Middle East Monitor / July 7, 2022
An Israeli soldier was arrested by the military on Tuesday after looting property belonging to Palestinians during a nightly raid near Hebron/Al-Khalil, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit announced yesterday.
The army said that the arrest was made during a military investigation of looting from Palestinian homes by soldiers in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
According to The Times of Israel, the soldier was ordered to remain in jail until Monday and at the request of his defence attorney, his identity was barred from publication.
Attacks, assaults and acts of vandalism are frequently carried out on Palestinian towns and villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank both by illegal settlers and soldiers.
However, the odds of an Israeli soldier being prosecuted for harming Palestinians or their property is almost zero.
According to a new report by Israeli human rights group Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights, analysis of the data for the 2019–2020 period shows that only two per cent of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli forces for abuse lead to prosecutions.
Yesh Din says that there exists a deliberate policy of reducing the number of investigations being opened against Israeli soldiers and in the few investigations that are opened, the proportion of investigations that yielded sufficient evidence and culminated in the prosecution of suspects remains extremely low.
