Graves of fallen IDF soldiers vandalized in Jerusalem with hate messages

The word “Nazis,” a Palestinian flags and scribbles were drawn to blot out the word “Israel” on a nearby commemorative memorial plaque.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

A number of graves of fallen IDF soldiers and a memorial plaque were discovered to be vandalized on Tuesday morning in the military section of the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem.

Israeli police released photographs of the damaged graves, showing smashed tombstones. The word “Nazis,” a Palestinian flags and scribbles were drawn to blot out the word “Israel” on a nearby commemorative memorial plaque from the Ministry of Defense.

Authorities have opened an investigation into the vandalism, and the IDF has been notified so that it can repair or replace the damaged tombstones and plaque.

Military cemeteries and public memorials to both terror victims and Israel’s fallen soldiers have been repeatedly targeted by vandals in recent years.

The graves of Druze-Israeli soldiers in the northern Israeli city of Shfar’am were vandalized in June 2021.

Graves belonging to Private Muhammad Ismail Abu-Shah, who fell in Israel’s War of Independence, Staff Sergeant Ibrahim Shibel, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Gaza in 1993, and Border Police Senior Sergeant Ayman Hanifas, who was killed in the line of duty in 2008, were damaged.

In June 2022, an Israeli flag at a memorial site for slain IDF soldiers in the Golan Heights was replaced with a Palestinian flag.

In January 2021, two Bedouin teenagers uploaded a video of themselves desecrating a Jewish graveyard in Moshav Nevatim.

The pair, who were later arrested by police, filmed clips in which they gleefully smashed and destroyed headstones.

In May 2019, Arab students at the David Yellin Academic College of Education in Jerusalem vandalized a memorial for fallen IDF soldiers at their school.

The vandals extinguished candles at the temporary site, which had been set up prior to Israel’s annual Memorial Day for slain soldiers, and wrote “Happy Ramadan” over a space in which people wrote the names of their deceased loved ones.