Occupied Jerusalem: As Palestinians mourned the deaths of at least 32 people over the last two weeks, shot by Israeli occupation forces during protests along the border with Gaza, grainy video footage surfaced on Monday appearing to show occupation troops shooting a Palestinian man across the border fence at a time when he posed no obvious threat — and then rejoicing.
The Israeli regime’s Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday the soldier who shot the Palestinian “deserves a medal”.
Lieberman said in comments to journalists that the soldier who recorded the incident however deserved a demotion. In the video, the man is standing motionless, just inside Gaza. An Israeli sniper is told to take him down. A shot rings out and he falls to the ground.
Another soldier who appears to be videoing the scene whoops with excitement.
“Wow, what a video! Yay!” he exclaims, adding an expletive. “What a video legend.”
After the footage, from an unknown source, was widely broadcast by Israeli media Monday night.
The video emerged at a fraught time, after the flare-up along the border over the last two Fridays also left hundreds of Palestinians with gunshot wounds, according to Palestinian medical officials.
The latest footage comes after a series of earlier videos from the Gaza side showing unarmed protesters being shot, and after a Gazan journalist wearing a protective vest clearly marked with a “PRESS” sign was killed on Friday.
“Incidents such as the one in the video published today occurred hundreds of times over the past few weeks in the Gaza Strip, causing death and injuries — with the full support of policymakers and top military officials,” BTselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, said in a statement. “BTselem is deeply sorrowed by the manifestly illegal commands ordering soldiers to shoot at people who pose no threat.”
Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans organisation that opposes the regime’s policies towards the Palestinians, wrote on Twitter, “This isn’t from a few months ago, it’s been 51 years,” referring to the 1967 war when Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt.
Also Monday, the Norwegian Refugee Council, a non-governmental organisation, provided some of the last footage taken by Yasser Murtaja, 30, the Gazan journalist who was killed Friday. Murtaja, a photographer with the Gaza-based Ain Media agency, had been covering the border protests against the blockade and for the return to lands in what is now Israel. He was supposed to start documenting the struggle of Palestinian refugees in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The footage, some of it shot by a drone, shows protesters praying, burning tyres and facing off against the Israeli occupation soldiers. Murtaja shot video of injured men being rushed away on stretchers and in ambulances and being treated in a makeshift field hospital.
