Ex-soldiers of the Israeli occupation army revealed on Thursday, August 11th, 2022, how their superiors allow airstrikes on Gaza knowing that civilians, including women and children, will be killed.
The Israeli magazine “+972” published a report in which officials in the Israeli occupation army boasted about the percentage of non-combatants killed in the Gaza Strip.
This report comes in light of “Israel” publishing its narrative that the dead civilians, especially children and women, are just unintended missteps during the undertaking of the missile strikes on the Gaza Strip, but it appears that the Israeli occupation army deliberately killed them on the pretext of hitting a target, even when it was among civilians.
And the Hebrew news website Ynet quoted army officials as boasting that the death rate between “non-combatants” and fighters was “better than in all previous operations,” as Israel admits that it killed at least 11 people unrelated to the militants’ activities, Including a five-year-old girl in the latest assault.
The author of the report explained that the Israeli army admitted that it shot unarmed people, according to an officer who gave an interview to the same website with which the Israeli magazine cooperated.
she said; It is during the last attack: “An Islamic Jihad member came down from his house and was unarmed, but I opened fire on him, and when he fell, I shot more.”
The site reveals that the majority of Israelis believe that any children or civilian families killed in Gaza during Israeli military operations are being killed unintentionally, as the thinking goes that the Israeli occupation forces do not knowingly kill the innocent.
The report said; This rationalization allows the Israeli society to forget the scenes of bloodshed and horror dismissing from consciousness hundreds of children who were killed by the Israeli occupation army in Gaza over the years.
The site emphasizes that the reality is much more complex than that, as conversations with Israelis who served in various units of the Israeli intelligence corps over the past months reveal that during its military operations, and in many cases, the army knows beforehand that the attack will kill unarmed civilians.
The testimonies reveal that the decision to kill civilians is not by mistake, but rather a calculated and conscious decision. Where former soldiers testified that their superiors had told them that the army was allowed to kill a certain number of “non-combatants”—that is, families and children—in the course of operational activities; As long as this limit is not exceeded, the killing can be approved in advance.
The site quotes Dana, who used a pseudonym; Like all the ex-soldiers interviewed in this article—a kindergarten teacher who lives in a wood-furnished apartment filled with philosophy books in central Tel Aviv; During her military service, she participated in the assassination of a five-year-old child in Gaza.
“When I served in the Gaza department, we were following someone from Hamas,” she said. “Because the army knew it was hiding the missiles, and they made a decision to annihilate him.”
The website states that Dana worked as a traffic analysis officer in the operating room; Her job was to confirm that the missile hit the right people.
“We sent a drone to follow the man to kill him, but we saw that he was with his son, who was a boy, five or six years old, I think,” she said. “Before the assassination; Information from two different sources must be consulted so that we know we are killing the right target, and I told the commander, who was a lieutenant colonel then, that I could not fully pinpoint the target, and asked not to confirm the shooting, but he said: I don’t care, and he confirmed it, and he was also right, The aim was correct, but they killed the Hamas military element and the little boy who was next to him.”
According to the site, Dana said that she was in denial at the time, and continued, “The commanders said that this complies with the rules, and therefore it is allowed. We had rules in the army regarding the number of non-combatants allowed to be killed in Gaza with the targets allowed to be killed.”
The website noted that several other officials in the Intelligence Corps echoed Dana’s words; As they served in the same place during the previous wars on Gaza in recent years.
The website, citing three of them, including Dana, stated that in the wake of any Israeli bombing of Gaza in which Palestinians are killed; Soldiers are asked to monitor the phone conversations of family members, to hear the moment they tell each other that their loved one has died.
Dana explained; “It was another way to verify the dead, a way to make sure the person we wanted was dead, and that was her job after the five-year-old was killed; She says, “I heard a woman say, ‘He died; The child is dead,” and so I confirmed the task’s completion.
Another soldier, who served in a technology unit in the Intelligence Corps in 2019 said; “You control all their crossings; That gives you a lot of power, and if Gaza is connected to the West Bank, you lose some of that power, but today we control everything that goes in and out, whether it’s physical or electronic, or in terms of people, and that allows for more ways of working.”
“For example, people in Gaza are begging to be able to travel to study abroad or visit relatives outside the Strip, and this can be used to turn them into collaborators,” he explained.
The site reported that personal information collected by the military is used to recruit collaborators; As Adam said, “There is no such thing as privacy. You know everything about a person; what they like, what they filmed [on their phones], whether they have a lover, their sexual orientation; Everything is completely exposed, and you can collect information on anyone you want, and you know that these people do not want you to know these things.”
The magazine concluded with what Shira, a soldier in the Intelligence Corps, said, “I felt that we were all living in a version of the movie “The Truman Show.”
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