Sergeant Elor Azariya, on trial for killing a wounded terrorist in Hevron earlier this year, has criticized former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and the IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot for jumping to presume his guilt before hearing the facts.
"I had no backup from the Chief of Staff, from the ministers," Azariya said, following a short break in proceedings Sunday.
"I feel like they threw me to the dogs, maybe because of the media, the TV," he continued, accusing Israeli TV of showing a highly edited video of the incident "with no sound" in order to incriminate him. That video of the shooting was circulated by the far-left B'Tselem organization.
"The media showed the video in a biased way, without any sound," he emphasized, asserting that with sound it would have been possible to hear the shouting in the background and understand the situation as it unfolded.
"Whoever was in the field knows that the video means nothing... the B'Tselem film," he said.
When asked about footage showing the knife was some distance away from the injured terrorist - proof, the prosecution says, that Azariya didn't really feel threatened at the time - the soldier responded: "I don't care about the film; the film I saw was what I saw in real time in the field."
Azariya also hit back at the prosecution's assertion he shot the terrorist purely out of revenge - telling comrades that "a terrorist deserves to die."
"I don't think I said that sentence, (I'm) fairly sure not," he stated, adding that even if he had said something to that effect it had been "twisted and misinterpreted."
His real intent at the time was that "a terrorist posing a real danger to people in the field needs to be killed in order to neutralize the danger."
"If it was for revenge I would have gone closer to the terrorist and shot him from point-blank range, but I shot him from a distance of 7-10 meters in order to neutralize the threat," and nothing more, he insisted.
Earlier Sunday, Azariya told the court of his fears for the safety of his comrades and "the children of Hevron" in taking the split-second decision to kill the terrorist.