Israeli Press
Nitzan Alon says Israeli soldiers stand by during unlawful West Bank acts
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A retired Israeli major general told a room of Israeli teenagers this week that soldiers in the occupied West Bank watch unlawful acts happen and sometimes join in.
Nitzan Alon commanded the army's Central Command, which holds the West Bank, and after October 2023 ran its directorate for hostages and missing persons. He was speaking at the opening conference of the LEAD youth programme's 2026 cycle, and Ynet reported his remarks on Sunday.
"There is significant erosion of the army's values among some fighters and commanders," Alon said. He attributed it to the length of the war: it is, in his phrase, a product of a prolonged war.
He then described what that erosion looks like on the ground. There are incidents, he said, in which soldiers behave improperly in the West Bank — cases where soldiers stand by in the face of unlawful and immoral acts, and sometimes cooperate with them.
Who is saying it, and to whom#
The venue matters. Alon was not addressing a court, a commission or a Palestinian audience. He was talking to Israeli youth ambassadors about what he believes their army is becoming, and he framed the argument in terms of Israel's own long-term survival and its capacity to look at itself.
He made a second claim in the same conversation, about Gaza rather than the West Bank: the political echelon, he said, bears responsibility for the overall conception regarding Hamas, and the intelligence that existed beforehand, along with the observers' data and the signals of that night, should have been treated as a real warning.
What it adds for a Palestinian reader#
Nothing in Alon's account is new to the villages. It is new only in the mouth that says it.
Palestinian residents, the Israeli group Yesh Din and Amnesty International have documented soldiers standing beside settlers for years, and the paper reported this week that the chief of staff carried the same warning to the prime minister in writing. Alon's contribution is a former Central Command chief putting the word cooperate into the record.
He offered no case, no unit and no date, and Ynet reported none. What he offered is a diagnosis, delivered to Israeli teenagers, of a practice Palestinians experience as policy.
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