As Israeli forces indiscriminately massacre Palestinians across Gaza, they are using American-made heavy equipment to dismember people and hide bodies, a new report says, in an apparent effort to conceal the death toll and prevent photos of decomposing corpses from circulating on the Internet.
An Israeli soldier said +972 Magazine And Local call that the Israeli forces are clearing away the bodies of Palestinians using D-9 bulldozers, which were provided to the Israeli forces by the US government and manufactured by the Texas company Caterpillar.
The soldiers are clearing bodies from aid convoy routes that have been designated by the Israeli army as “safe” humanitarian areas – areas where, despite the route designations, soldiers are instructed to shoot Palestinians on sight. The purpose of clearing the bodies is to prevent aid workers from seeing and reporting on them, the soldier said.
“A D-9 (Caterpillar bulldozer) drives down with a tank and clears the area of bodies, buries them under the rubble and throws them aside so that the convoys don’t see them – (so) no pictures emerge of people in advanced stages of decomposition,” said a soldier who was from +972 And Local call.
Another soldier, D., said his brigade, stationed near a route for aid convoys and another route for civilians fleeing northern Gaza, developed a policy of “green” zones that civilians were allowed to enter and “red” zones where soldiers killed Palestinians whether they looked like civilians or not. It is a war crime not to distinguish between civilians and fighters in combat.
The group sold $69 million worth of the Texas-based company’s stocks and bonds this month.
The soldiers added that many of those killed by the soldiers were believed to be civilians, some of whom had entered the “red” zones to search for food or other supplies that may have fallen from an aid truck.
“I saw many (Palestinian) civilians – families, women, children,” S. continued, according to the report. “There are more deaths than are reported. We were in a small area. Every day at least one or two (civilians) are killed because they were walking in a restricted area. I don’t know who is a terrorist and who is not, but most of them were not carrying weapons.”
The investigation also referred to the recent testimony of an Israeli soldier before the Israeli Knesset, who said that while driving a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, his crew ran over “hundreds of terrorists, dead and alive.”
The soldiers’ accounts match those of Palestinians, who say that Israeli forces often bulldoze Palestinians and also use the bulldozers for illegal demolitions and property confiscation as part of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found in March that Israeli forces have regularly used tanks and bulldozers to run over and kill Palestinians in Gaza in recent months. Israeli forces have previously admitted to burying Palestinian bodies with bulldozers during the Gaza genocide, apparently to prevent the carnage from being reported. In at least one case, reports have found evidence that Israel bulldozed mass graves after carrying out massacres at a Gaza hospital.
Israel has long used Caterpillar bulldozers to promote the violent dispossession of Palestinian land. One particularly notorious example is the US pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, who was driving a Caterpillar bulldozer in 2003 and killed it while protesting against Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
Due to Israel’s extensive use of Caterpillar machinery, the company has been the target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for decades. Recently, Norway’s largest private pension fund sold $69 million worth of the company’s stocks and bonds because the Israeli military allegedly used its machinery to commit countless human rights violations against Palestinians.
The use of bulldozers to dismember and bury Palestinian bodies may be a war crime, so the government’s continued supply of bulldozers and related equipment to the Israeli forces responsible for such acts may also be a violation of U.S. law.
