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CAIRO — Sporting T-shirts with Palestinian babies, Gazan mothers mourning their slain children, razed mosques, Israeli soldiers are bragging their atrocities in the Gaza Strip.
"You take whoever [in the unit] knows how to draw and then you give it to the commanders before printing," an Israeli soldier who identified himself as Y., told Haaretz on Saturday, March 21.
Y. designed a T-shirt depicting a soldier in a Palestinian city with the slogan "If you believe it can be fixed, then believe it can be destroyed!".
Since the end of the Gaza war, Israeli soldiers, marking the end of training of field duty, wear T-shirts depicting images of atrocities in overcrowded strip.
A T-shirt was designed by infantry snipers with an inscription reading "Better use Durex (trademark for condoms)," next to an image of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.
A T-shirt designed by the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, "1 shot, 2 kills."
A graduation shirt for soldiers who completed a snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."
Israeli troops killed more than 1,350 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and wounded 5,450 others in 22 days of attacks in Gaza, home to 1.6 million Palestinians.
The onslaught wrecked havoc on the infrastructure of the densely-populated enclave, leaving tens of thousands of homes and other buildings in ruins.
Israeli soldiers admitted Thursday killing innocent Palestinians in cold blood and ransacked their properties during the Gaza war.
UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Richard Falk has accused Israel of committing war crimes of the greatest magnitude in Gaza.
Racist
One of the shirts sported by infantry unit soldiers is reading "Let every Arab mother know that her son's fate is in my hands!".
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," a Givati Brigade soldier said.
Another sniper's shirt features a Palestinian kid in the crosshairs with the slogan "Smaller - harder!"?
"It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally, and also the target is smaller," G., a soldier in an elite unit who has done a snipers course, said.
Many T-shirts are also printed with blatant sexual messages.
"No virgins, no terror attacks," reads a slogan written below an image of an Israeli solider raping a girl.
Another T-shirt depicting a vulture sexually penetrating Hamas' prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, accompanied by a particularly graphic slogan.
The content of the T-shirts is approved by the unit's commanders.
"Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant," the Givati soldier said.
Sociologist Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University said the trend shows the growing radicalization process inside Israeli society.
"(The phenomenon is) part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront.
Sasson-Levy said the paintings and slogans show how Israeli soldier see Palestinians.
"There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him."
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