An IDF officer with the rank of lieutenant head-butted a Palestinian youth in the face, a video filmed in the city of Hebron on Wednesday and uploaded to YouTube has revealed. A volunteer for the NGO B’Tselem filmed the video on Wednesday from the window of his home in Hebron, documenting an IDF soldier as he stopped a number of Palestinian youths, thought to be between 10 and 17 years of age, next to the Beit Hadassah checkpoint in Hebron.
B’tselem
A video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem shows an IDF officer pointing a loaded gun at an unarmed Palestinian in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, last month.
Unhappy settlers: “The fact that B’Tselem decided to publish it on the day of Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama to try to make it go badly reveals the organization’s face as a systemic harmer of Israeli interests,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
B’Tselem’s Report:
By Hook and By Crook: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank
The president of the Interdisciplinary Center, Uriel Reichman, described the human rights watchdog B’Tselem as a “fifth column” and said that inviting its representatives to speak at the college was “disgraceful,” students who spoke to the president told Haaretz. Reichman denies ever making the statements.
[I]n two of the three cases the troops behaved as if they were preparing for an execution, not an arrest. Relatives and eyewitnesses told B’Tselem that the two were unarmed and did not attempt to flee, and that the soldiers weren’t trying to stop them, but rather shot them from close range once their identity was revealed.
A majority of Israelis seem to get by just fine with the occupation, while B’Tselem is met with suspicion and accused of treason. Despite this, over the years in which targeted assassinations, smart bombs, closures, checkpoints, detentions without due process, lack of running water, poverty and a separation fence five minutes from Kfar Sava have all become routine, B’Tselem has continued to undermine the passion for denial, and to defend the rights of Palestinians and thus also the image of Israeli society.
If not for B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, the State of Israel would look different today. The occupation might have been even crueler, or just as cruel, but we certainly would look different. In its 20 years of existence, this important human-rights organization may not have succeeded in changing reality, but at least it has made it possible for us to know what that reality was.
According to the Israeli Judge Advocate General’s Office, since Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza, the Military Police Investigation Unit (MPIU) has opened 23 investigations into incidents that took place during the operation.
Israel is violating international law by detaining hundreds of Palestinians, some of them for years without charge or trial, two leading human rights groups in the country have said.
READ the B’Tselem report announcement
WATCH the Al Jazeera TV report
