The far-right mob attack on two Israel Defense Forces bases in support of soldiers accused of sexually torturing a detainee did not come out of the blue – the parallels to a 2016 incident were immediately obvious.
In March that year, Elor Azaria, an IDF soldier serving in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, calmly walked over to Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, an injured Palestinian knife attacker lying on the ground, and shot him in the head. A video of the killing released by a human rights group led to political uproar.
