Officer sent to jail, 3 dressed down over Qalandiya foul-up

The lieutenant of the two soldiers who accidentally entered the Qalandiya refugee camp late Monday night was sentenced to a week in prison and dismissed from his position following an initial investigation into the circumstances of the incident, a spokesperson said.

In addition, Brig.-Gen. Yehuda Fox, the army’s chief infantry and paratrooper officer, formally chastised officers throughout the IDF’s Oketz K-9 Unit, where the two soldiers serve.

The lieutenant colonel who commands Oketz and the soldiers’ company commander have both had the incident noted in their permanent record, while the soldiers’ deputy company commander was court-martialed and given a suspended prison sentence, the army said.

The soldiers, who accidentally drove their army vehicle into the flashpoint refugee camp outside Jerusalem — setting in motion an extraction operation and clashes in which a Palestinian was killed — have not been tried for their actions in a military court, and it was not immediately clear if or how they would be formally punished, an IDF spokesperson said.

Col. Ariel Ben-Dayan, head of the army’s Airlift and Special Training Center, led the investigation, as the Oketz Unit is subordinate to the center.

“[Ben-Dayan] stressed the responsibility of the commanders and noted that this was a serious incident. With that, he also noted the conduct of the soldiers themselves in the event,” the IDF said in a statement.

The two apparently entered the camp mistakenly after being directed by the navigation application Waze.

The soldiers fled their vehicle after it was attacked and set alight. As they ran, the pair separated. “One of them made phone contact almost immediately, and within 20-30 minutes the (rescuers) had reached him. The second one took about an hour to make contact, and then (it became possible to) pick him up,” an army spokesperson said late Monday.

One of the soldiers hid in the yard of a house in the refugee camp, where he was found by forces that entered Qalandiya and tracked his cell phone, IDF Spokesperson Moti Almoz told Army Radio Tuesday morning.

The second left his phone in the vehicle. He escaped from the refugee camp and made his way to the nearby Kochav Ya’akov settlement.

During the half-hour between finding the first soldier and making contact with the second, the IDF employed the controversial Hannibal Protocol, which gives the army free rein to do whatever is necessary to avoid a soldier being taken hostage, the army said.

Following the extraction of the two soldiers, IDF troops remained in Qalandiya to remove the burned army vehicle, where they were met with gunfire, Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs and rocks.

In the riot, which began when the two soldiers first entered the refugee camp, one Palestinian man was killed, dozens were injured and 10 members of Israel’s security forces were wounded.

The Palestinian man killed in the skirmish was identified as 22-year-old Iyad Amr Sajdiyeh, an Al-Quds University student from Qalandiya.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said Sajdiyeh was shot in the head.

Among Israeli forces, which included both border guards and IDF soldiers, one sustained moderate injuries and the rest were listed in fair condition after being taken to a Jerusalem hospital, according to the IDF.

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