A new bill seeks to make filming or recording Israel Defense Forces troops on duty "to purposely undermine the morale of IDF soldiers and state residents" punishable by five years in prison.
The legislative proposal, sponsored by Yisrael Beytenu MK Robert Ilatov, was introduced after a video of radical leftists accosting Israeli soldiers near the Gazan border went viral on Tuesday.
The video caught the attention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the beginning of Wednesday's cabinet meeting described what he called an "outrageous and absurd thing: people coming up to IDF soldiers, who protect us from annihilation, and calling them terrorists. They don't call Hamas terrorists."
The bill would also make it illegal to disseminate such content on either social or mainstream media. Doing so would be punishable by up to five years in jail as well.
In the abstract of the bill, Ilatov stated that "for many years, the State of Israel has borne witness to a worrying phenomenon of documenting IDF soldiers by taking video and stills and recording sound, by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups such as B'Tselem and Machsom Watch.
"In many cases, the groups spend entire days hounding IDF soldiers, waiting impatiently for any activity that can be documented in a skewed and tendentious manner and use it to shame Israeli soldiers," he said.
