Crime and the Criminal #1: Netzah Yehuda
The IDF goon squad behind the killing of an American citizen
Israeli politicians love to boast that the Israel Defense Forces is "the most moral army in the world," despite the IDF's long history of committing civilian massacres—from Al-Dawayima in 1948 to Qibya in 1953 to the Gaza border fence massacre in 2018.
You know an army commits a lot of massacres when you can't just refer to, say, the Rafah massacre. You have to specify which Rafah massacre.
Was it the Rafah massacre in 1954 in which the IDF executed over a hundred Palestinian refugees during the Suez Crisis?
Or was it the Rafah massacre of 2014, when the IDF killed at least 135 civilians, according to Amnesty International, to retrieve the body of an IDF officer killed by Hamas?
The latest example of the IDF’s routine cruelty is the killing of a 78-year-old Palestinian-American, Omar Assad, by soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, a unit for ultra-Orthodox Jews notorious for beating, torturing and sexually assaulting Palestinians.
Assad was an American citizen who spent forty years living in Milwaukee, where he owned a string of grocery stores. About a decade ago, he moved back to the West Bank where he was born.
But if he thought his American citizenship protected him from the everyday violence of Israeli occupation, he was mistaken.
In the early hours of Wednesday, January 12, Assad was returning home from a card game with friends when he was stopped by IDF soldiers from Netzah Yehuda. In the next hour, the elderly Palestinian was dragged from his car, handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged, which apparently caused him to have a heart attack.
Instead of calling for medical help, the soldiers dumped his body on a construction site in freezing cold weather, and left.
A Palestinian doctor who attempted to resuscitate Assad after the soldiers left said his face had turned blue by the time he got to the scene.
According to details of the official investigation leaked to the Israeli news website, Ynet, the soldiers claimed they didn’t know Assad was having a heart attack. “He did not identify any signs of distress on him: a cry for help or, for example, the gripping of his hand to his chest,” the soldiers reportedly said. How Assad was supposed to communicate he was in distress when he was gagged and handcuffed is unclear. The investigators said the soldiers are unlikely to be prosecuted, though a final decision on whether to charge them with a crime is still pending.
Assad’s killing at the hands of soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion shouldn’t surprise the Israeli government.
In recent years, Netzah Yehuda fighters have taken part in several deplorable incidents, some of which may rise to the level of war crimes.
In 2015, Netzah Yehuda soldiers arrested a Palestinian near Jenin, blindfolded, handcuffed, and beat him. One of the soldiers tortured him with electrodes, increasing the voltage when he begged them to stop. A military court sentenced the ringleader to nine months in prison and demoted him to the rank of private.
In the same year, a Netzah Yehuda soldier appeared on video at a wedding celebrating the murder of 18-month-old Palestinian Ali Dawabsheh, who was burnt alive by Israeli settlers after they firebombed his home in the village of Duma.
More scandals followed. In 2018, the Israeli military suspended two servicemen from Netzah Yehuda for fighting with Border Police who had just arrested two of their friends for throwing rocks at Palestinian homes. The following year, troops from the battalion forced a son to watch his father being savagely beaten. And then they forced the father to watch his son given the same treatment while unit commanders looked on.
Later in the year, fourteen members of the battalion were arrested for attacking a group of young Bedouin men at a gas station in Israel, calling them “dirty Arabs.”
Last October, Israeli military police detained four Netzah Yehuda soldiers for beating and sexually assaulting a Palestinian suspect. According to Ynet, the news outlet that broke the story: “Details indicate four soldiers from Netzah Yehuda Battalion, a Haredi military unit, threatened the detainee with a gun and even committed indecent acts on him.”
These are the type of people—religious sociopaths who believe their god promised them the whole of Palestine and won’t be happy until they’ve expelled every Palestinian from the West Bank—that Israel sends to enforce its illegal and immoral occupation.
The IDF may not be the most evil army in the world. But being less evil than the Syrian Army, for instance, is nothing to brag about. And the U.S. doesn't fund the atrocities carried out by the Syrian Army to the tune of $3.8 billion a year.
If the Biden administration is serious about making human rights a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, it should threaten to withhold all military aid to Israel until Israel disbands the Netzah Yehuda Battalion and charges the soldiers responsible for Omar Assad’s death with manslaughter
Fat chance, I know.
Further reading: over the weekend, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz released a shocking report about a mass Palestinian grave beneath a popular Israeli beach.
For decades, the Palestinians claimed Israeli soldiers massacred over 200 Palestinians in the village of Tantura in 1948. And for decades, the Israelis called them liars. Now, close to death, Israeli Jews who took part in the savagery have confirmed the massacre took place. The Palestinians were right all along.
Unfortunately, the story is behind a paywall.