-documented evidence of incitement to religiously-justified mass murder?  Wouldn't it?  http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/20092 


Lets see a little about yesh din                  http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/_yesh_din_justice_for_all_