JERUSALEM, Dec. 10 -- A rash of allegations that Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians wrongfully and abused corpses in the field has been disclosed by human rights organizations and Palestinians -- but also by soldiers who contend that the long conflict is undermining basic concepts of decency in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the military's chief of staff, told foreign reporters this week that the string of recent cases would "seem to call into question the moral standard of IDF soldiers," and said he would initiate investigations of the incidents. Yaalon, the army's top general, said he had spent much of the last two weeks meeting with officers in the field to discuss the allegations.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, left, and military chief of staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon flew together to a meeting in April 2002. Yaalon has expressed concern about charges of abuse by Israeli troops, while Sharon has cited the "difficulties" soldiers face in the field.
(Moshe Milner -- AP)
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Many troops have been making their concerns known through the news media, Web sites, military courts and soldiers' organizations, according to soldiers, human rights officials and analysts. Critics contend that the Israeli military has a poor record of investigating and prosecuting allegations of wrongdoing by soldiers.
"These are not exceptions, but the reality itself," Yehuda Shaul, organizer of a group of soldiers called "Breaking the Silence," wrote on the organization's Web site, which lists dozens of testimonials from soldiers describing abuses they said they had witnessed. "Horrible and shameful as it is, this is the normative situation."
In the most recent case, exposed this week, the Israeli military said it was investigating reports that soldiers on a basic training graduation "march" in March were firing a machine gun from a tank, with no threat in sight, when they killed a 15-year-old boy tilling a field with his father in the southern Gaza Strip. According to his father, the youth suffered seven bullet wounds in the head.
Also this week, the Israeli military suspended all operations by a naval commando unit during a probe of allegations that some of its members killed a suspected Palestinian militant this month near the West Bank city of Jenin after he had been injured and posed no further threat.
The troops were accused of ordering Palestinian civilians, at gunpoint, to move the man before he died and retrieve his wallet. In a statement Thursday, the military said a preliminary investigation had revealed "professional errors," but "no ethical or moral failures," and allowed the unit to resume arrest missions.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, addressing reporters Wednesday as a parliamentary committee debated the reports of abuse, defended the nation's troops.
"IDF soldiers are fighting a very difficult war, day and night, against the basest, vilest murderers," Sharon said. "You should admire what the IDF has done and understand the difficulties. IDF soldiers are more moral in their operations than any other army in the world."
"They say, 'Don't look at this as deviant behavior that is characteristic of the military, because it's not,' " said Yagil Levy, an author and political sociology professor who studies trends in the Israeli military and society. "They are wrong. They don't understand the occupation has corrupted the soldiers and changed their mode of fighting. It's not fighting against an army, but policing among populations."
Since the current conflict began just over four years ago, the Israeli military has opened 92 investigations into allegations of improper conduct by Israeli soldiers in the deaths or injuries of Palestinians, according to a military spokeswoman. She spoke on condition of anonymity, a routine policy at the military's public affairs office.
She said the investigations had resulted in the convictions of four soldiers either for wrongful death or injury. She said she did not know how many of those cases involved deaths.
According to Jessica Montell, executive director of the Israel-based human rights group B'Tselem, only one of those cases involved a wrongful death. Her group has investigated hundreds of allegations of abuse during the current conflict.
"Now we are seeing the floodgates opening in terms of reports about abuses across the spectrum," Montell said. "The IDF is compounding the problem because of the impunity with which soldiers kill Palestinians without proper investigations."
Yehuda said that his organization, which collects and exhibits photographs and videotaped testimony from soldiers, had shifted its tactics in recent weeks.
"In the beginning we didn't want to bring the real tough cases," Shaul said this week, noting that his group had interviewed 200 soldiers and had another 200 on a waiting list of soldiers volunteering to give their accounts. "We wanted to tell the story of the daily life that brings soldiers to do tough stuff. Now we're publishing everything -- how these moral issues just rip you up inside and tear you apart as a soldier."
Soldiers' confessions to "Breaking the Silence" provided the first photographic evidence of allegations that Israeli soldiers routinely abuse the bodies of Palestinians killed during army operations. An Israeli daily newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, last month published graphic photographs, including an image of soldiers posing with the severed head of a suicide bomber after placing a cigarette in the charred mouth.
Days after that scandal broke, Israel's Channel 2 aired recordings of radio transmissions describing a captain who had fired bullets into the body of a 13-year-old school girl at close range, after she had been shot and was lying in the sand. One group of soldiers had identified the youngster as a potential bomber, while others at a nearby observation post warned she was only a scared child trying to run away from soldiers.
The captain has been indicted on charges of misusing a firearm and ordering subordinates to lie about what happened.
"This new type of war presents real moral and ethical challenges," Yaalon told foreign reporters this week. "These challenges are as important and as essential a part of the conflict as stopping the suicide bomber.
"The IDF's moral standard is essential for society," he continued. "We are the army of the people. The soldier's moral standard is our moral standard."
