(JTA) — Israeli television aired video showing Jews at a wedding celebrating the murder of three Palestinians in a West Bank firebombing.
According to the Times of Israel, the video, released Wednesday night on Channel 10 and filmed at a Jerusalem wedding last week, features friends of the suspected assailants in the July attack on a home in the Palestinian village of Duma.
Three members of the Dawabshe family — Ali, 18 months, and his parents, Saad and Riham — were killed. Ahmed Dawabshe, now 5, the only surviving member of the immediate family, is still undergoing treatment in an Israeli hospital.
In the video, party-goers stab a photo of the Dawabshe family and wave knives, rifles, pistols and Molotov cocktails. The crowd chants the words to a song that includes a verse from Judges 16:28, in which Samson says, “Let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” However, the crowd substitutes “Palestinians” for Philistines.
“The shocking pictures that were broadcast this evening show the true face of a group that constitutes a danger to Israeli society and to the security of Israel. We are not prepared to accept people who deny the laws of the state and do not view themselves as subject to them. The pictures underscore how important a strong ISA (Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet security service) is to the security of us all,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released after the video aired.
Tzipi Livni, a Zionist Union lawmaker, spoke about the video before the Knesset.
“This is the group that wants to destroy the Jewish Israel, to destroy this state from within, to destroy the government from within and sow hate,” she said, according to the Times of Israel.
Livni pointed at Bezalel Smutrich, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home party, and said, “These are the people you protest being interrogated by the Shin Bet.”
The suspects in the Duma attack, who are Jewish and are being held in administrative detention, have claimed the Shin Bet tortured them during interrogation, a charge the security service denies.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett have defended the Shin Bet. Bennett, who is the education minister, told a group of religious Zionist school administrators at a gathering Wednesday that he is “closely supervising” the Shin Bet, according to Haaretz.
“What is being done to [the Jewish terror suspects] is certainly no more than is done against Palestinian terrorists,” he said.
