This article contains descriptions and embedded images of disturbing images of Palestinian people being abused by Israeli soldiers.
Disturbing footage of Israeli abuse is being circulated on social media. This comes amidst shocking images that show Palestinian babies who have frozen to death. Such examples of Israeli brutality have been commonplace during the ongoing genocide, and indeed the history of settler colonial Israel.
Of course, these graphic incidents are happening without commentary from Western media outlets, the United Nations, or other institutions who just last week rushed to release statements about the treatment of the bodies of a number of Israeli hostages.
Last week at the Canary, we reported:
No human body should be treated with indignity after death. Privacy and respect for the deceased and their loved ones form the basic standard of how bodies should be treated. However, this isn’t happening in isolation. Israel has spent the last year of its siege on Gaza, and indeed its entire history as a settler colonial entity, disrespecting Palestinian bodies with cruel and inhumane rituals.
Mere days later the “cruel and inhumane rituals” we referred to were once again evident.
Israel: disgusting behaviour
Quds News Network shared a shocking image of an IDF soldier posing with his leg propped on a skull:
"A pure soldier showcases the quality football that was made with hard work after prolonged fighting in the Whores' Strip."
This is the caption written for an image shared on a prominent Israeli settlers' Telegram channel. The image shows an Israeli soldier stepping on the… pic.twitter.com/m9bVKLAvLe
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) February 24, 2025
The accompanying caption, shared by the soldier himself in Hebrew, reads:
A pure soldier showcases the quality football that was made with hard work after prolonged fighting in the Whores’ Strip.
IDF soldiers have a history of using social media to freely post images of them disrespecting and taunting the homes, belongings, and bodies of Palestinians they’ve slaughtered. This is what these soldiers are posting to their own social media – what on earth is happening behind closed doors?
Journalist Hend Amry expressed a hope that the skull couldn’t be used to identify someone:
Please use self care before reading this caption and seeing this photo. I hope the family of this Palestinian can’t identify their loved one from the clear shape of their teeth as the IOF soldier uses their skull for a football. Dear God.
They are Nazis in every literal sense. https://t.co/8DwggyYerh
— Hend Amry (@LibyaLiberty) February 24, 2025
And there it is – even if institutional bodies won’t admit it, that skull is a person. It belonged to a Palestinian person who was a whole universe. Last week, the world’s media went to great lengths to express sympathy and grief at the coffins of Israeli hostages – coffins, not bodies. Then, there was anguish that those coffins were ‘paraded’ at a ceremony where people who have lived their entire lives in a concentration camp had put up posters condemning the leader of their invaders.
The indignity, violence, and horror of a person’s skull being posed with in such a manner is met with no such sympathy or grief from the world’s media.
Harrowing
Another harrowing clip on social media shows Israeli soldiers doing nothing while dogs eat the remains of a Palestinian lying on the ground:
⚠️Warning: Sensitive Content
Israeli occupation forces documented themselves laughing at a body of a Palestinian man, whom they killed during the genocide in Gaza, being eaten by stray dogs. pic.twitter.com/a3OtNUI7m1— Kuffiya (@Kuffiyateam) February 26, 2025
Throughout the ongoing genocide, starving cats and dogs have often been seen eating corpses. So many Palestinians have been killed with such fervour and destruction of infrastructure that unless locals rally to bury bodies, nothing much can be done. Given the obvious sustained brutality of Israel’s soldiers on display, it’s probably fair to say that nobody would have expected them to intervene. Nevertheless, to see them calmly turn away is still an affront to human dignity.
It’s incidents like this that make it even harder to swallow grief-laden coverage about Israeli hostages. Anyone who’s paid the barest attention to the attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestine over the years knows that it never takes long for the next Israeli atrocity to make its way onto the internet only to be met with the silence of a complicit Western media.
War crimes
In yet another appalling incident, Middle East Eye have reported that:
Israeli forces strapped explosives around the neck of an elderly Palestinian who used a walking stick and forced him to inspect areas used by Hamas before killing him and his wife.
They quote an Israeli investigative news site, HaKom, who found that the man:
was told that if he did not carry out the searches Israeli forces would detonate the explosives and “blow off his head”.
An Israeli soldier is said to have told HaKom:
That’s how he walked around with us for eight hours, even though he’s an 80-year-old man and even though he couldn’t run away from us. And that’s knowing that there’s a soldier behind him who can pull the rope at any second – and he’s done.
As Middle East Eye concluded:
While the extent and scale of such operations are unknown, the practice, which is illegal under both Israeli and international law, has repeatedly been used in Gaza.
In what was an undoubtedly terrifying death for this Palestinian man, it once again displays the callousness repeatedly shown by numerous Israeli soldiers. It feels ridiculous to turn to international law at this point, when the international community has not only ignored the hell visited on Palestinians, but gone further to equip Israel’s torture.
Grief is a political choice
Any one of these horrific instances should be enough to stop the world’s media in its tracks and force a reckoning with Israel’s genocidal behaviour. However, none of these incidents is the first of its kind even over the past year, and certainly not in Palestinian history. Solidarity is a word often used in left-wing circles and feels an inadequate term to describe the grief and anguish that many of us do feel at seeing Palestinians demeaned and tortured even after death.
Fuck mainstream Western media, and fuck anybody else who continues to turn away from this horror.
Featured image via the Canary
