Amid a war already marked by charges of genocide, Israeli soldiers were filmed mocking Islam in a mosque in the West Bank this week.
The desecration of the Muslim place of worship brought a swift apology from Israel Defense Forces in a prepared statement not attributed to anyone in particular.
“The behavior of the soldiers in the videos is serious and stands in complete opposition to the values of the IDF,” the statement said. “The soldiers will be disciplined accordingly.”
The British newspaper The Guardian published videos showing Israeli troops singing and mocking the Islamic call to prayer over the loudspeaker of a mosque in Jenin, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israel’s military has been waging a brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, located on the opposite side of Israel’s territory from the West Bank. However, this week Israel has made several raids into the West Bank, killing at least 12 Palestinians, including one youth shot dead at a hospital.
That death count pales in comparison to the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces — 18,000 and counting — not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing illness and hunger as all supplies for living have been cut off.
In Jenin, Israeli soldiers were filmed inside the mosque, where one of them recited a Jewish prayer in the style of the Islamic call to prayer from the pulpit. In another clip, a song associated with the Jewish festival of Hanukkah is heard sung in Hebrew through a loudspeaker in the minaret. In yet another clip, one of the soldiers sits on the floor of the mosque and uses a microphone to deliver the Islamic call to prayer saying, “In the name of God, the merciful. Here is the spokesperson of the IDF.”
Israel already has bombed more than three dozen mosques in Gaza and the West Bank — in violation of international accords that say religious centers of worship should be protected at all costs.
Israel already has bombed more than three dozen mosques in Gaza and the West Bank.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, condemned the Israeli soldiers’ mockery of Islam, calling it “shameful and condemnable.”
He warned Israel is “dragging the region into a religious war.” He urged the international community and the United States to “put pressure on Israel to stop its violations against Palestinian people, their property and their sanctities”.
This incident came to light just as U.S. President Joe Biden — one of Israel’s staunchest supporters — appeared to be losing patience with the excesses of Israel’s retaliation against the terrorist group Hamas for its Oct. 7 assault on Israel that killed 1,200 and made nearly 200 kidnap victims.
“I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives, not stop going after Hamas, but to be more careful,” Biden told reporters Dec. 14.
Meanwhile, a group supporting Palestinian Christians issued a news release Dec. 14 calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.”
Jonathan Kuttab, executive director of Friends of Sabeel North America, said what Israel is doing to Palestinians in its quest to eradicate Hamas clearly qualifies as genocide.
“Genocide” is defined by the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
“’Intent’ is usually the most difficult part to prove, but in the case of Palestine, intent is clearly expressed in the blatant statements by Israeli leaders, calling Palestinians in Gaza ‘human animals,’ referring to Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ (the tribe God commanded King Saul to destroy in the Old Testament), and declaring that there exist ‘no innocent Palestinians in Gaza,’ which must be destroyed,” Kuttab said.
“Never before has there been a case where such a genocide is being committed and reported on in real time on a daily basis, along with an openly declared policy of cutting off their water, food, electricity and fuel, and subjecting them to massive bombardment, after ordering them to move from their homes, (with no safe place to go to) and while over 50% of their buildings are destroyed.”
Kuttab called the “scenes of destruction” in Gaza “apocalyptic.”
He lamented: “How do we explain, in the face of this overwhelming evidence of an ongoing genocide, that the world, including the church, is largely silent with only mild, tepid pronouncements of concern, and where those who dare even speak of a ceasefire, or de-escalation on humanitarian grounds, are themselves attacked, silenced and ridiculed as naive supporters of terrorism?”