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"A newly released collection of anonymous accusations of alleged human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers in Gaza has prompted reservists who served there to deliver signed, on-camera counter-testimonies about Palestinian terrorists' use of Gazans as human shields.
The dozen English-language testimonies were delivered in response to a report by Breaking the Silence, an organization which says it is attempting to collect accounts by Israel Defense Soldiers in order to expose "moral corruption" within the IDF, as explained in the movement's Website.
The accusations were made by anonymous people who said they were reserves soldiers, and whose faces were blurred in filmed talks. Some recounted hearing from other soldiers that the IDF used Palestinians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead in January. Others said they recalled destroying Palestinian property.
"We came upon an ambulance from a local children's hospital," Pinchas Sanderson from Jerusalem recounted in an American accent in his counter-testimony. The 29-year-old U.S.-born student is one of three native English-speakers who appear on the new website www.soldiersspeakout.com.
"It was suspicious because there was a very old lady in the ambulance of a children's hospital. Inside we found three RPG rocket launchers," he said. "We couldn?t believe someone would use an ambulance to move them."
Johannesburg-born Jeremy Lipshitz, 24, recounted in a South African accent how his unit discovered a Hezbollah hideout in Lebanon but was ordered to hold fire. Lipshitz, a reserves Intelligence Corps field combatant who settled in Ra'anana after making aliyah six years ago, said it was because the terrorists were using civilians as human shields."
Shane Goodson, a 23-year-old reserves paratrooper from Herzliya who in 2005 also came to Israel from South Africa, Pretoria, described how the IDF is made up of "ordinary Israelis with families, jobs and a respect for family values."
Another testimony by an Israeli-born commando soldier talks about him ordering his soldiers to clean up a Palestinian home after they were in it, and how they collected items from their own food parcels from home and gave them to the family.
The SoldiersSpeakOut group, which encourages soldiers to send in their filmed testimonies via the video sharing site Youtube, describes itself as "a grassroots movement that wants to show the voices of real Israelis."
The new movement is supported by the international Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs, which specializes in high-tech quick response projects in English to what is perceives as anti-Israel bias."
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