Shocking video shows Palestinian bodies thrown from West Bank rooftop by Israeli soldiers

Israeli forces killed three Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank on Thursday and threw their bodies off a rooftop in a shocking scene captured on video.

An AP journalist saw three Israeli soldiers pushing the bodies from the top of an adjacent multi-story building in Qabatya, sending the apparently lifeless bodies falling several storeys to the ground.

It happened following a 10-hour military assault on Qabatya, where Israeli forces reportedly knocked over pedestrians as they hurtled through the down in armoured jeeps.

Israeli forces had earlier besieged several homes and shot Palestinians dead, reports stated.

The video of the three bodies being thrown off the buildings saw rights groups and Palestinians condemn Israeli forces for the harrowing act of brutality.

"Israeli occupation soldiers throw injured men from a rooftop in Qabatiya outside Jenin in the occupied West Bank earlier today. This is Israel’s ‘self-defence’," Husam Zumlot, the UK ambassador for the state of Palestine wrote in a post on X. It is not clear if the men were already dead or badly injured when they were pushed off the roofs.

"Israeli soldiers pushed three lifeless bodies from roofs during a West Bank raid. Under international law, even enemy combatants must be treated with dignity," another post on social media read.

The former executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, also slammed the harrowing footage.

"Under international humanitarian law, soldiers are supposed to ensure the bodies of enemy combatants are treated decently. Yet Israeli soldiers threw the bodies of three Palestinian men from a roof" he wrote on X, adding there was no military need to carry out such actions.

Israel issued a statement, saying they were investigating the incident and claiming it does not meet the military's "values and the expectations" of its soldiers.

Hamas also issued a response to the footage, denouncing the act as "barbarity".

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said the image of bulldozers desecrating bodies and throwing Palestinian civilians from rooftops "should shock the conscience of all Americans and must result in concrete actions by the Biden administration, which is enabling and excusing Israel’s war crimes".

The Euro-Med rights monitor said that while claims of Palestinian fighters doing the same to Israeli bodies have been debunked, this tactic has been used by Israel before.

They highlighted one report by AFP published on 12 December which claimed a video showed Hamas members carrying out executions by throwing captives off rooftops but in fact was of Islamic State group militants executing civilians in 2015.

According to the UN, 622 Palestinians have lost their lives in Israeli violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between October and August, including 126 killed in air strikes, and killed by extremist Israeli settlers.