Tag: collateral damage

IDF Veterans: Post-10/7 Rules Allowed Hundreds of Civilian Deaths to Kill Single Hamas Member

Former Israeli military and intelligence personnel affirmed that rules for targeting confirmed and alleged Hamas members in Gaza were dramatically loosened after the October 7, 2023 attack, allowing strikes expected to kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians to target even low-ranking members of the Palestinian resistance group, according to a report published Monday.

In an article published by Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Yaniv Kubovich gathered testimonies from former Israel Defense Forces intelligence personnel that add to the body of evidence from Israeli whistleblowers, military officials, and investigative journalists documenting how the IDF expanded its targeting practices during its devastating US-backed annihilation of Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in the coastal exclave over the past three years.

One change described by some of those interviewed by Kubovich was “the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.”

“People arrived at military intelligence who weren’t from the unit, reservists who’d never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places,” said one veteran, identified as “A.”

“They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them,” A added. “Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry.”

Another veteran, “D,” who was assigned to a strike cell – units that coordinate drone and other aerial attacks – said: “Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That’s how far it went.”

Kubovich wrote that “a recurring theme in the accounts is the gap between a target’s importance, the scale of the strike and the civilian toll deemed acceptable.”

For example, on October 31, 2023, IDF warplanes dropped 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs supplied by the United States on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in order to kill one Hamas commander, Ibrahmi Biari.

“We knew Biari was underground, beneath several large buildings, but we couldn’t pinpoint which building he was under,” said D. “So they chose several buildings that were still occupied and decided to bring down all the buildings above the tunnel he was in. We didn’t initiate an evacuation because it was important to kill him before he could get away.”

A, who was also involved in the mission, said the decision to bomb the buildings was referred to the IDF chief of staff for approval, since intelligence officials estimated that there would be hundreds of civilian casualties. The IDF calculated that roughly 100 people would be killed or wounded in the proposed attack.

“We couldn’t get any more intelligence to pinpoint his exact location,” said veteran D. “They told us, ‘He’s killing soldiers right now. We have to strike him,’ out of concern for the troops on the ground, and in the end the strike was approved. They really wanted to kill this guy.”

Hamas said that 400 people were killed or wounded in the attack.

“Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren’t 100% accurate,” veteran A told Kubovich. “As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn’t even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on.”

The UK-based civilian casualty monitor Airwars said that at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, were killed in the attack, which wiped out whole families.

“You can’t authorize the potential killing of 300 civilians for a battalion commander, or the killing of 20 civilians for every Hamas truck driver, and still tell the public we did everything we could to avoid harming innocent people,” Nadav Weiman, executive director of the IDF veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, told Kubovich.

Referring to the Jabalia massacre, D said: “I can’t say this particular strike is what really messes with my head. What’s much harder for me is the system of strike after strike after strike, with collateral damage running into dozens of people, sometimes hundreds. Being part of a system like that bothers me more than taking part in any particular strike.”

The veterans’ accounts raise further questions about Israel’s repeated assertions that its military operations have been conducted in accordance with international humanitarian law, which requires parties in armed conflicts to distinguish between civilians and combatants and prohibits attacks expected to cause excessive civilian harm relative to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage.

Those claims stand in stark contrast with statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, who began calling for the genocidal destruction of Gaza and its 2.2 million people in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant – his former defense minister who ordered the “complete siege” of Gaza, explaining that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly” – are currently fugitives from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where they are wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague, is currently conducting a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by more than 15 nations. While a ruling in the case isn’t expected until at least 2029, a United Nations commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and other experts – including many Israeli and international Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others – have already concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The new Haaretz investigation adds to the body of reporting on Israel’s loosened rules of engagement and their disastrous implications for Gaza civilians, including a December 2024 New York Times exposé involving interviews with over 100 IDF soldiers and veterans, Israeli officials, dozens of airstrike victims, and experts on the law and conduct of war.

Kubovich’s revelations also come as the documentary NAZA, directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, brings testimony from Israeli military and intelligence insiders to international audiences. The film features 24 anonymized insiders describing the surveillance, artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, and military procedures used during the assault on Gaza.

IDF veteran testimonies are consistent with earlier investigations into the IDF’s use of artificial intelligence to generate targets at extraordinary speed, often with limited human scrutiny.

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Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

On the morning of Saturday, February 28, people across Iran began their day like any other. It was one week into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and people were preparing for their work and school week. Parents hustled their children out the door for school as the notorious morning traffic jams filled the streets of Tehran and other cities.

In the southern Iranian city of Minab, preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem was getting ready to leave the house. “Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7 o’clock—because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school,” she recalled. “I got Yassin ready and headed to school. Yassin went to the boys’ school and I stayed at preschool, in my own class.”

It was Salem’s seventh year as a teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh, a well-respected, private school. “The upper floor was for girls and the downstairs was for boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. The preschool was in the same building,” she said. “There were students there from all walks of life—children from working class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.”

Among the students at the school was 6-year-old Fatemeh Yazdanpanah from the fishing village of Gurzang, about eight miles from Minab. The village is well known for its daily fish market—a bustling, strategic hub where fishermen trade their catches from both the Minab River and the Persian Gulf. There is a girls’ school in Gurzang, but Fatemeh’s father, Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, saw gifts for poetry in his daughter and he wanted to secure for her the best education he could find.

“Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. I am a poet myself. When I would write poetry, edit poetry, I would repeat the poem. After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatemeh would immediately memorize it. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word,” recalled Yaghoub, who teaches Persian literature. “I wanted to find a school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly, you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future,” he said. “Thank God,” he recalled thinking, “I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.”

That morning, Yaghoub kissed Fatemeh goodbye before walking to the local school in Gurzang where he taught.

Iranians had gone to bed the night before with the news that negotiations between government officials and the Trump administration aimed at averting war were proceeding smoothly and a new round of technical talks would soon be held in Vienna. The foreign minister of Oman—the longtime mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations—was in Washington, where, after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, he announced that recent negotiations between the two sides had “yielded substantial, momentous, and unparalleled progress” that could pave the way for “an honorable agreement” to halt the U.S. drive to war.

“We were very optimistic about the negotiations that were taking place,” said Pouria Askari, a prominent Iranian international law expert, who recalled being stuck in his car that morning on his commute to the university where he lectures. “We were not expecting the beginning of the war.”

At Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, the little girls gathered that morning in the prayer hall in observance of the day when Shia Muslims across the world commemorate the passing of Umm al-Banin, the wife of Imam Ali and the mother of four martyrs who died at the battle of Karbala in the year 680.

After the prayers, Salem laid out for her students a breakfast sofreh, a traditional Iranian fabric placed on the floor to serve meals. The small girls of the preschool had not yet reached the age of fasting during Ramadan. They did some lessons and then went out to the playground for recess. It was around 9:30 a.m. when Salem received word that the U.S. and Israel had begun attacking Iran.

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Double Standards of Diplomacy

On May 22, Russia accused Ukraine of deadly attack on student dormitory in the Luhansk region. More than 20 people were killed and about 40 were injured, many of them young women.

All of this is painfully reminiscent of the deadly US missile attack on a school in Minab, Iran, in February 2026. The strike killed more than 150 civilians, the vast majority of whom were children.

The most terrible thing is that, both then and now, the countries responsible for the attacks hid behind a wall of disinformation. Its politicians shift the blame, make numerous contradictory statements and accuse their victims of even greater crimes. It’s not surprising as all of these are favourite propaganda tactics used to distract public attention.

It’s pertinent to note, that modern satellite technology makes it possible to track the direction of attack, identify those responsible, and conduct a prompt investigation, especially when it comes to potential harm to children. However, while the European political machine immediately constructed a discourse about US involvement in the case of the strike on Minab School, at the emergency UN Security Council meeting on the attack on Starobilsk, European diplomats insisted that Ukraine’s involvement could not be verified or confirmed due to a lack of access to the site of the tragedy. It’s as if Europe ever had access to the site of the tragedy in Minab!

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Russian Drone Strikes Romanian Apartment Building During Attack On Ukrainian Port City Of Izmail Across Danube River

A Russian drone struck an apartment building in Galați, Romania, injuring two people. The drone hit the roof of a residential building near the Ukrainian border. At the same time, Russia was attacking the nearby Ukrainian port city of Izmail across the Danube River.

The Romanian Ministry of Defense says the Russian drone was not shot down because doing so could have posed a greater risk to civilians and infrastructure.

Officials said it was initially unclear whether the drone carried explosives or was a decoy, and concluded after reviewing the incident that there was no safe opportunity to intercept it. The Romanian Ministry of Defense said the Russian drone was tracked for only four minutes, leaving insufficient time for a safe interception, reported Clash Report.

The European Union seemed to relish the incident.

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The U.S. Has Killed More Than 190 People in Boat Strikes. We’re Tracking Them All.

Since September, the Trump administration has conducted an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing scores of civilians. The Intercept is chronicling all publicly declared U.S. attacks and providing a tracker with information on each strike.

The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Pentagon has repeatedly withheld information on the attacks from members of Congress and the American public, despite mounting questions from lawmakers about the legality of these deadly strikes.

So The Intercept is publishing a strike tracker documenting America’s newest war. The locations and casualty figures are drawn from information provided by U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Office of the Secretary of War, and social media posts by Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

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Wildlife & Landmines: The Lasting Legacy of Passive Weapons

Horrifically deadly and widely implemented on a global scale, landmines continue to speckle the landscape of current and past battlefields. And while effective in a passive sense, the hardware planted beneath the soil persists long after the inevitable conclusion of war. Innocents and combatants who survive the barrage of bullets and bombs are left with a sadistic game of whack-a-mole – including the wild and domesticated animals.

Rudimentary explosives first appeared in China as early as the Song Dynasty. Continued development eventually gave rise to the modern pressure-activated landmine, which appeared on the battlefields of the American Civil War. Seen as a cowardly method of waging war at the time, the improvised explosive devices continued to gain popularity.

Since the Vietnam War, many variants of mines have been concocted and deployed in the field. This includes the proliferation of anti-personnel and anti-vehicle explosives. For the purposes of this piece, we will focus on anti-personnel mines due to their sensitivity and tendency to detonate with less pressure applied.

​The production, transfer, and use of anti-personnel landmines have been greatly reduced, notably following the signing of the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which specifically addresses the use of mines, foreign and domestic. Many nations agreed to the treaty, though it excludes the signatures of China, Russia, and the U.S.

​However, mines continue to be used in modern theaters of war, and the historic placement of mines predates 1997, meaning an unknown number of AP mines patiently wait across the planet for a specific amount of pressure to be applied. And these explosives do not discriminate – hoof or foot, they are ready to go.

​Post-conflict wildlife interactions with landmines have largely remained unstudied, but specific negative interactions have been documented. Famously, in the case of “Mosha,” the Thai elephant that stepped on a mine following their use during a conflict between Myanmar and Thailand. The mine blew half of her front leg off while walking through the jungle on the border of the two nations. Mosha found refuge at a Thai sanctuary, where a prosthetic leg was built for her.

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Pentagon quietly shut legally required program to prevent civilian deaths by military, watchdog finds

The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog.

A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).

Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of making deep cuts to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war.

While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnel had been lost or reassigned.

“As a result, the DoW may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy,” the report read. “A policy required by federal law.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

The program was created by Lloyd Austin, then defense secretary, in January 2022, under Joe Biden, following years of deadly US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Airwars, a civilian harm monitor, estimated that US drone and airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – in the 20 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief, has recently come under fire over deadly attacks on Iran, including a US strike in Minab that killed at least 175 people, a majority of them children, at an all-girls school.

Limiting casualties has not been a top priority under Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War, rebranded on his watch from Department of Defense last September. When pressed on civilian casualties in Iran, he has pivoted to blame the country’s regime for placing rocket launchers in civilian areas, and also claimed no nation in history had taken more precautions than the US to avoid civilian deaths.

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The Bloody Awful Waste of War

Iran’s forensics chief said nearly 3,400 people had been killed in the country since U.S.-Israeli strikes began Feb. 28. Almost 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, 32 have been killed in Gulf states, and 23 have died in Israel. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and two more died of noncombat causes.

I happen to believe Iranian lives are as valuable and precious as American lives. What gives the U.S. and Israeli governments the right to inflict such disproportionate casualties on Iran, on Lebanon, on Gaza? (I know: might makes right.) If you include the Palestinians, more than 100,000 people, and probably closer to 200,000, have been killed in the latest Israeli/U.S. wars, with the United States providing most of the deadly weaponry.

Speaking of weaponry, the liberal New York Times had an article last week lamenting the heavy expenditure of costly precision weaponry (like Tomahawk cruise missiles) by the U.S. since the beginning of the Iran War. Nowhere in the article was there a complaint about the death toll, nor was there much of a complaint about the cost. No – what the liberal New York Times was concerned about was how quickly the U.S. could replenish its stockpile of weaponry so it could be prepared for a future war against peer threats like China and Russia.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the US stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.

The Iran war has significantly drained much of the US military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries such as Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.

Again, if you read the article, nothing is said about morality. Nothing is said about death and dying and the bloody awfulness of war. The article simply says the U.S. has used a lot of very expensive missiles that we MUST replace if we’re to be prepared to wage more wars in the near future.

There’s not even a hint here that maybe America could be at peace – even in the most distant future. Apparently, America must always remain locked and loaded for a war with China, or Russia, or some other country and combination of countries, even as all this is couched as defending the homeland.

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How Many People Have the US and Israel Killed in Iran?

After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the US and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have failed to end Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon or to negotiate international access to the Strait of Hormuz, now under Iran’s control.

The world must use this pause in the war to push for a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement, but we must also start to assess the true human cost of the war–something the US is always reluctant to do in its wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. While we always know the exact number of Americans killed in these wars, we never have an accurate tally of how many people we have killed–not only because it is often hard to get the data, but also because the US systematically downplays civilian casualties and treats their lives as less valuable.

We saw this from the very first day of this war. The US carried out a double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing 175, mostly young girls. Trump’s response was to blame Iran: “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said, and later suggested that Iran might have gotten hold of a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own people.

Minab is not an isolated case – it is a window into a much broader failure by the US government and media, as well as the Iranian government and international media, to honestly reveal the human toll of this 40-day war.

The Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures have not been updated in any detail since March 29, when it put Iranian casualties at 2,076 killed and 26,500 wounded, and there is an obvious mismatch between these two numbers. The ratio between them is much higher than in other wars, or even when compared with the Israeli assault on Lebanon in this war, where Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported 1,830 people killed and 4.927 wounded by April 10, a ratio of 2.7 to 1 between the wounded and the dead.

For further comparison, UN figures for civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine are 15,172 and 41,378 wounded, which is also a ratio of 2.7 to 1. These are certainly under-estimates, like civilian casualty counts in every war, but the ratio between deaths and injuries is realistic, unlike that in Tehran’s casualty figures.

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U.S. Is Scattering Landmines From Air Near Iranian Missile Bases

The United States military is scattering landmines from the air near Iranian missile bases to hunt launchers, and Iranian media has already reported civilian casualties.

The accusations first came on March 26 from Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency, which shared photos of what appear to be BLU-91/B scatterable anti-tank landmines.

“These explosive packages resemble ready-made canned food, are somewhat larger than tuna cans, and contain explosives that detonate after being opened, causing casualties,” Tasnim wrote on Telegram. “These packages have been dropped in the skies over the southern suburbs of Shiraz, especially in the village of Kafari, and unfortunately have caused the martyrdom of several people in these areas.”

Canadian lawyer and activist Dimitri Lascaris — who is currently in Shiraz in the southwestern Iranian province of Fars — shared footage showing the remains of similar landmines that exploded right between homes in Kafari, and at least three others some two kilometers away from the entrance to what is reported to be Shiraz South Missile Base, an Iranian “missile city.”

The landmines were likely scattered there to hit any launcher leaving the base, which had been already bombarded by the U.S.

This is the first time such a weapon has been used against Iran since the start of the American-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic around a month ago.

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