Israeli army under fire after killing girl

Among the questions analysts say are raised by the recording: Why did soldiers, after identifying Iman as a child, shoot her or not object to her being shot? Why was she shot at such a great distance? Why did General Yaalon endorse a flawed investigation that exonerated Captain R., and what does that imply about other investigations he says he personally conducts when civilians are killed?

At one point in the recording, after establishing that Iman is "a girl about 10 years old," the lookout soldier says: "She is behind the trench, and she is scared to death. The [bullet] hits were right next to her, centimeters away."

Another soldier then describes how "our forces are attacking her" and the lookout says: "One of the positions has taken her down."

Captain R. says: "We operated on her. Yes, it seems she has been hit." Captain R. later adds that he "verified" the killing.

Captain R. was indicted on Tuesday in a military court for "illegal use of weaponry" after complaints by soldiers about his behavior published in a newspaper triggered a military police probe separate from that of Yaalon. The charge sheet alleges that R. approached Iman, who had already been struck by gunfire, and fired two bullets into her. Then he switched his gun to automatic and emptied his clip into her, it says. R's lawyer says he is innocent.

But the episode is not just about R., but about the Israeli army as a whole, wrote analyst Ofer Shelah in Yediot Ahronot, a newspaper.

"The Israel Defense Forces are revealed in this story as a group of defeated gangsters in the field and as whitewashers and tricksters in the [army headquarters]," he wrote. "The commanders, from the company commander who emptied his magazine into the girl's body to the chief of staff who endorsed an investigation that said the company commander 'did not discern who was shooting at him and therefore fired on the ground,' are not worthy of continuing in their jobs."

Menachem Klein, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, says of the soldiers' communications during the incident: "This is the banality of a war crime. They know she is a girl, but they assassinate her. It's very banal, very dry, like they are talking about a tank. They identify the target, but they don't acknowledge the individual, they don't see the face. These are automatons."

Yaalon Wednesday conceded that the investigation he had overseen "was a grave failure in arriving at the full truth," but he rejected calls to place some army investigations into the hands of civilian bodies.

He added in remarks quoted by Y-net news service that the killing of Iman involves "failures in values."

"I don't think we should exaggerate the problem," he added. "It exists, but we know how to handle it."

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