The Hebrew edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz just published an article about IDF soldiers getting PTSD from Gaza, but the article contained several admissions from IDF soldiers of killing children and committing war crimes, which were supported and encouraged by commanders.
One IDF soldier who went by the pseudonym “Yoni” in the article admits to opening fire on children, saying that an IDF soldier yelled “Terrorists, terrorists,” with him saying, “We go into a frenzy, and I immediately go up with the Negev (a kind of machine gun), and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. Then we rushed forward, and then I realized it was a mistake." Haaretz notes, “there was no terrorist there,” quoting “Yoni” saying, “I saw bodies of children, maybe eight or maybe ten, I have no idea, it was all blood, full of signs of gunfire. I knew it was all about me, that I had done it”.
“Yoni” then went on to say his IDF commander supported this massacre of children, saying, “After a few minutes, the company commander came and said coldly, as if he were not a human being, 'They entered an extermination zone, it's their fault, that's how it is in war’”.
Another IDF soldier named in the Nahal Brigade, admitted that he was repeatedly given the command to open fire on starving civilians at the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” aid sites, saying that “His and his friends' day starts at 3:30 a.m. Accompanied by drones and armored forces, they set up a sniper position and wait. He said that between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., the trucks arrived and began unloading their contents. In the meantime, the residents are trying to move forward to take a good place in the queue, but there is a border in front of them that they don't notice.”
The paper quoted him saying, “A line that if they cross, I can shoot them, it's like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different way each time, and I'm there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are shouting at me, 'Get off, get off.' I shoot 50-60 bullets every day, I stopped counting X's. I have no idea how many I killed. A lot. Children.
The IDF sniper testified that his commander ordered him to shoot at children waiting at aid sites, saying “The battalion commander would scream on the radio, 'Why don't you take it off, they're advancing towards us, it's dangerous,' The feeling is that we are being put in an impossible situation, and no one prepared us for it. The officers don't care about children dying, they don't care what it does to my soul, as far as they're concerned, I'm just another tool”.
This is just one of many examples of IDF soldiers saying they were ordered to fire at civilians at the Israeli “aid sites”.
Two IDF soldiers told Haaretz in a separate article :
It's a killing field, where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.
and
I was at a similar event. From what we heard, more than ten people were killed there. When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.
Similarly, multiple IDF soldiers have described similar instances of what “Yoni” described: IDF commanders creating invisible “security parameters” and shooting civilians who enter them.
One IDF soldier who spoke to Sky News said, “We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die, if they're inside, they're dangerous, you need to kill them. No matter who it is”.
Sky News reported that he said, “that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.”
The IDF soldier admitted, “It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle, … It's just poor people, civilians that don't really have too many choices”.
He said the order was given to “shoot everyone on sight who crosses the ‘imaginary line’”.
Sky News reported that “the soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza” and quoted him saying “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren't innocent”.
Referring to these “no-go zones,” the American-Israeli IDF sniper Danial Raab disgustingly bragged, “It's a question of distance. There is a line that we define. They don’t know where this line is, but we do.”
Raab bragged that he killed a 19-year-old unarmed Palestinian and then killed his brother and father when they attempted to retrieve his body, saying, “It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me, I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”
Referring to the “no go zones,” Raab said, “They’re thinking: ‘Oh, I don’t think [I’ll get shot] because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong, that’s what you have snipers for.”
The Guardian noted that:
The attacks match a pattern described by a former Israeli reservist, who told the Guardian that soldiers he served with in Gaza repeatedly shot unarmed Palestinians trying to collect bodies.
“It’s something I saw myself,” he said, adding that these killings often came after a first unarmed individual was targeted for crossing an invisible “security perimeter”.
“Once he has been declared an enemy before he has been shot, then the assumption is that everyone going to collect him is his co-conspirator,” added the former reservist, who refused to return to Gaza on the grounds that the war had become “immoral”.
While Israel and its supporters try to deny that Israel is mass murdering civilians in Gaza, it will become harder and harder to deny as more and more IDF soldiers admit to doing it.
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No member of a military institution is obliged to follow any order that he or she knows to be in contravention of international law .
I hope someone is keeping track of these incidents and the name of the IDF soldiers for the ICJ trials to come.