Israeli soldiers raped and murdered a teenage Bedouingirl in the Negev desert. Image: Wiki image
After 54 years, details one of Israel’s earliest secrets – the fate of a young bedouin girl at the hands of soldiers – have finally been released.
After previously being relegated to whispered rumours between soldiers, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has revealed the full extent of what happened in the Negev desert with the help of previously classified army documents.
In August 1949, an army unit stationed at Nirim in the Negev shot an Arab man and captured a bedouin girl with him who is thought to have been in her mid-teens.
In the hours after her capture she was forced to shower naked in front of the soldiers before three of them raped her.
After the Sabbath meal, the platoon commander, a man called Moshe who had served in the British army during the second world war proposed a vote on what should be done with her.
One of the options discussed was to make her work in the outpost’s kitchen. However, 20 or so of the soldiers present made their vote clear by repeatedly chanting: “We want to f***”.
Moshe then organised a rota for groups of the soldiers to gang rape the girl over the next three days. Moshe and one of his sergeants went first leaving the girl unconscious. When she complained about her treatment the next morning Moshe ordered one of his sergeants to kill her.
She was forced into a patrol vehicle with several soldiers, two of which were carrying shovels, and taken to the dunes. When the girl realised what was about to happened she tried to run but only managed a few paces before she was shot by a sergeant.
The young girl’s body was buried in a grave less than a foot deep.
When battalion commander Yehuda Drexler asked Moshe if he had carried out an order to return the girl to her village he replied: “They killed her. It was a shame to waste the petrol.”
Moshe was then ordered to write a report, which Ha’retz has since managed to obtain a copy of.
One excerpt is as follows: “In my patrol on 12.8.49 I encountered Arabs in the territory under my command, one of them armed. I killed the armed Arab on the spot and took his weapon. I took the Arab female captive. On the first night the soldiers abused her and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world.”
Moshe and many of the soldiers involved were tried in secret, in fear of the shame which would fall on the armed forces. Military judges rejected the soldiers’ line of defence that they were just carrying out orders.
Moshe denied rape, telling the court: “Morally speaking, it was impossible to sleep with such a dirty girl.”
He was acquitted of rape but convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Nineteen other soldiers recieved light sentences of between one and three years mainly for “negligence in preventing a crime”.
http://middleeastblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/israeli-secret-rape-and-murder-of-bedouin-girl-uncovered/
No comments:
Post a Comment