JERUSALEM, 14 October 2004 — The Israeli army’s already troubled image has taken a new battering during its controversial offensive in Gaza after a commander allegedly emptied his weapon into the body of a Palestinian girl and it was forced to retract claims that the UN’s refugee agency aided militants.
The military has justified its so-called Operation Days of Penitence, which has so far claimed 116 Palestinian lives, as vital to put an end to rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on southern Israel. But while the death of two children in the border town of Sderot a fortnight ago in a rocket attack served to bolster Israel’s case for action, it has subsequently been forced on to the defensive by its killing of Palestinian youngsters.
The army announced yesterday that it had suspended an officer under investigation for allegedly firing multiple shots at 13-year-old schoolgirl Imam Al-Hams who had already been gunned down in the southern Gaza Strip last week.
Even members of the officer’s own unit had criticized the army’s delay in suspending their commander, while one senior officer told the best-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper that “a moral army such as the IDF should have suspended him immediately.”
Maj. Sharon Feingold, an army spokeswoman, admitted that the damage to the army’s image would be “extremely serious ... if the veracity of these allegations are proven.”
“We expect our soldiers to maintain the highest standards of behavior while they are in service,” she said.
Nearly a quarter of the victims of Days of Penitence have been under 18 years of age. An 11-year-old girl died yesterday from wounds she sustained when Israeli troops fired into a classroom in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, which is run by the UN refugees agency UNRWA.
The army’s credibility has also taken a battering after its hasty claim that UNRWA had allowed one its ambulances be used by Palestinian militants to transport rockets in the Gaza Strip. The army released grainy footage earlier this month of what it said was a rocket being loaded into an UNRWA vehicle but was forced to backtrack Tuesday, with Gen. Ruth Yaron admitting to MPs that “it is obvious today, after all the inquiries made into the question, that it wasn’t a Qassam rocket.”
However the retraction has failed to defuse the row between Israel and UNRWA, with the organization’s chief demanding a formal apology yesterday. “I wish to have an apology,” Peter Hansen told representatives of major UNRWA donor countries in Jordan. “I would like to see as much energy spent in withdrawing these accusations as there was energy in making them.”
Hansen’s organization has been particularly outspoken in its criticism of the Israelis’ failure to avoid casualties among the Palestinian civilian population, particularly children. “Schools should be havens of peace,” said an UNRWA spokesman yesterday. “Outside the schools, the pace of child deaths in Gaza has been accelerating terribly in recent weeks. The most basic right of the child, to life, is now being violated almost every day.”
Veteran left-wing MP Yossi Sarid told army chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, when he appeared before parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee Tuesday, that he was leading a force that was now “morally bankrupt” and argued that talk of the purity of arms was “pathetic.”
