‘Kill them all’: Social media uproar over ‘Anti-Arab’ Israeli rally

A large rally held in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Tuesday in support of a Israel soldier who murdered a Palestinian teenager in 2014 has drawn flak from social media users, who claim that the demonstration was against Arabs.

A photo posted by Arab-Israeli lawmaker Ahmed Tibi showed a demonstrator holding a banner displaying the words “Kill them all,” at the rally, which drew a crowd of around 2,000 people.

Dan Cohen, an independent US journalist on the ground, reported that the crowd was chanting ‘death to Arabs.’

“This seems more like a celebration of murder than anything,” he wrote on Twitter.

The demonstration came just hours after a Jerusalem district court convicted the main suspect in the July 2014 murder of a Palestinian teenager - an incident that ignited tensions in the lead-up to the 2014 summer war between Israel and Gaza’s Islamic militant group Hamas.

It is unclear what sentence the soldier faces but the teen’s killer could face life in prison.

Israeli defense officials have criticized the conduct of the soldier, identified as a medic, while large segments of the public have rallied behind him and accused the government of abandoning him at a time of heightened conflict with the Palestinians.

The soldier was charged Monday in last month’s shooting in the city of Hebron, which has been a focal point of a seven-month wave of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

The gruesome killing caused deep outrage and wide condemnation in Israel and was part of a series of events that helped spark the Gaza war later that summer.

Reflecting the general mood among the public, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that “our soldiers are not murderers. They act against murderers.”

(With the Associated Press)