SEOUL, (PIC)
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung sparked wide interaction after publishing a comment on the X platform regarding a video showing Israeli soldiers throwing the body of a Palestinian martyr from the roof of a building in the West Bank, in a scene that brought back the spotlight on one of the repeated crimes of Israeli abuse of the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.
Myung wrote in his tweet in the Korean language, “It must be verified whether this is true, and if it is, what measures were taken. What we consider crimes like forcing ‘comfort women’ or the extermination of Jews or killing during wartime, is no different from that.” in a clear reference to placing the incident within the context of gross violations of international humanitarian law.
An old crime
Although the circulating clip has received wide spread recently, the incident originally dates back to September 2024, when Israeli forces carried out a military operation in the town of Qabatiya north of the West Bank. During the operation, the Israeli forces besieged a house where a number of Palestinians were barricaded, before later announcing the killing of three of them.
But what caused wide shock at that time was not only the toll of martyrs, but the scenes that showed soldiers throwing the bodies of the dead successively from the roof of the building to the bottom, in a behavior described by human rights bodies as mutilation of bodies and a flagrant violation of the dignity of the dead.
Amid the re-circulation of the video, Ramy Abdu, Chairman of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, clarified the temporal context of the incident, confirming that the clip does not document a recent incident as rumored, but rather dates back to year 2024, when “Israeli forces threw the bodies of three Palestinians one after the other from a besieged house in Qabatiya.”
At the time, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for an urgent and effective international investigation into the incident of the Israeli occupation army throwing the bodies of Palestinian martyrs from the top of a house roof in Qabatiya in the northern occupied West Bank on Thursday (19 September 2024), in a horrific incident added to the series of ongoing atrocities and serious crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory.
A shocking clip
The Euro-Med Monitor highlighted that the shocking videos showed Israeli soldiers throwing the bodies of Palestinian men from the top of a house roof after raiding the town of Qabatiya near Jenin, which included besieging three Palestinians in a building consisting of two floors, and shelling it with “Energa” incendiary shells, before killing them and then mutilating their bodies after throwing them from the top of the building to the bottom.
The video clips show three Israeli soldiers climbing the roof of the building and pushing the bodies, then throwing them one by one from the top of the building. In one of the clips, a soldier appears kicking one of the bodies until it falls from the edge.
Tubas child
The revival of this incident comes in a broader context of Israeli escalation in the West Bank, where reports documenting similar violations are repeated.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights condemned another incident in Tubas, represented in the abuse of the body of the child Majid Fida Abu Zeina, 17 years old, a resident of Al-Far’a camp, after killing him during a military operation, considering that what happened represents a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law.
The center indicated that these practices cannot be dealt with as isolated individual incidents, but rather come within a repeated pattern of humiliating treatment of Palestinian bodies, in light of the absence of effective accountability, demanding the opening of independent international investigations leading to holding those responsible accountable.
The entry of the president of a country the size of South Korea onto the line of interaction with this incident reflects the expansion of the circle of international interest, especially with the link he made between the incident and major historical crimes, which adds a political and ethical dimension that transcends the limits of traditional media coverage.
The comment of the South Korean President sparked Israeli anger as Hebrew media attacked him while attempting to justify the heinous crime and claiming that it is old. However, it has been repeated many times in Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
While the incident dates back to about two years, the most urgent need remains ensuring the accountability of Israel for its crimes and ensuring its commitment to respecting the rules of war and stopping the repetition of these heinous crimes.
