US “Sanctions” on a unit of Israeli soldiers, Gantz calls Blinken: “Think again”

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM — When the general staff decides to move the Netzah Yehuda soldiers to the Golan Heights at the end of 2022, it was the first time the battalion has left the West Bank in twenty years. Because the soldiers who are part of it they live there and feel at homehosts among 3 million Palestinians.

So the generals explain the choice as a normal operational rotation, but in reality it happens twelve months after the death of Omar Abdelmajed Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian with an American passportwhom men from the unit arrested, handcuffed and gagged during a raid in his village and then left him freezing on the side of the road: the autopsy reveals that the old man was killed by a heart attack caused by stress and inflicted injuries.

Now that the United States – writes the digital magazine Axios — they want to impose sanctions against the battalion for violation of human rightsthe general staff replies that it is “not aware of the provision” and specifies that the troops “are fighting in Gaza with courage and professionalism”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defines the possible measure as “absurd and of low moral level”while Benny Gantz (who left the opposition to join the restricted war council) phone Antony Blinkenthe American Secretary of State, to ask him to “rethink”: “The punishments would damage Israel’s international position and there is no justification for implementing them.”

Yet the same Israeli officers in the past they attempted to re-establish respect for orders and the chain of command in the battalion, up to hypothesize its dissolution after a series of violence against the Palestinians of which the Omar case was the most serious to become public. «In the end we understood – explains a source to the newspaper Haaretz — that dissolving the Netzah Yehuda would have meant a declaration of war against the settlers.”

As Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance and leader of the Religious Zionists, said: «Whenever the battalion is deployed, the people in the settlements in that area are happy. The soldiers don’t let themselves be confused, they know who their brothers are and who the enemy is.” It would be the first time that Washington applies the Leahy law to the Israeli army: Prohibits the United States from providing military assistance to units of foreign forces that commit human rights abuses and violations with impunity. The Netzah Yehuda was created to attract the ultra-Orthodox who for the most part do not perform compulsory military service, it is made up of only men and over time the settlers have become the majority.

Daniel Hagari, the spokesman for the armed forces, recalled that with the start of Passover the last hostages held in Gaza will have spent 200 days in captivity: They were kidnapped on October 7, when Hamas terrorists attacked villages in southern Israel and massacred 1,200 people. “We will increase political and military pressure on Hamas because it is the only way to free them and bring them home,” Netanyahu proclaims. There are 133 leftaround thirty of them were declared dead by the intelligence, the internal secret services – writes the British Daily Mail – have established that only 40 survived, the Shin Bet denies this.

Tsahal has intensified the bombing of Rafah, the city towards the border with Egypt where one and a half million displaced people are crowded together and where Netanyahu wants to concentrate the offensive. According to local sources, 22 people died in a bombing, including 18 minors, over 34 thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict. In the courtyard of a hospital in Khan Younis — besieged by troops from the end of last December until two weeks ago — around fifty half-naked corpses were reportedly exhumed: the witnesses interviewed by Agence France Presse claim that they are Palestinian prisoners.

April 21, 2024

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