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Photos:
Scene. Published by IMEMC News
Amit Ben Ygal. Published by IMEMC News

Israeli soldiers wear face masks as they carry the coffin of Israeli army Staff Sgt. Amit Ben-Yigal during his funeral in Beer Yaakov, Israel, Tuesday, May 12, 2020. Credit: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit Published by Haaretz
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by IMEMC News
First Published On May 12, 2020 at 13:19
Updated May 12, 2020 2:32 PM

During a pre-dawn invasion of the northern West Bank on Tuesday, a 21-year old Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinians who dropped a large stone from a rooftop on his head while he was in the street. The soldier who was killed was identified as Staff Sgt. Amit Ben Ygal.

According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Ygal was among a battalion of soldiers with the Golani Brigade who invaded the village of Ya’bad, southwest of the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank, around 4:00 in the morning on Tuesday.

Many villagers were awake at the time, to eat their pre-dawn meal and prepare for the day of fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. So the soldiers, who often engage in pre-dawn raids but usually do so while residents are sleeping, instead were met by angry youth who demanded that they leave their town.

The Israeli military reported that the Golani Brigade was invading the village in order to abduct two Palestinians that they suspected of ‘terrorism’, and another two who were suspected of having thrown stones at soldiers during previous invasions.

The person who dropped the stone on the soldier has not been identified, but Israeli troops have issued a complete lockdown order on the village and are searching house-by-house, interrogating the residents and preventing them from leaving their homes.

Following the initial invasion, dozens of soldiers and armored vehicles stormed the town, and initiated very violent and extensive searches of homes and buildings, and abducted at least eighteen Palestinians, including a father and his three children.

Media sources in Jenin said the soldiers abducted Mohammad Atiyya Abu Bakr along with his brothers Thabet, Bassel and Ra’fat, in addition to Ribhi Mohammad Abu Bakr, along with his wife, his daughter Eman, 15, and his sons Mohammad and Khaled.

The soldiers also abducted Anas Kamer Abu Shamla and his brother Yazan, in addition to assaulting and wounding their brother, Mohammad.

The soldiers also shot two young men with rubber-coated steel bullets and caused dozens to suffer the severe effects of teargas inhalation.

The soldiers also stormed and ransacked many homes, including the properties of Bassem Lufti Abu Bakr, Sa’ed Omar Abu Bakr, Atiyya Younis Asfour, in addition to his brothers Nathmi and Ribhi, and interrogated them for several hours.

Furthermore, the soldiers also occupied the rooftops of many homes, especially in the as-Salma neighborhood, while more soldiers were deployed in the town’s streets and around it, completely isolating it.

First Published On May 12, 2020 at 13:19
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An Israeli Soldier Just Died in the West Bank for No Reason

by Gideon Levy for Haaretz
May 14, 2020 1:54 AM

The video is hard to watch: armed soldiers leaping and shouting in near-religious ecstasy, forming a circle around their comrade, swaying as in some sort of ritual. “Who’s crazy? I’m crazy!” they shout, led by the soldier in the center, their voices hoarse.

Brainwashed and coursing with hormones, “poisoned” as they affectionately call it for some reason in Israel, their dance is violent, as are the words they yell.

Who’s crazy? I’m crazy. The meaning is clear: Don’t test us. We’re crazy. It’s a scary sight. It’s not hard to imagine how this group, the Golani Brigade reconnaissance unit, operates in the occupied territories. This is what their purpose is. They have no other way to act except with violence and intimidation, and there’s nothing like this wild motivation dance to prepare them for the mission.

The soldier in the middle of the circle is Sgt. 1st Class Amit Ben-Yigal, of blessed memory. He was killed two days ago in Yabed. A Palestinian threw a rock on him from the roof of a house in the middle of the night and killed him.

Understandably, the media was immediately filled with a wave of sympathy for the bereaved family – heartbreaking interviews with the parents and a live broadcast of the funeral, after more than a year in which no soldier was killed in action. The jargon came from the usual propaganda lexicon: The soldier was a “fighter” and the youth who threw the rock at him is a “terrorist”; the village is “hostile” and the act is “murder.”

But we shouldn’t surrender to the pathetic media in the service of propaganda: The soldier may be a fighter, but not when he comes in the middle of the night to pull young men out of their beds. The operation is a policing operation, often intended as a drill for the forces and a show of power more than any other purpose. The “terrorist” is a youth defending his home and his friends and trying to repel the invader with the meager means at his disposal. A rock is a weapon, as the right wing correctly argued, but the rifle, machine gun and grenades that the soldiers have are weapons of a vastly greater kind.