A new brigade commander in the Israel Defence Forces has encouraged his soldiers to commit “genocide” in Lebanon, according an army mental health officer, Anadolu has reported, citing Israel’s state-run broadcaster. Adi Engert, the Alexandroni Brigade’s mental health officer, sparked uproar with her comment on X late on Monday, in a post that was later deleted.
According to Engert, the brigade’s new commander, Colonel Moshe Pesel “wishes for the fighters to commit genocide,” reported the Israeli Broadcasting Authority.
“The villages of Lebanon will become desolate, and its roads impassable,” Pesel is quoted as saying in a document sent to soldiers. Engert attached the comment to her post, images of which continued to circulate in Israeli media even after its removal from X.
Channel 12 reported on Tuesday that Alexandroni Brigade soldiers have served more than 200 days on reserve duty since 7 October on the border with Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip.
The broadcaster reported that Engert said that after Pesel took command, he sent a message to the brigade’s soldiers, saying: “A new commander has joined the brigade. To begin with, I wish for the fighters to commit genocide.”
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Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also took to X after the post, questioning on Tuesday why action had not been taken by the army against Engert.
On Sunday, Israeli warplanes launched over 40 air strikes on southern Lebanon, the most severe attack since cross-border exchanges of fire between Tel Aviv and Hezbollah began on 8 October last year. The Israeli army claimed that the attacks aimed to prevent a rocket barrage by Hezbollah.
The Lebanese group said that it had launched hundreds of rockets and missiles deep into Israel as the “first phase” of its response to last month’s assassination of its senior commander Fuad Shukr in an Israeli air strike in Beirut.
The exchanges between Hezbollah and the Israeli army have resulted in hundreds of casualties, mostly on the Lebanese side.
The escalation comes against the backdrop of a brutal Israeli war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 40,500 Palestinians since last October, mainly children and women. The military offensive has reduced much of the territory to rubble and left most of the population homeless, hungry and prone to starvation and disease.
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