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Israeli Arab arrested for impersonating an IDF soldier, vilifying Israel on social media

The 19-year-old charged that soldiers were killing “everyone” in Gaza, including women and babies.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Israeli Arab was arrested Tuesday for impersonating an IDF soldier and vilifying Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip on social media.

In a clip that the police released, the 19-year-old resident of Abu Ghosh tells a keffiyeh-draped American-sounding interviewer that he is an IDF soldier and charges the army in broken English with systematically killing innocent civilians.

“We kill everybody, no Hamas,” he says in the video.

Nodding when the interviewer, who seems to be sitting at home, asks, “Everybody? Even the children? And the women?” he says, “Children, and babies. Babies one day [old] we kill him…. Why no?”

The Jerusalem District Police, who among their other protective functions also monitor anti-Israel social media posts for incitement, investigated the matter when the post came to their attention.

They located the young Arab and discovered that he was not, in fact, a soldier.

He was questioned after his arrest, and the authorities plan on submitting a request to the courts to extend his detention on Wednesday as the investigation continues.

The Israel Police announced last month that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, out of 1,010 social media posts its dedicated unit against online anti-Israel incitement has examined, the prosecutor’s office has approved criminal investigations against 524 authors. Charges have been filed against 162 of those investigated.

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In the Judea and Samaria district, which is counted separately, 503 cases have been examined since the outbreak of the war, and charges brought in 236 of them.

This is but a drop in the bucket of millions of posts from around the world on social media sites that daily attack Israel’s narrative of the war, glorify Hamas’ attempted genocide on October 7, and support and encourage any attack on the Jewish state or Jews wherever they may live.

While Israeli government officials know the data, the social media battle has not drawn the serious budget necessary to combat even a small part of the well-oiled, and in many cases, enemy-state backed propaganda machine, to the deep chagrin of many Israel supporters.