- GAZA CITY (IslamOnline.net
& News Agencies) - An Israeli newspaper splashed out Friday, November
19, photographs showing Israeli soldiers abusing and posing for photographs
with the bodies of dead Palestinians.
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- The Israeli army said it was launching an investigation
to get to the bottom of the scandal.
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- Mass-selling Israeli daily Yedout Ahronot carried the
photos, in which Israeli occupation soldiers were posing next to the bodies
of dead Palestinians.
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- In another picture, a soldier points his weapon at a
corpse while pressing his foot into the half-naked body.
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- A third picture shows a dead man, a cigarette allegedly
stuck in his mouth by troops.
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- Investigations
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- Yedout Ahronot's investigation of the scandal includes
numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers who photographed the bodies of Palestinians
or who were themselves photographed with bodies.
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- "When walking by a Palestinian shot in combat, several
troops would fire into the dead body. One of them even shot four bullets,"
one soldier is quoted as saying by the Israeli newspaper.
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- One account, provided by a soldier serving in the Nahal
Haharedi battalion, told of the abuse of the remains of a bomber who blew
himself up at the unit's Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley .
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- Soldiers from the unit positioned the bomber's head on
a concrete barrier and placed a cigarette in his mouth before taking photographs.
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- Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General
Moshe Ya'alon ordered Military Police Friday to investigate the report.
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- Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz submitted an urgent motion to
the Knesset concerning the abuse of dead bodies by Israeli soldiers, Israeli
daily Ha,aretz reported Friday.
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- According to Pines-Paz, the soldiers' actions "testify
to a moral imperviousness and there must be action taken to prevent this
from recurring.
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- Similar Incidents
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- Meanwhile, Israeli army opened investigation into an
officer accused of shooting a 13-year-old Palestinian girl repeatedly at
point-blank range, a lawyer for the girl's family said Thursday.
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- Lea Tzemel, an Israeli lawyer representing the girl's
family, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that soldiers fired
at the girl, Iman Al-Hams, while on her way to school.
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- Iman Al-Hams was riddled with 20 bullets, mostly in the
upper body, by three Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip city of
Rafah .
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- Al-Hams was left lying in a pool of blood because ambulances
had been denied access.
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- Hundreds of Palestinian children and teens have been
killed by army fire in the past four years, often in clashes between stone
throwers and Israeli troops, according to the AP.
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- A 10-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl died Wednesday,
October 13, of her wounds after Israeli occupation troops shot her in the
chest while sitting inside a United Nations school in a Gaza refugee camp.
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- The army rarely launches investigations into the incidents,
the American news agency said.
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- Abu Ghraib Copied
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- If true, the photos would come as a grim reminder of
the abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad
.
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- Many Arabs complain that Iraqis and Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip share the same blight of suffering from occupation
of foreign troops.
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- Several graphic photos of Iraqi detainees tortured and
sexually abused by American soldiers at the infamous prison were made public
by American media in April.
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- One American soldier was pictured holding a leash attached
to the neck of a naked detainee who was sprawling on the floor of a cell
block.
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- In September, four senior officers of an elite Israeli
air force unit hit out at the military's "immoral policies in the
occupied territories in a letter published by Israeli newspapers.
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- An Israeli reservist said last March that a growing number
of reservists are skeptic about the "moral principles of the army.
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- Erlik Alhanan said 80 percent of reservists have lost
confidence in the declared moral principles of the Israeli army due to
the practices in Lebanon , whose southern parts were occupied southern
parts for more than 20 years, and attacking Palestinians.
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- http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-11/19/article07.shtml
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