The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into
the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line
soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement
so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to
“cold-blooded murder”.
The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military
academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as
international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries
into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive
against Palestinian Islamists.
The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old
woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two
children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from
their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing
houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of
Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and
you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir,
the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a
company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.
"I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in
Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn't
prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked,” Mr
Zamir said. “I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just
didn't want to see it, we didn't want to face it."
One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy
battalion commander in the reserves, that the army “fired a lot of
rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured
or shot at.
"When we entered a house,
we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside
and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey,
if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is
this reasonable?"
The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered
soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main
street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said
left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.
"I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I
don't know her story,” the NCO said. “I do know that my officer
sent people to the roof in order to take her out…
It was cold-blooded
murder."
Another NCO recounted a military blunder that led to a mother
and her two children being shot dead by an Israeli sniper. "We had
taken over the house… and the family was released and told to go
right. A mother and two children got confused and went left… The
sniper on the roof wasn't told that this was okay and that he
shouldn't shoot… you can say he just did what he was told… he was
told not to let anyone approach the left flank and he shot at
them.
"I don't know whether he first shot at their feet or not, but he
killed them," the soldier said.
The soldiers’ accounts were submitted anonymously at a meeting
at the academy around a month ago. The Israel army said that it had
started an investigation, but that this was the first time it had
heard such testimony, despite having debriefed troops itself.
Breaking The Silence, an organisation of former soldiers who
gather witness accounts from troops in the Palestinian territories,
said that its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead, as the
war was known in Israel, had revealed a similar picture of the
fighting.
“It’s definitely in line with what we are hearing,” said one of
the researchers.
Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role
of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the
fighting as a religious war. “All these articles had a clear
message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by
miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles
who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the
Holy Land… a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this
operation of a religious war,” said one soldier.
There were also accounts of soldiers being ordered to throw all
the furniture out of Palestinians’ homes as they were taken
over.
“We simply threw everything out the windows to make room and
order. The entire contents of the house flew out the windows:
refrigerator, plates, furniture. The order was to remove the entire
contents of the house.”
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights released the names of
1,417 Gazans that it says were killed in the war, saying that 926
were civilians. The Israeli Government contends that most of those
killed were combatants or legitimate targets.
