Israel to probe abuse of dead Palestinians’ bodies

JERUSALEM – Israel’s top general announced Friday that the military would investigate allegations that soldiers abused the bodies of Palestinians killed during army operations, including a case in which soldiers posed for pictures with the severed head of a suicide bomber.

Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the military’s chief of staff, responded to photographs and interviews with soldiers published Friday in an Israeli newspaper by condemning the abuses and saying that maintaining the army’s ethical strength was as important as sustaining its military power.

Photographs published in Friday’s editions of the Hebrew daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, depicted three incidents: a soldier posing next to a bomber’s blackened head with a cigarette dangling from its mouth, a soldier with his boot on the chest of a dead Palestinian and his gun pointed at the corpse’s head, and a dead Palestinian’s body draped over the hood of a jeep.

A military spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, said the Israeli military did not doubt the veracity of the photographs.

As the current Israeli-Palestinian hostilities move into their fifth year, soldiers and officers have become increasingly outspoken about abuse of Palestinians by soldiers at checkpoints, on urban battlegrounds and in detention. In recent months, the Israeli military has issued new ethics guidelines and has expanded ethics training for soldiers.

The Israeli soldiers’ actions “testify to a moral imperviousness, and there must be action taken to prevent this from recurring,” Ophir Pines-Paz, a member of the Israeli parliament from the main opposition Labor Party, said in a statement Friday after introducing a motion denouncing the abuses.

“This is a very serious phenomenon that attests to profound weakness in IDF behavior, even when its battles and acts are justified,” Mordechai Baron, a former chief of military education, told Israeli Radio, referring to the Israeli Defense Forces.