A leading Israeli rights organization said Monday it had requested a military investigation into a senior commander over suspected war crimes against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) urged Military Advocate-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi to open an inquiry into Major General Avi Bluth, head of the Israeli military in the West Bank, citing remarks and actions it said amounted to collective punishment.
In a video circulated Friday, Bluth declared that “every (Palestinian) village and every enemy... will pay a heavy price” for attacks against Israelis. He went on to say Palestinian villages could face curfews, encirclements and “terrain-shaping actions” as deterrence measures.
The comments came after Israeli forces arrested a Palestinian man from the village of al-Mughayyir accused of carrying out a shooting. On Sunday, Israeli bulldozers uprooted hundreds of trees in the village under army protection. The military later said it had “cleared” the area because the vegetation “obstructed the identification of enemy movement.”
ACRI denounced the operation as collective punishment. “For months, lawlessness in the West Bank has made war crimes and crimes against humanity part of daily life. Alarmingly, the army has begun to boast about it,” the group said in its statement. It demanded that the army immediately cease all acts of collective punishment, including the destruction of property.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. Violence there has escalated sharply since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza nearly two years ago, with Palestinian communities facing near-daily raids, demolitions and settler violence under military protection.
Bluth, a former military secretary to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was born in a West Bank settlement, has in recent months faced criticism from Israeli settler groups for publicly condemning some of their violent attacks.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the request for an investigation.
