THE ISRAELI DEFENCE Forces (IDF) will ban soldiers from using social media websites in an attempt to clamp down on the amount of security leaks and embarrassing videos on the internet.

Lt. Col. Gadi Abudi announced the new plan on Tuesday, saying that the idea was to prevent sensitive information from reaching its “enemies” via popular social networking sites, AP reports.

Email clients like Gmail will also be blocked along with websites like Facebook and Twitter.  In August, and IDF soldier posted smiling pictures of herself with Palestinian prisoners on Facebook.

Another IDF soldier posted a video of himself belly-dancing around a bound Palestinian woman on Youtube in May.

Abadi spoke on Israel’s Channel 2 yesterday about the new policy, saying that its aim was to reduce the number of mistakes.

The soldiers care deeply about security, but they are human. When a soldier is in his office at the unit, the risk of confusion and mistakes is higher. When you separate the work environment from the non-operations environment, the number of mistakes drops significantly.

The IDF regularly tweets updates from its Twitter account.