Israeli war crimes in Gaza aired in UK documentary

About 30 minutes into a new documentary featuring testimonies of Israeli soldiers about being deployed to Gaza, a soldier reflects on the enclave after months of sustained Israeli war on it: “Terrible heat. Sand. Stench. And dogs wandering around in packs. They eat dead bodies … It’s horrifying … It’s a kind of zombie apocalypse. No trees. No bushes. No roads. There’s nothing.”

The documentary, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, shown on UK network ITV on Monday, featured Israeli soldiers, some speaking of shame at having participated in what they concede is a genocide, others unflinchingly detailing the nature of that war.

Included are the details of a firing policy that takes little to no account of cause, the wholesale destruction of property and homes, the systematic use of human shields, drone warfare and indiscriminate killing tied to a weaponised system of aid.

“People don’t think about it,” one participant, credited as Eli, tells the camera. “Because if you do think about it, you’ll want to kill yourself.

“When you take a moment to try and think about it, you want to scream,” he says, his face blacked out to obscure his identity.

Free fire

Through its two years of genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 69,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands more. International agencies say it will be decades before the enclave recovers, if it ever does.

Israel’s own intelligence suggests that 83 percent of those it has killed in Gaza were civilians.

“‘There are no civilians in Gaza,’ you hear it all the time,” Daniel, a commander with an Israeli tank unit, said. Another contributor, Major Neta Caspin, described a conversation with her brigade’s rabbi.

“[He] sat down next to me and spent half an hour explaining why we must be just like they [Hamas] were on 7 October 2023. That we must take revenge on all of them, including civilians … that this is the only way,” she said.

Hamas’s armed wing led an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, during which 1,139 people died and about 250 were taken captive.

Armoured Corps Captain Yotam Vilk described the suspension of all rules for firing on civilians – that they must have the means, intention and ability to pose a threat to Israeli soldiers.

“There’s no such thing as means, intent and ability in Gaza,” Vilk explained. “It’s just ‘a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed’,” he said, describing the overcrowded and chaotic interior of Gaza, where the precise limits on movement were known predominantly to Israeli troops alone.

“Anyone who crosses the line is automatically incriminated and can be put to death,” Vilk added.

Mosquitoes

Throughout its war, Israel has denied the growing number of accusations of war crimes from multiple bodies, claiming that it has investigated any credible allegations.

However, in August, a report by UK monitor Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) showed that, of the limited investigations into accusations of war crimes by military investigators, including the killing of 15 paramedics in April, few have resulted in any action.

Responding to Israeli denials that it did not use human shields, tank commander Daniel was clear that the army “is lying”.

“It’s called the ‘mosquito protocol’,” he said of the routine practice of seizing Palestinian civilians, strapping an iPhone to them and using them to explore suspected Hamas holdouts remotely.

“Every company has its own ‘mosquito’,” he said, referring to captured Palestinians as insects. “That’s three Palestinians per battalion, nine to 12 per brigade, then dozens, if not hundreds, per division.”

Some soldiers in his unit decided to release two teenage human shields they had captured out of concern they were breaking international law, Daniel recalled, adding that a senior officer said at the time: “Soldiers don’t need to know about international law, just the ‘[Israeli military] spirit’.”

Destruction

Through its two years of war on Gaza, Israel has destroyed or damaged 92 percent of its housing stock and displaced at least 1.9 million people, according to the UN, many multiple times.

All the institutions, from universities to hospitals, that make up a society have been targeted for destruction. Social media videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers show an orgy of violence, with Palestinian homes and belongings ransacked and held up for ridicule by soldiers.

“You feel that every day could be your last and that you can do anything,” one conscript who only gave his name as “Yaakov” said. “Not out of revenge, but just because you can.”

Other participants talked of routinely burning Palestinian homes or celebrated their bulldozing.

Speaking from the illegal Israeli settlement of Beit El in the occupied West Bank, rabbinical judge Avraham Zarbiv – the subject of a war crimes complaint to the International Criminal Court – boasted of driving a bulldozer to destroy people’s homes and belongings during his time in Gaza.

“I post a lot of videos,” he says, before cutting to one showing him driving a bulldozer, destroying homes in clear contravention of international law.

“Until the end, until victory, until settlement. We will not give up until this village is wiped out,” he says in the video, telling the camera how his video “lift[s] soldiers’ spirits”.

Continuing his comments, Zarbiv claimed credit for pioneering the tactic of destroying entire homes that is now commonplace.

“We changed the conduct of an entire army,” he bragged. “Rafah is flattened. Jabalia is flattened. Beit Hanoon is flattened. Shujayea is flattened. And Khan Younis is flattened.”

Shame

Cheered on by a media and a public that a film participant, platoon sergeant Yaakov, described as neither knowing nor wanting to know what was happening in Gaza, another soldier described the experience of sitting in a basement, half-dressed, killing Palestinians remotely via drone.

Any life that was not Israeli meant little, Eli said, with Yaakov separately describing how soldiers at the private US-Israeli aid programme, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), would “open fire, even if they don’t see a concrete threat”.

Some of the participants acknowledged they had taken part in genocide; others accepted the pain they caused.

“All mosques, almost all hospitals, almost all universities, every cultural institution has been destroyed,” Yaakov told the camera.

“You’ve destroyed a society. You don’t have to kill them one by one to destroy every sign of the society that once existed there.

“I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”