"An investigation has been opened by the military police's criminal investigation division," the Israeli military told AFP news agency when asked about the incident. "The behavior seen in the video does not accord with the values" of the Israeli military, which said it "respects all religions" and "utterly condemns such behavior." The video, whose authenticity could not be immediately verified, shows a soldier wearing a uniform similar to those used by the Israeli military throwing a book that appears to be a copy of the Quran onto a bonfire. A photograph that has been widely circulated online appears to show an Israeli soldier posing in front of burning books in Gaza. Both the video and the photo have been shown on Israeli television stations.

Un soldat débile publie sur son compte Instagram une vidéo où il brûle le Coran dans la bande de Gaza.@TFilastin @Bassemvaudais #stopgenocide #gaza #Israel_is_terrorist_state pic.twitter.com/tzWfHwJpf9

— NusaybaAlQalam🇵🇸 (@AlNusayba) May 24, 2024

A journalist for the investigative journalism and fact-checking website Bellingcat determined that the bookshelves in the background of the photograph match those in the library of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. Since the start of Israel's war on the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip in October last year, Israeli soldiers have been accused of posting humiliating content about Palestinian civilians on their personal social media accounts. In February, the military announced that it had opened a criminal investigation into several incidents of alleged misconduct by soldiers during the war. The incidents "raised suspicions of mistreatment of detainees, killing of detainees, looting and illegal use of force," the military's chief legal adviser, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, said at the time. Israel launched a war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 last year to "uproot" the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas after it carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli territory hours earlier, killing more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) -- which has been in power in Gaza since 2007 and is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel -- also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in captivity and 37 have since died, according to the latest figures from the Israeli military. The war, which entered its 231st day on Thursday and continues to threaten to spread throughout the Middle East, has so far killed more than 35,800 people in the Gaza Strip and wounded 80,200, and about 10,000 are missing, presumably buried in the rubble, most of them civilians, according to updated figures from local authorities. The conflict has also displaced almost two million people, plunging the overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a "catastrophic hunger situation" that is claiming lives -- "the highest number ever recorded" by the UN in food security studies worldwide. Read Also: Egypt to allow UN aid into Gaza via Israel (Portuguese version)