Israel has been creating “kill zones” in the Gaza Strip in areas where the Israeli military is operating, and anyone who enters will get shot even if they’re unarmed civilians, Haaretz reported on Sunday.
The report said anyone killed in a designated kill zone is labeled a “terrorist” even if they “never held a gun in their lives,” and they are “often civilians whose only crime was to cross an invisible line drawn by the IDF.”
One Israeli reservist who was recently in north Gaza said the “feeling we had was that there weren’t really rules of engagement there.”
Other sources in the IDF told Haaretz that Israel’s claim that 9,000 out of the 32,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are “terrorists” is not valid. “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate,” an Israeli reserve officer said.
A senior officer in Israel’s Southern Command said it was “astonishing to hear the reports after every operation regarding how many terrorists were killed.” He added that Hamas fighters don’t operate in large groups, saying, “You don’t need to be a genius to realize that you don’t have hundreds or dozens of armed men running through the streets of Khan Yunis or Jabaliya, fighting the IDF.”
Another reserve officer who spoke with Haaretz said he was tasked with telling senior IDF officers how many “terrorists” were killed in operations his men carried out and said no one “can determine with certainty who is a terrorist and who was hit after entering the combat zone of an IDF force.”
Hellbound and Down 