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Four Israeli military intelligence soldiers acknowledged they received instructions to use “heavy bombs” against inhabited buildings in the Gaza Strip without evacuating residents first, in strikes that killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians, according to a media report on Monday.
The soldiers gave their accounts to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, which began in October 2023.
The Israeli army has repeatedly claimed that it warns civilians in Gaza to evacuate before strikes, a practice Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have frequently boasted.
However, soldiers’ testimonies contradict these claims, as they revealed a complete change in open-fire regulations since the start of the war on Gaza, where approximately 2.4 million Palestinians live.
One intelligence soldier, identified only as A, who was tasked with tracking Hamas commanders in Gaza, said: “We knew almost nothing about Hamas and its military wing at the field level.
“In October 2023, we started almost from scratch to identify where their members and operatives were,” he said.
He added that the criteria for defining a target were quickly loosened, alongside “a sharp change in the concept of proportionality and the use of heavy weapons” and a significant easing of the policy governing the killing of civilians considered “collateral damage.”
Expanded targeting policy
Haaretz said the testimonies of the four soldiers portrayed “a fundamentally different concept of warfare, in which even relatively minor targets could be considered sufficient justification for attacks to harm civilians.”
The newspaper said the large number of civilians classified by the military as “collateral damage” was not simply the result of failures or mistaken identification, but stemmed from a policy of expanding the use of firepower “to the maximum extent.”
Haaretz said similar accounts had been presented during the three years of the war and that efforts to compensate for the intelligence failures of Oct. 7, 2023, “contributed to unprecedented tolerance for civilian casualties.”
The newspaper cited an Oct. 31, 2023 Israeli airstrike on a large residential complex in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza as one example. The stated target was Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas battalion commander in Jabalia.
“We knew Biari was underground, beneath large buildings, but we did not know beneath which building,” said a soldier identified only as D.
“So they chose buildings that were still inhabited and decided to destroy all the buildings above the tunnel where he was located. We did not carry out an evacuation because it was important to kill him without allowing him to escape,” he said.
Soldier A, who said he took part in the mission, said members of the targeting cell understood that the number of civilians likely to be harmed “was extremely high.”
“In the military intelligence estimates of potential collateral damage, there was talk of 250 to 300 people, so the decision was passed up for direct approval by the chief of staff,” he said.
“After the strike, as time passed, we understood that the number of dead was around 250,” he added, referring to Palestinian civilians.
“I remember being shocked when several densely populated buildings were flattened, killing hundreds, in order to kill a battalion commander who only a few weeks earlier would not even have been considered a target,” he said.
Responding to the Jabalia massacre, the Israeli army claimed that the strike had been “replanned several times to reduce harm to civilians,” saying the expected number of civilian casualties “was not in the hundreds.”
The army claimed that after the strike, “the damage was found to have exceeded its initial assessment.”
OPINION: Gaza’s displaced face a deadly choice: collapsing buildings or flooded tents
Civilian bloodshed
Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence, a left-wing Israeli organization, denounced the army’s conduct in Gaza.
“We cannot allow the killing of 300 civilians to assassinate a battalion commander,” he said. “Nor can we kill 20 civilians to kill every Hamas truck driver and then claim publicly that we did everything possible to prevent harm to innocent people.
“It is time for those who issued these orders to take responsibility instead of trying to get rid of the soldiers who courageously decided to tell the public the truth,” Weiman said.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal judicial organ, is also hearing a case brought by South Africa and joined by several countries accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Haaretz said another case described by the soldiers involved the Oct. 13, 2023 targeting of Hamas commander Ali Qadi.
According to the newspaper, an intelligence soldier in the Gaza Division had warned that Qadi “was behaving unusually,” but the division’s intelligence officer disregarded the warning.
“A few days after the war began, Qadi became a target and was subjected to heavy fire,” soldier A said.
“He was in the house with his family, and they decided to kill him. The army quickly announced that he had been killed, but in reality Qadi was the only person who survived the attack. Everyone who was killed had no connection to the target,” he said.
Without evacuation
Another soldier, identified as B, who served in a drone unit, said that after the war began, the division was authorized to operate under expanded parameters, meaning attacks expected to injure up to 20 noncombatants “did not require approval from a senior official outside the targeting cell.”
A third soldier, identified as C, who served in military intelligence, said that several months after the ground offensive began on Oct. 27, 2023, his unit was asked to prepare an entry zone into Gaza City for a maneuvering division.
He said several high-rise buildings in the area were considered a threat to Israeli troops and that an intelligence assessment estimated that about 25% of residents were still inside their homes.
“When we tried to ask how many residents remained and whether that was reasonable, we were told that those residents were targets for the forces on the ground. I could not understand or believe that we were talking about such numbers,” he said.
He added that the forces planning to enter the area could have waited considerably longer before approving the attack.
“So in the early stages we attacked without a full evacuation. Defending the soldiers was given priority, which is understandable, but the numbers (of civilian casualties) kept growing and became unreasonable,” he said.
The Israeli army has killed more than 74,300 Palestinians and injured over 175,400 others in a brutal war since October 2023 that has left the entire enclave in ruins.
READ: Israeli army fire kills 5 more Palestinians in Gaza, death toll nears 74,400
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