Israeli soldiers recount indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza

Israeli soldiers tell a documentary of opening fire unprovoked and arbitrary designations of who was an enemy during the Gaza genocide.

In the documentary, scheduled to be broadcast in the UK on ITV on Monday, Israeli soldiers described the regime forces' genocidal war on Gaza as a lawless, free-for-all situation where there were no obligations to rules, norms, and legal constraints.

According to soldiers' testimony in the documentary, the Palestinian people in Gaza were killed at the whim of individual Israeli officers.

“If you want to shoot without restraint, you can,” Daniel, the commander of an Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) tank unit, confesses inside the documentary titled, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War.

In the documentary, some soldiers chose to remain anonymous while others spoke on the record.

However, they unanimously pointed to the brutal Israeli forces' nonexistent military code of conduct concerning civilians during the atrocities committed by the Tel Aviv regime forces in the Gaza genocide.

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In it, the Israeli forces' routine use of human shields is confirmed by the soldiers who agreed to reveal the truth, contradicting Tel Aviv's official denials.

They gave details of Israeli forces opening fire unprovoked on Palestinian people racing to reach food handouts at the militarized distribution points set up by the US- and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

“In basic training for the army, we all chanted ‘means, intent and ability’,” Capt Yotam Vilk, an armored corps officer, says in reference to the official IOF training guidelines stipulating that a soldier can fire only if the target has the means, shows intent, and can cause harm.

“There’s no such thing as ‘means, intent and ability’ in Gaza,” Vilk says. “No soldier ever mentions ‘means, intent, and ability’. It’s just a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed. A man aged between 20 and 40.”

“Life and death aren’t determined by procedures or opening fire regulations. It’s the conscience of the commander on the ground that decides,” revealed another soldier, referred to in the documentary as Eli.

Eli added, “If they’re walking too fast, they’re suspicious. If they’re walking too slow, they’re suspicious. They’re plotting something. If three men are walking and one of them lags behind, it’s a two-to-one infantry formation – it’s a military formation.”

In the documentary, he describes a situation in which a senior officer ordered a tank to demolish a building in an area designated as safe for civilians.

“A man was standing on the roof, hanging laundry, and the officer decided that he was a spotter. He’s not a spotter. He’s hanging his laundry. You can see that he’s hanging laundry.”

“And the tank fired a shell. The building half collapsed. And the result was many dead and wounded,” Eli confesses in the documentary.

According to a Guardian analysis in August based on the IOF’s intelligence data, 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians, showing a historic high for noncombatant deaths in contemporary wars.

Israeli military officials deny that a large majority of the more than 69,000, mostly Palestinian women and children, killed in Gaza since the genocidal war started in October 2023 were civilians.

In the documentary, some of the soldiers admit they were under the influence of the language used by Israeli politicians and religious leaders, leading them to believe that following the Hamas retaliatory operation, every Palestinian had become a legitimate target.

A UN commission concluded in September that the Israeli regime forces had committed a heinous genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

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'All that’s left is shame'

Sam, who worked at food distribution sites run by the GHF, testifies in the documentary that he witnessed the Israeli forces killing the defenseless Palestinian people in Gaza.

He describes the summary execution of Palestinians in one incident at one of the GHF distribution sites, where two young men were running in the general rush to get food aid when they were killed.

“You could just see two soldiers run after them. They drop onto their knees, and they just take two shots, and you could just see … two heads snap backwards and just drop,” Sam says.

He recounts another incident in which an IOF tank in the vicinity of one of the distribution sites destroys “a normal car … just four normal people sat inside it”.

At least 2,500 Palestinian civilians were killed while seeking food aid in the vicinity of GHF sites, according to UN estimates.

One of the officers in the Israeli regime forces says in an interview recorded on the documentary that the genocidal war on Gaza broke his spirit. 

“All that’s left is shame,” he admits.

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