03 August 2024 , 20:39
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IDF soldiers have shared scores of videos of their conduct in Gaza. The American-Israeli soldier says his videos were ‘taken out of context’
An American-Israeli man deployed in Gaza with a combat engineering unit of Israel’s armed forces posted videos online that show indiscriminate fire at a destroyed building and the detonation of homes and a mosque.
One video posted by the man, Bram Settenbrino, and filmed from the shooter’s viewpoint, shows dozens of rounds being fired into the ruins of a building. Another video shows what appears to be an armored vehicle’s fire-control system trained on a mosque before it is razed to the ground. Others depict the detonation of several homes as soldiers cheer.
It is not clear whether Settenbrino personally filmed the videos or was involved in the acts depicted in them, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Settenbrino did not dispute the videos’ authenticity. The videos recently went viral on X, drawing accusations that they showed “war crimes”. Settenbrino wrote in a message to the Guardian that the videos were “taken out of context” but declined to elaborate. “I have not committed any war crimes whatsoever,” he added.
After the Guardian reached out to Settenbrino and his family, his father published a response attributed to his son through Arutz Sheva, a news site associated with the settler right. “The machine gun fire video in question was suppressive fire in an area cleared of civilians after my team was attacked by Hamas terrorists from that area. The mosque that was blown up was being used to house armed terrorists and weapons stockpiles and used as a base to attack IDF soldiers.”
The soldier’s father said his son had “sent a congratulatory video dedicating a detonation to honor a friend’s new marriage”, and that the family business had received threats since the videos began circulating.
Israeli soldiers have shared scores of videos during the 10-month war showing themselves mocking Palestinians in Gaza and destroying Palestinian property. Some have been used as evidence in the genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ). Israeli forces have killed more than 39,000 Palestinians since the beginning of the war, displaced most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents and destroyed more than half of the strip’s structures.
With thousands of Americans serving in the IDF, potential misconduct documented by soldiers themselves raises uncomfortable questions for US officials about their willingness to enforce federal law against citizens acting in an overseas war the US government funds and supports.
The extensive destruction of property, when “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” is a violation of international law regulating conflict and a war crime under US law.
The US has an obligation to ensure respect for the Geneva conventions, a series of international treaties regulating armed conflict, said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the US Department of State. “If US citizens are violating the Geneva conventions or committing war crimes in Israel and Palestine, that implicates the US’s obligations,” he said, adding that under the federal War Crimes Act, the US has the authority to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes when either the victim or perpetrator are US citizens, or when perpetrators of any nationality are on US soil.
The IDF did not answer questions about why the mosque and homes in Settenbrino’s videos were targeted but has regularly claimed buildings it destroyed were used by Hamas fighters. Combat engineering corps usually plant explosives inside buildings they identify as targets and detonate them remotely, a more controlled demolition than bombing them from the air or from a tank.
Palestinians return to their homes in Khan Younis, Gaza, on 31 July 2024. Photograph: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images
The video showing the destruction of the mosque is dated 10 December, approximately when Settenbrino’s unit was deployed in the north of the strip. Israeli forces partially or fully destroyed more than 500 mosques in the strip since 7 October, Palestinian officials said in March.
Rights groups have called on the Biden administration to investigate crimes committed in Gaza as potential violations of US law. Ahead of the trip to the US last week of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Center for Constitutional Rights urged the US Department of Justice to investigate him and others responsible for serious crimes being committed in Gaza, “including potentially US and US-dual citizens”.
Brad Parker, CCR’s associate director of policy said: “Federal criminal statutes prohibit and criminalize genocide, war crimes, and torture, among other serious international crimes.
“US officials, government employees approving or facilitating continued weapons transfers to Israel, and individual US citizens currently serving active-duty roles in the Israeli military should definitely be concerned about their own individual criminal responsibility.”
Since the start of the war in Gaza, US efforts to crack down on violence against Palestinians have focused on the West Bank, where officials sanctioned a handful of settlers, freezing assets they may hold in the US and blocking American individuals and institutions from doing business with them. While the sanctions also include a ban on travel to the US, this would not extend to Americans. “But there are other tools available to the US government,” said Finucane, noting that citizens committing crimes abroad could be prosecuted in US courts.
An estimated 60,000 US citizens live in settlements in the West Bank. Many are deeply ideological, inspired by extremist figures like Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was designated a terror group in both the US and Israel. The justice department did not answer questions about whether it is considering any action against settlers who are US citizens.
Americans in the IDF
An estimated 23,380 US citizens serve in Israel’s armed forces, according to the Washington Post – a figure the IDF did not confirm but probably includes both Americans traveling to Israel for the purpose of service and Israeli-raised soldiers holding dual citizenship.
A spokesperson for the US state department did not answer questions about Settenbrino and referred questions about US obligations regarding its citizens’ actions in Gaza to the justice department. “We do continue to emphasize that the IDF must abide by international humanitarian law,” the spokesperson wrote. The justice department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the IDF declined to comment on Settenbrino specifically, citing privacy concerns, but said in a statement that “the IDF examines events of this kind as well as reports of videos uploaded to social networks and handles them with command and disciplinary measures”. The spokesperson declined to say whether the IDF regulates soldiers’ use of social media but said that it refers cases of suspected criminality to the military police for investigation.
The state department spokesperson was not able to confirm the number of Americans serving in the IDF, as citizens are not required to register their service with the US government.
Settenbrino has been deployed in Gaza since the beginning of the war with the Handasah Kravit, the IDF’s engineering corps. An Eagle scout raised in New Jersey, he moved to Israel as a teenager, becoming one of an estimated 600,000 US citizens who live there. He first joined the Israel dog unit, a civilian group that trains and deploys search-and-rescue dogs, and later enlisted in the IDF.
Last year, he received an “Outstanding Soldier of the Year” award from his division, according to his father, Randy Settenbrino, who has written about his son in op-eds for Israeli and Jewish publications.
‘Destroying homes is a day-to-day activity’
Settenbrino’s videos were first circulated in July by a prominent X account under the name Younis Tirawi that regularly surfaces videos posted by soldiers. Israeli soldiers have also shared videos of themselves playing with children’s toys and women’s underwear, the burning of Palestinian food supplies and rounding up and blindfolding civilians. Another video recently shared by Tirawi and originally posted by a member of Settenbrino’s unit showed the deliberate destruction of a water facility in Rafah.
One video by an IDF soldier, depicting a huge explosion in Gaza City as the soldier says “Shuja’iyya neighborhood gone … peace to Shuja’iyya” was screened in January before the ICJ as part of the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel and others were cited during the proceedings.
“There is now a trend among the soldiers to film themselves committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, in a form of ‘snuff’ video,” the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said in court. He cited examples of soldiers recording themselves destroying houses and declaring their intent to “erase Gaza” or “destroy Khan Younis” – potential evidence of genocidal intent.
Such videos have rarely led to consequences. The IDF spokesperson said that when military investigations determine that “the expression or behavior of the soldiers in the footage is inappropriate […] it is handled accordingly”, but did not offer examples.
“The vast number of such videos online demonstrates that the military leadership isn’t even trying to discipline the rank and file,” said Joel Carmel, a member of the Israeli veterans group Breaking the Silence.
He added: “More importantly, the issue is less about the videos themselves and more about what it says about the way we fight in Gaza. Destroying homes and places of worship is a day-to-day activity for soldiers in Gaza – it is the opposite of the ‘surgical’ strikes on carefully chosen targets that we are told about by the IDF.”
Whether the US would ever prosecute American citizens fighting for Israel is as much a political question as a legal one.
“The US government could prosecute these US citizens if they participate in war crimes,” Oona Hathaway, director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, told the Guardian. “Politically, however, that’s unlikely, for all the obvious reasons.”