On Saturday, Israeli soldier Avraham Ben Pinchas, a platoon commander in the Armoured Brigade, died after being hit by an anti-tank missile fired at the tank he was in during an Israeli operation in the southern Gaza Strip.
Many have eulogised Ben Pinchas, a settler from the settlement of Harsha, northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
His neighbour, Yaakov, said of Ben Pinchas: ‘One of the last times you were at home you were bothered a lot because in your opinion we should look at the issue of war as we would a passage from the Torah. You demanded that we go into the depth of the issue and see things as you see them, that this is the commandment of war, to conquer the Land of Israel’.
Another eulogy was published on the WhatsApp group of Hilltop News, a chat that reports news from radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank settlements.
‘Avraham went to this war out of his tremendous desire to aggrandize the people of Israel. He was so happy to enter Gaza and lead attacks…He wanted to kill, take revenge and destroy as much as possible, so that the whole world would understand what happens to those who challenge the people of Israel.’
Ben Pinchas’s friend later notes that ‘he told me that he kept count of how many people he had killed. At first, he counted those who he killed by shooting, shelling or driving over them with his tank, but later decided that what he kills with shells does not count and informed his crew that they were to stop running over Palestinians and to only kill with the MAG because he was ‘tired of cleaning his arms and legs from the tank’s tracked treads’. After a relatively short period of time, he reached to about 30 that he personally killed and decided that he had no desire to keep counting.’
The eulogies have shocked some progressive lawmakers and rights activists with the brazenness of the admissions of atrocities and killings.
‘These are exactly the crimes that they are trying to hide through persecution, suspension and threats, but we will not be silent! We will expose them and their perpetrators everywhere and without fear,’ Knesset member Ofer Kasif, of the left-wing Hadash party, wrote on social media.
According to Knesset member Moshe Tur-Paz of the centrist Yesh Atid party, eulogies like those of Ben Pinchas are becoming more common in Israel. ‘Lately, there has been an increase in eulogies about soldiers who take pride in the fact that they go in to kill. ‘What fun I have had for those I killed in Gaza 10, 20, 30’…
In October, during the funeral of an Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon, his brother said of him, ‘you entered Gaza in order to take as much revenge as possible, on women and children, on everything you saw, that’s what you wanted.’