Israelis filmed abusing bodies of Palestinian fighters
Screenshot from a 2011 video showing police beating up a Palestinian man
The Electronic Intifada reports:
Videos of Palestinians being abused in Israeli custody are being shared over Israeli social media channels. The videos, which show captured Palestinians being beaten and corpses of resistance fighters being abused, were posted in the days following Israel’s recapture of territory surrounding the Gaza Strip that it lost on 7 October, when a Hamas-led attack caught Israeli forces by surprise.
The clips were uploaded to a Hebrew-language Telegram channel with over 100,000 members called “Terrorists from another angle.”
Although The Electronic Intifada has blurred these videos to preserve the dignity of the dead, the clips leave little to the imagination. English subtitles have been added to the videos to draw back the curtain on the thoughts and feelings of the perpetrators and their accomplices.
In one clip, a man is seen urinating on dead bodies, presumably of Palestinian fighters, that have been stripped, scorched and splayed on the ground, either before or after their deaths. “This is what we are going to do to the Arabs,” one witness is heard commenting in Hebrew.
In another clip, an Israeli in civilian clothing can be seen repeatedly stabbing the corpse of a Palestinian fighter in combat fatigues. “Hole him a little,” another Israeli is heard saying. “Won’t we give it to you in the stomach? And rip? Won’t we take out all his fat?”
In a third particularly gruesome video, an Israeli man uses the rod of a squeegee to repeatedly beat the face of a dead fighter, and then to poke each of his eyes out.
The videos are replete with foul language and calls for sexual violence. “Today on our show, we will fuck their mothers,” one Israeli says.
The Geneva Convention of 1949, to which Israel is a signatory, characterizes abuse towards captured enemy troops, and the defilement of their dead bodies, as war crimes.
Blood libels
In the days and weeks following the 7 October attack, Israel’s ambassadors and advocates have claimed that Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians who followed them into the fray committed unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians during three days of intense fighting.
Videos captured by security cameras, body cameras and phone cameras of all involved parties make clear that many Israeli civilians were in fact wounded and killed on 7 October, while more than 200 Israelis and foreign nationals of all ages were taken captive and transported to Gaza, where most are still being held. This includes a significant number of Israeli military prisoners of war.
The testimonies of numerous Israelis who survived those same battles also make clear that a significant number of their compatriots who did not make it out alive were actually killed by the Israeli military.
Among the most scandalous claims leveled against the Palestinian combatants and others who entered the battlefield is that they ripped fetuses out of women’s wombs, baked babies in an oven, and decapitated dozens of infants. These atrocious allegations, which were repeated as fact by Israel lobbyists, international news outlets, and even top politicians including US President Joe Biden, have not been substantiated by even a scintilla of evidence. While the mainstream media eventually realized this and – in some cases – retracted their original false reports, Israeli journalists have continued to broadcast these blood libels as fact.