MK Boaz Bismuth, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, on Monday urged the Israel Defense Forces to reverse a decision to suspend an entire reservist battalion following an alleged attack on a CNN crew in Samaria, calling the move “a mistake that harms troops and lends support to anti-IDF narratives.”
“I demand that you cancel the decision and return the battalion to full operational activity, while making it clear that the IDF stand behinds its fighters,” Bismuth wrote in a letter to IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.
Suspending the battalion’s activity is “a severe step that directly harms the operational continuity and does not serve, in my view, the best interests of the reservist fighters,” Bismuth said.
“This is not the first time our forces have been required to deal with hostile elements in the field, during an important mission of preventing harm to Israeli civilians,” noted the lawmaker.
The suspension “provides ammunition precisely to those false narratives promoted by Israel’s enemies against IDF soldiers in the international arena,” Bismuth said.
The Menashe Regional Brigade’s 941st “Netzah Israel” Battalion, a reserve unit made up mostly of former members of the IDF’s ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda Battalion, was suspended pending a “process aimed at reinforcing its professional and ethical foundations,” the military announced earlier on Monday.
“Accordingly, the operational deployment currently being carried out by the reserve battalion will be suspended,” it said.
“The battalion will resume operational activity upon completion of this process and subject to the decision of the commander of the Central Command,” according to the IDF, which said that additional command measures against the soldiers would be “implemented at a later stage.”
The decision followed an incident on March 27 in which the troops allegedly detained and assaulted a CNN crew during operations in the northern Samaria village of Tayasir.
The channel’s Jeremy Diamond claimed that a soldier put a photojournalist in a chokehold as troops tried to prevent them from filming at an unauthorized Jewish outpost.
The Israeli military told CNN last week that “the actions and behavior of the soldiers in the incident are incompatible with what is expected of IDF soldiers operating in the Judea and Samaria area.”
