As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a lot of beef between Israel and Palestine (if you don’t understand why, check out our handy guide to the Arab Israeli Conflict) and it’s been escalating a lot on the past few weeks, with perhaps the most shocking event that happened being this kidnapping and brutal beating of a young American Jew sticking up for the Palestinians by the Israeli police. I hope he’s OK.
In any case, although most people probably agree that the whole conflict needs to stop, most people would also probably agree that (in general) the Israelis are being jerks to the Palestinians (of course there are some Palestinian dickheads too though) and when they’re doing things like what this young army officer was doing then it isn’t really surprising that world opinion is so against them.
This 20 year old guy called Mas Ostrovski is a sniper in an Israeli army unit and he decided to post an image on his personal Instagram account of him with a Palestinian child in his crosshairs. Although the image hasn’t been verified as being 100% authentic, the very fact that he’s posting shit like this is just not cool at all and pretty bad taste to be honest. I mean what kind of a sick fuck wants to advertise to the world that he could kill a child if he wants to? Or even worse pretending that he could kill a child if he wants to.
Ostrovski has since deleted his Instagram page and told military officials that he didn’t take the picture but found it on another site before he uploaded it. This doesn’t exactly sound true, especially when you consider that his Instagram page reportedly had loads of pictures of him posing with heavy duty guns and generally being an Israeli meathead.
The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) aren’t happy with this though and have condemned the pictures, stating that the pictures ‘are not in accordance with the spirit of the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] or its values’. There’s no word yet on how Ostrovski will be dealt with but if it’s anything like previous Israeli military social media offenders, it looks as though he could be a set for a short stint in military prison or some kind of military disciplining. This is what has happened in the past to other offenders, including a soldier who posted a picture on his Facebook of himself next to a handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian prisoner and a female soldier who uploaded lewd images of herself with Palestinian prisoners.
