"It is up to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to consider reinforcing the presence of military prosecutors at the main army checkpoints in order to ensure every effort is being made to protect human rights," said MP Michael Eitan, chairman of the parliamentary committee on constitution, law and justice.

Eitan's comments were made at a special committee session dealing with "human rights and the purity of arms during the war on terror".

In recent months, Israel's once-unshakable faith in the morality of the army has been put to the test by a series of recent scandals, one of which saw a soldier empty his weapon into the body of a young Palestinian girl who was already dead.

In another incident, soldiers at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank allegedly forced a Palestinian to his violin, prompting a bout of intense soul-searching among social commentators.

In the army's defence, Elazar Stern, head of the army's personnel branch, told the committee that while setting up checkpoints posed a moral risk, the idea of not having checkpoints posed a security risk.

"You cannot conduct a war wearing kid gloves. Every generation of officer needs to see himself as if he had come out of Auschwitz in two senses: not to do what they did to us, and to make sure that what they did to us isn't done again," he said.

Stern also said some 20 percent of soldiers joined the army with the preconception that Arab lives are worth less than Jewish lives, and subsequently behaved improperly at roadblocks, the website of the Haaretz daily quoted him as saying.

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