Firsthand testimony by admittedly inexperienced Israeli tank operators reveals orders to open fire upon Israeli communities when Palestinian militants breached the fences encircling Gaza on October 7.
A glowing profile of an all-female tank company by Israel’s N12 News network contains admissions by the 20-year-old captain — identified only as ‘Karni’ — that she was ordered by a “panicked” soldier to open fire on homes in the Holit kibbutz whether they contained civilians or not.
Ten Israelis were killed in Holit on October 7; no children were among the dead.
“The soldier points and tells me, “shoot there — the terrorists are there,”” the captain recounts in the newly-released footage, noting that when she asked “are there civilians there?,” her compatriot simply replied, “I don’t know,” and ordered her to “just shoot” a tank round into the buildings anyway.
Ultimately, she recalled, “I decided not to shoot” as “this is an Israeli community.” Instead, she said, “I fired with my machine gun at a house.”
While the Israeli government and its army of international propagandists have blamed Hamas alone for a range of grisly killings on October 7, along with unsubstantiated claims of rape, torture and beheading babies, the comments in N12’s report add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that shelling by Israeli tanks was responsible for many of the casualties incurred in Israeli kibbutzim. According to the soldiers interviewed, others killed by the tank company in question include supposed Palestinian militants whom they say they crushed to death with their vehicle.
“My driver spots two terrorists on the road and reports it,” the captain tells her N12 interviewer. When “I tell her to run them over, she simply runs over the terrorists and moves on,” she explains blithely.
The female tank company appears to have been trained on the least advanced vehicles in Israel’s arsenal, and given only border defense duties. In the chaos of the Hamas assault on October 7, they were forced into more advanced vehicles equipped with a remote controlled weapons system (RCWS).
In the N12 report, Brigadier General Raviv Mahmia admitted that taking on a band of militants in Kibbutz Holit was a “very complex” task for which the young tankers were “in many ways…not trained to fight.”
“They fired in Israeli communities, driving on plain roads,” he noted.
Reporting by The Grayzone has revealed that many of the bodies found burned beyond recognition inside southern Israel’s so-called Gaza envelope were likely victims of the Israeli military – which recent admissions seem to confirm.
Hellbound and Down 