South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Saturday accused Israel of failing to “reflect” on allegations of rights abuses by its forces, after Israel decried him for amplifying social media “disinformation”.Lee irked Israel’s foreign ministry this week with his comments on a social media video with a caption purporting it showed Israeli soldiers torturing and pushing a “Palestinian kid” off a roof.
“I need to look into whether this is true, and if so, what measures have been taken,” Lee said in a social media post on Friday.
The provenance of the video, which has been widely shared on social media, could not be immediately identified.
Israeli troops deploy during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus in August last year. Photo: AFPHowever, it appeared to show a different angle of an incident captured in the West Bank two years ago, when reporters saw an Israeli soldier use his foot to push the body of an apparently dead adult man off a roof.
In 2024, the White House called the footage “deeply disturbing” and said it had demanded an explanation from Israel amid its intensifying raids on the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.