"When one of the Palestinian youths fell to the ground, the youths continued to hit him in the head; he lost consciousness, his eyes rolled, his angled head twitched, and then those who were kicking him fled while the rest gathered around in a circle, with some still shouting with hate in their eyes."
Imagine this graphic account repeated, in different manifestations, every day in Occupied Palestine, and consider this: rarely does anyone pay a price for it. Indeed, this is how Israel's culture of impunity has evolved over the years.
According to Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, "approximately 94% of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians and their property are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing."
And no one is immune. Israel's 972Mag wrote in December 2015 about the hundreds of violent incidents of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian medical staff. Palestinian rights group, Al-Haq, documented 56 cases in which "ambulances were attacked," and 116 assaults against medical staff while on duty.
How about violence meted out by illegal settlers whose population in the Occupied Territories is constantly on the increase?
Armed settlers rampage daily through villages of the Occupied West Bank and the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. The number of their violent crimes has grown tremendously in recent years, and even doubled since 2009.
In August 2015, months before the current uprising, Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Bill Van Esveld, wrote:
"Settlers attack Palestinians and their property on a near-daily basis -- there were more than 300 such attacks last year, but few attackers faced justice. In the past decade, less than two percent of investigations into settler attacks ended with convictions."
In case one is still fooled by the "rational" argument used to justify the murder of militarily occupied, oppressed and besieged Palestinians, Batzalel Smotrich, from the Jewish Home Party, which is part of Netanyahu's ruling coalition, protested via twitter that his wife was expected to give birth in the same hospital room where Arab babies are born.
His written "rationale," after declaring that his wife "is not a racist...It's natural that my wife wouldn't want to lie next to someone whose baby son might want to murder my son."
The likes of Smotrich, and the majority of Israelis are morally blind to their own wrongdoing. They have long been sold on the idea that Israel, despite its brutality is a "villa in the jungle." According to a recent Pew survey, nearly half of Israelis want to expel Palestinians Arabs -- Muslims and Christians, from their ancestral homeland.
The danger of impunity is not merely the lack of legal accountability, but the fact that it is the very foundation of most violent crimes against humanity, including genocide.
This impunity began seven decades ago and it will not end without international intervention, with concerted efforts to hold Israel accountable in order to bring the agony of Palestinians to a halt.
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