Israeli forces in the eastern occupied Jerusalem village of al-Eizariya were caught on video on Friday posing for trophy photos as they held a wounded, handcuffed Palestinian child in a stranglehold.

The disturbing video, shot by Rami Alarya was published by the Independent Media Center (IMC), however that publication’s website, which regularly documents Israeli abuses in the village, appeared to be down.

The images in this post are screenshots from Alarya’s video.

The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) which translated IMC’s report provided this description and analysis:

The soldiers assaulted the child during clashes that took place in the [al-Eizariya] town, east of occupied East Jerusalem. One of the soldiers tried to push the cameraman, Alarya, and his colleague, Amin Alawya, away from the scene, and was yelling at them, “Enough, enough…. go away… what do you want…” Medical sources said the soldiers shot the child, Yassin al-Karaki, 13 years of age, with a rubber-coated metal bullet which hit the 13-year old in the leg. After he fell, the soldiers began assaulting and abusing him. The attack took place after soldiers, who hid in a building near the Annexation Wall in the Qabsa area, ambushed a group of children, and one of the soldiers opened fire on the children. Several soldiers then attacked and assaulted the wounded child before kidnapping him. The soldiers took pictures of themselves with the wounded child, and one soldier picked up a Molotov cocktail from the ground, while the child shouted in Hebrew, “it’s not mine, it’s not mine”, and a soldier responded, “it’s yours, it’s Ok … it’s yours”. One of the soldiers was holding him in a chokehold, and was mocking the child by imitating wrestling moves while other soldiers took pictures, although the child was barely able to breathe. The soldiers then placed the child in their jeep, while one of them was still filming the incident.

Trophies

In his book Goliath, The Electronic Intifada contributor Max Blumenthal writes that such so-called “trophy” photos have a long tradition in many military forces, including Israel’s.

Blumenthal recalls a series of such photographs released several years ago by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group which documents testimonies of Israeli soldiers while protecting their identities:

Among the disturbing shots culled from Facebook pages belonging to young Israelis was a photo of four smiling troops towering over a blindfolded preadolescent Palestinian girl kneeling at the point of their machine guns; a pretty female soldier smiling winsomely beside a blindfolded Palestinian man cuffed to a plastic chair; two soldiers posing triumphantly above a disheveled corpse lying in the street like a piece of discarded trash; a soldier pumping his rifle in the air directly behind an older Palestinian woman tending to pots on her kitchen stove; a soldier defacing the walls of a home in Gaza by spray-painting a star of David and the phrase, “Be Right Back”; troops in the Gaza Strip playing with and posing beside corpses stripped half nude in acts of post-mortem humiliation; a young soldier mockingly applying makeup from a Pal- estinian woman’s dresser. The Facebook pages were so replete with documents of humiliation, domination, and violence it seemed that army basic training had been led by Marquis de Sade.

Blumenthal sees these images as documents of a “colonial culture in which Jewish Israeli youth became conditioned to act as sadistic overlords toward their Palestinian neighbors, and of a perpetual conquest that demanded indoctrination” beginning “at an early age” and continuing “perpetually throughout their lives.”

The latest shocking images from occupied Jerusalem are proof that this ugly tradition persists.