Another senior British legal figure, who asked not to be named, said that while the letter may show “animus,” it was not, in their view, relevant to the question of establishing motives for last week’s drone strike.
Although the IDF has concluded its probe, a judicial inquiry is ongoing to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against those involved in the air strike.
Col Mandel is the highest ranking officer to have been dismissed in connection to the airstrikes. In 2007, he was named in the Israeli media as one of the IDF’s “10 most promising religious officers”.
The son of a Holocaust survivor, he lives in Gush Etzion, a cluster of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
In his youth, he studied at a religious school run by the Ateret Cohanim, a right-wing Jewish organisation dedicated to “returning, reclaiming, and rebuilding a United Jerusalem”.
Since 2000, the organisation has been acquiring land in the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem outside the Old City.
