JERUSALEM — The Israeli military has suspended a battalion whose troopers assaulted a NCS crew in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in a uncommon case of punishment for soldier misconduct.
The military introduced Monday it was suspending the Netzah Yehuda battalion after troopers had been filmed assaulting the NCS crew final week.
Netzah Yehuda is a unit of ultra-Orthodox troopers that has been linked to abuses of Palestinian civilians in the previous, together with the loss of life of a 78-year-old Palestinian American man after his detention by the battalion’s forces in 2022.
After an outcry from the U.S. authorities in that case, the Israeli military referred to as the incident “a grave and unfortunate event,” reprimanded one officer and reassigned two others. Later that yr, Israel moved the unit out of the West Bank.
In final week’s incident, a NCS crew was making ready a report on settler violence in the West Bank village of Tayasir. Settler violence in the territory has surged, with at the very least 9 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers this yr, in response to U.N. knowledge. Punishment of Israeli settlers for violence in opposition to Palestinians can be uncommon.
ln the incident caught on digital camera, troopers from the battalion approached the information crew, weapons raised, and yelled at them. Correspondent Jeremy Diamond mentioned a producer was put in a chokehold. The footage went viral.
In a report on NCS’s web site, Diamond wrote that the troopers detained the crew, together with West Bank Palestinians, for 2 hours whereas echoing settler ideology, saying all the West Bank belongs to Israel and calling Palestinians terrorists.
On Monday, the military mentioned that Netzah Yehuda was suspended from its present deployment and the battalion would resume its service after present process “a process aimed at reinforcing its professional and ethical foundations.”
Rabbi Shaul Abdiel, who works with the Netzah Yehuda unit, criticized the Israeli military’s punishment, saying in a radio interview that it was “too fast and too collective.”
Human rights teams lengthy have argued that Israel hardly ever holds troopers accountable for Palestinian deaths. The circumstances of the Palestinian American man and NCS crew seem to have attracted further consideration as a result of they concerned U.S. residents and a well-known information group.
A couple of weeks earlier than the NCS incident, Israeli authorities mentioned that they had launched an investigation into the killing of 4 Palestinians, together with two kids, considered one of them blind, by Israeli forces throughout a patrol in the close by West Bank city of Tammun.
Israeli authorities haven’t introduced disciplinary measures in opposition to the officers in that case. Israeli media has reported that the officers haven’t been questioned.
Frankel writes for the Associated Press.