JERUSALEM, 7 August 2007 — Backed by rabbis and extreme far-right MPs, about a dozen Israeli soldiers are refusing to take part in a forced removal of settlers from two houses in the West Bank flashpoint town of Hebron, the army said yesterday. The soldiers are among some 3,000 troops and border police due today to remove two families who for months have illegally squatted inside two houses in Hebron’s wholesale market.
The mutinous soldiers, most of them religious, have told their commanding officers that they will refuse to join in the operation to evacuate the Hebron market, the army said in a statement. “A number of soldiers from the Kfir regiment training base protested before their commanders this morning over the task they had been given,” it said.
The head of the Central Army Command Gen. Gadi Shamni ordered the court-martial of “two company commanders and some 10 soldiers, who will be removed from their unit,” the army said in another statement.
“This is a dangerous phenomenon that threatens the very basis of the army being the people’s army in a democratic state,” Shamni was quoted as saying. “There is only one commanding authority in the army and its soldiers are not allowed to choose their tasks, as tough as they might be,” the statement said.
The army initially said that some 30 soldiers had refused to take part in the forced removal. Zvi Handel, an extreme-right opposition lawmaker, expressed support for the insubordinate soldiers. “I am proud that we have soldiers who think before obeying illegal orders and refuse to be part of a political game,” he said.
Several rabbis close to the settler movement have also thrown their weight behind the soldiers. The families squatting in the market claim that the property is Jewish. They received an evacuation order on Sunday to vacate the premises within 48 hours.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Army has punished two commanders whose troops mistakenly shot a Palestinian girl in Gaza last month, the military said. One officer was reprimanded and another was removed from his post and barred from holding a command position in the future, the army said. But an Israeli human rights group criticized those punishments as inadequate.
The girl, 14-year-old Ghana Nabhine, was wounded during a hunt for weapons and militants in the Gaza Strip’s Bureij refugee camp in mid-July, when soldiers sent her into what they believed was a militant hideout and told her to call on anyone inside to come out, the army said.
