The Israeli army has “severely weakened” its protocols to protect civilians during military operations since the start of the war in Gaza, allowing mid-ranking officers to order indiscriminate strikes from the air force, according to a New York Times (NYT) investigation.
According to NYT, officers were granted the authority right after 7 October to risk the killing of up to 20 civilians in each airstrike. The order had “no precedent” in Israel’s military history.
“Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost,” NYT said, adding that under this order, “the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors.”
Previously, Israeli strikes were approved only after officers found that no civilians would be hurt. In some cases, the military had granted them the leeway of risking up to five civilian deaths. Nonetheless, this did not stop brutally deadly strikes against civilians in previous conflicts.
An anonymous military officer told NYT that Israel changed its protocol because it believed it was existentially threatened.
“Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior US military officials about these failings,” according to the investigation.
NYT reviewed dozens of army records and conducted interviews with over 100 Israeli soldiers and officials, including those who had a hand in vetting targets for airstrikes and attacks.
As part of this loosening of protocol, Tel Aviv greatly expanded its set of targets for preemptive strikes and the number of civilians it could risk killing. As a result, nearly 30,000 munitions were fired into the besieged Gaza Strip in the first seven weeks – more than the next eight months of the war combined, NYT said.
“On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants – crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary western military,” it added.
This policy has been evident throughout the course of the war in Gaza. One attack in the northern strip in October this year resulted in the killing of at least 100 Palestinians.
In early June, Israel launched an indiscriminate rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza to retrieve Noa Argamani and three other Israeli captives. Nearly 300 Palestinians were massacred in the process.
“The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale,” the NYT investigation revealed.
Insufficient models to assess the risk of civilian loss were used repeatedly. In the first two months of the war, 15,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel.
Hellbound and Down 