In a chilling exposé, Israeli soldiers have confessed to a disturbing reality: they were given unchecked authority to shoot Palestinians, including civilians, in Gaza, often without clear rules of engagement. Testimonies reveal a landscape littered with civilian corpses left to decay, homes deliberately set on fire, and a callous indifference toward human life. Shockingly, soldiers describe shooting simply out of boredom or to demonstrate power, painting a grim picture of unchecked violence and systemic abuses. The revelations raise urgent questions about military ethics and the treatment of civilians in conflict zones.
Early in June, Al Jazeera broadcast a number of unsettling recordings that showed what it called “summary executions”—three different instances of Israeli forces shooting dead multiple Palestinians who were strolling close to the Gaza Strip’s coastline route. In every instance, the Palestinians were seen to be unarmed and did not present the soldiers with any immediate threats.
Because of the harsh restrictions placed on journalists in the besieged enclave and the ongoing risk to their lives, such footage is uncommon. That being said, the experiences of six Israeli soldiers who were released from active service in Gaza in recent months and talked Local Call align with these executions, which seemed to have no security purpose. The soldiers’ accounts of being permitted to shoot Palestinians, including civilians, during the conflict were consistent with the statements made by Palestinian eyewitnesses and medical professionals as reported by +972 Magazine.
The six sources described how Israeli forces regularly murdered Palestinian civilians for no other reason than that they had entered an area designated as a “no-go zone.” All but one of the sources spoke under the condition of anonymity. The reports depict a scene where civilian corpses are scattered throughout the countryside, either to decay or to be consumed by stray animals. The army merely conceals the corpses from view before the arrival of international relief convoys, preventing “images of people in advanced stages of decay from coming out.” Additionally, two of the troops spoke of a deliberate policy of burning down Palestinian homes once they were taken over.
According to multiple accounts, the liberty to fire without limitations provided soldiers with an outlet to release tension or alleviate the monotony of their everyday schedule. “People want to experience the event [fully],” S., a reservist who served in northern Gaza, recalled. “I personally fired a few bullets for no reason, into the sea or at the sidewalk or an abandoned building. They report it as ‘normal fire,’ which is a codename for ‘I’m bored, so I shoot.’”
Despite several requests to the High Court of Justice, the Israeli military has not disclosed its open-fire policies since the 1980s. Yagil Levy, a political sociologist, claims that since the Second Intifada, “the army has not given soldiers written rules of engagement,” leaving a lot up to the commanders and infantrymen’s interpretation. Sources stated that in addition to facilitating the deaths of over 38,000 Palestinians, these permissive guidelines were partially to blame for the recent spike in the number of troops killed by friendly fire.
“There was total freedom of action,” said B., another soldier who served in the regular forces in Gaza for months, including in his battalion’s command center. “If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain — you just shoot.” When soldiers see someone approaching, “it is permissible to shoot at their center of mass [their body], not into the air,” B. continued. “It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”
B. continued by describing an incident that occurred in November in which a school near Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood—which had been a shelter for displaced Palestinians—was evacuated and three civilians were killed by soldiers. Instead of leaving to the right, where the soldiers were positioned, the army instructed the evacuees to leave to the left, toward the sea. Those who took the incorrect turn in the following commotion were fired at instantly as a shootout broke out inside the school.
“There was intelligence that Hamas wanted to create panic,” B. said. “A battle started inside; people ran away. Some fled left toward the sea, [but] some ran to the right, including children. Everyone who went to the right was killed — 15 to 20 people. There was a pile of bodies.”
‘People shot as they pleased, with all their might’
B. claimed that it was hard to tell combatants from civilians in Gaza and that Hamas members frequently “walked around without their weapons.” However, this has led to the assumption that “every man between the ages of 16 and 50 is a terrorist.”
“It is forbidden to walk around, and everyone who is outside is suspicious,” B. continued. “If we see someone in a window looking at us, he is a suspect. You shoot. The [army’s] perception is that any contact [with the population] endangers the forces, and a situation must be created in which it is forbidden to approach [the soldiers] under any circumstances. [The Palestinians] learned that when we enter, they run away.”
Soldiers carried out widespread shooting in Gaza, even in what appeared to be deserted or uninhabited areas, as part of a practice known as “demonstrating presence.” S. stated in his deposition that his comrades “shoot a lot, even for no reason— anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots.” He pointed out that this was sometimes done with the intention of “removing people [from their hiding places] or to demonstrate presence.”
M., an additional reservist who saw action in the Gaza Strip, clarified that the field commanders of the company or battalion would be the ones issuing these instructions. “When there are no [other] IDF forces [in the area] … the shooting is very unrestricted, like crazy. And not just small arms: machine guns, tanks, and mortars.”
M. testified that soldiers in the field frequently enforce the law on their own, even in the lack of directives from above. “Regular soldiers, junior officers, battalion commanders — the junior ranks who want to shoot, they get permission.”
S. recalled hearing on the radio that a Palestinian family was shot by a soldier stationed in a security compound while they were strolling around the area. “They say ‘four people’ at first. It turns into two children plus two adults, and by the end, it’s a man, a woman, and two children. You can assemble the picture yourself.”
Yuval Green, a 26-year-old Jerusalem reservist who served in the 55th Paratroopers Brigade in November and December of last year, was the only soldier interviewed for this investigation who agreed to be identified by name. Green recently signed a letter signed by 41 other reservists stating that they would not be continuing their service in Gaza after the army invaded Rafah. “There were no restrictions on ammunition,” Green told +972 and Local Call. “People were shooting just to relieve the boredom.”
Green reported an incident that occurred one night during the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah in December, when “the entire battalion opened fire like fireworks, including tracer ammunition [which emits a bright light].” It created a wild color that illuminated the sky, and because [Hannukah] is the ‘festival of lights,’ it became symbolic.”
C., another soldier who deployed in Gaza, revealed that when they heard gunshots, they radioed in to see whether there was another Israeli military unit nearby, and if not, they opened fire. “People shot as they pleased, with all their might.” However, as C. pointed out, unrestrained firing exposes soldiers to the high potential of friendly fire, which he described as “more dangerous than Hamas.” “On several instances, IDF forces fired in our direction. We did not respond; we checked the radio, and no one was injured.”
As of this writing, 324 Israeli troops had been killed in Gaza since the ground invasion began, with the army claiming that at least 28 of them were killed by friendly fire. In Green’s opinion, such instances were the “main issue” threatening soldiers’ lives. “There was quite a bit [of friendly fire]; it drove me crazy,” stated the soldier.
For Green, the rules of engagement revealed a profound disregard for the hostages’ destiny. “They told me about a practice of blowing up tunnels, and I thought to myself that if there were hostages [in them], it would kill them.” Green expressed his outrage after Israeli forces in Shuja’iyya killed three hostages holding white flags in December, mistaking them for Palestinians, but was informed, “There’s nothing we can do.” “[The commanders] sharpened procedures, saying ‘You have to pay attention and be sensitive, but we are in a combat zone, and we have to be alert.'”
B. stated that even after the incident in Shuja’iyya, which was said to be “contrary to the orders” of the military, the open-fire laws remained unchanged. “As for the hostages, we didn’t have a specific directive,” he told me. “[The army’s senior brass] stated that after the hostages were shot, they briefed [soldiers in the field]. [But] they did not speak to us.” He and the soldiers with him learned of the hostages’ shooting just two and a half weeks after they left Gaza.
“I’ve heard statements [from other soldiers] that the hostages are dead, they don’t stand a chance, they have to be abandoned,” Green noted. “[This] bothered me the most … that they kept saying, ‘We’re here for the hostages,’ but it is clear that the war harms the hostages. That was my thought then; today it turned out to be true.”
‘A building comes down, and the feeling is, “Wow, what fun”’
A., an official in the army’s Operations Directorate, said that his brigade’s operations center, which coordinates action from outside Gaza by authorizing targets and preventing friendly fire, did not get unambiguous open-fire instructions to send to soldiers on the ground. “From the moment you enter, at no point is there a briefing,” he told me. “We didn’t receive instructions from higher up to pass on to the soldiers and battalion commanders.”
He stated that there were instructions not to shoot along humanitarian routes, but otherwise, “you fill in the blanks, in the absence of any other directive.” This is the approach: ‘If it is forbidden there, then it is permitted here.’”
A. stated that shooting at “hospitals, clinics, schools, religious institutions, [and] buildings of international organizations” necessitated additional authorization. But in practice, “I can count on one hand the cases where we were told not to shoot. Even with sensitive things like schools, [approval] feels like only a formality.”
In general, A. added, “The spirit in the operations room was ‘Shoot first, ask questions later.'” That was the consensus … No one will shed a tear if we flatten a house when there was no need, or if we shoot someone who we didn’t have to.”
A. stated that he was aware of occasions in which Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian people who entered their area of operation, which is consistent with a Haaretz investigation into “kill zones” in Gaza’s army-occupied areas. “This is the default.” No civilians are supposed to be in the area, that’s the perspective. We spotted someone in a window, so they fired and killed him.” A. went on to say that it was often unclear from the reports whether soldiers had shot militants or unarmed civilians, and “many times, it sounded like someone was caught up in a situation, and we opened fire.”
However, due to the ambiguity surrounding the identities of the dead, A. believed that military statistics on the number of Hamas militants killed could not be verified. “The feeling in the war room, and this is a softened version, was that every person we killed, we counted him as a terrorist,” he told the jury.
“The aim was to count how many [terrorists] we killed today,” A. continued. “Every [soldier] wants to show that he’s the big guy. The perception was that all the men were terrorists. Sometimes a commander would suddenly ask for numbers, and then the officer of the division would run from brigade to brigade going through the list in the military’s computer system and count.”
A.’s account is consistent with a recent revelation from Israeli news outlet Mako regarding a drone strike by one brigade that killed Palestinians in another brigade’s area of operation. Officers from both brigades conferred on who should register the assassinations. “What difference does it make?” “Register it for both of us,” one of them advised the other, according to the publication.
‘A horrific smell of death’
Multiple soldiers testified that Israel’s permissive shooting policy has allowed them to kill Palestinian civilians even when they had been identified as such beforehand. D., a reserve, stated that his brigade was stationed near two “humanitarian” travel lanes, one for aid organizations and one for civilians escaping from the north to the south of the Strip. Within his brigade’s operational area, they implemented a “red line, green line” policy, which defined zones where civilians were not permitted to enter.
According to D., relief organizations were allowed to enter these zones with prior coordination (our interview took place before a series of Israeli precision attacks murdered seven World Central Kitchen employees), but Palestinians were not. “Anyone who crossed into the green area would become a potential target,” D. explained, stating that these zones were clearly marked for people. “If they cross the red line, you report it on the radio and you don’t need to wait for permission, you can shoot.”
However, D. stated that locals frequently entered areas where relief convoys passed through in search of scraps that could fall off the trucks; despite this, the policy was to shoot anyone who attempted to approach. “The civilians are clearly refugees, they are desperate, they have nothing,” he replied. However, in the early months of the war, “every day there were two or three incidents with innocent people or [people] who were suspected of being sent by Hamas as spotters,” whom troops in his brigade killed.
According to the soldiers, corpses of Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing were still spread over highways and open terrain throughout Gaza. “The whole area was full of bodies,” stated S., a reserve officer. “There are also dogs, cows, and horses that survived the bombings and have nowhere to go. We can’t feed them, and we don’t want them to get too close either. So, you occasionally see dogs walking around with rotting body parts. There is a horrific smell of death.”
However, before the humanitarian convoys arrived, S. reported that the dead were removed. “A D-9 [Caterpillar bulldozer] goes down, with a tank, and clears the area of corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the convoys don’t see it — [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out,” he went onto say.
“I saw a lot of [Palestinian] civilians – families, women, children,” S. continued. “There are more fatalities than are reported. We were in a small area. Every day, at least one or two [civilians] are killed [because] they walked in a no-go area. I don’t know who is a terrorist and who is not, but most of them did not carry weapons.”
Green stated that when he arrived in Khan Younis at the end of December, he noticed “some indistinct mass outside a house.” We realized it was a body; we saw a leg. At night, cats ate it. “Then someone came and moved it.”
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‘Before you leave, you burn down the house’
Two of the troops interviewed also revealed how Israeli forces have become accustomed to burning Palestinian homes, as Haaretz first documented in full in January. Green personally experienced two such situations — the first as a result of a soldier’s initiative, and the second as a result of commanders’ orders — and his unhappiness with this policy contributed to his decision to decline further military duty.
When soldiers occupied homes, he said that the policy was “if you move, you have to burn down the house.” However, for Green, this made no sense: under “no scenario” could the midst of the refugee camp be part of any Israeli security zone that would justify such damage. “We are in these houses not because they belong to Hamas operatives, but because they serve us operationally,” he claimed. “It is a house of two or three families — to destroy it means they will be homeless.
“I asked the company commander, who said that no military equipment [could be] left behind and that we did not want the enemy to see our fighting methods,” Green continued. “I said I would do a search [to make sure] there was no [evidence of] combat methods left behind. [The company commander] gave me explanations from the world of revenge. He said they were burning them because there were no D-9s or IEDs from an engineering corp [that could destroy the house by other means]. He received an order and it didn’t bother him.”
“Before you leave, you burn down the house — every house,” B. reiterated. “This is backed up at the battalion commander level. It’s so that [Palestinians] won’t be able to return, and if we left behind any ammunition or food, the terrorists won’t be able to use it.”
Before departing, soldiers would stack beds, furniture, and blankets, and “with some fuel or gas cylinders,” B. said, “the house burns down easily, it’s like a furnace.” At the start of the ground invasion, his company would take over houses for a few days before moving on; according to B., they “burned hundreds of houses. On some occasions, soldiers set fire to a floor, forcing other soldiers on a higher floor to run through the flames on the stairs or choke on fumes.
Green described the harm the military has caused in Gaza as “unimaginable.” At the start of the battle, he described, they were marching between residences 50 meters apart, and many soldiers “treated the houses [like] a souvenir shop,” plundering everything their owners hadn’t managed to take with them.
“In the end, you die of boredom, [after] days of waiting there,” Green said. “You draw on the walls, rude things. Playing with clothes, finding passport photos they left, hanging a picture of someone because it’s funny. We used everything we found: mattresses, food, one found a NIS 100 bill [around $27] and took it.”
“We destroyed everything we wanted to,” Green testified. “This is not out of a desire to destroy, but out of total indifference to everything that belongs to [Palestinians]. Every day, a D-9 demolishes houses. I haven’t taken before-and-after photos, but I’ll never forget how a neighborhood that was really beautiful … is reduced to sand.”
The IDF Spokesperson responded with the following statement: “Open-fire instructions were given to all IDF soldiers fighting in the Gaza Strip and on the borders upon entering combat. These instructions reflect the international law to which the IDF is bound. The open-fire instructions are regularly reviewed and updated in light of the changing operational and intelligence situation, and approved by the most senior officials in the IDF.
“The open-fire instructions provide a relevant response to all operational situations, and the possibility in any case of risk to our forces full operational freedom of action to remove threats. This, while giving tools to the forces to deal with complex situations in the presence of a civilian population, and while emphasizing the reduction of harm to people who are not identified as enemies or who do not pose a threat to their lives. Generic directives regarding the open-fire instructions such as those described in the query are unknown and to the extent that they were given, they are in conflict with the army’s orders.
“The IDF investigates its activities and draws lessons from operational events, including the tragic event of the accidental killing of the late Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samer Talalka. Lessons learned from the investigation of the incident were transferred to the fighting forces in the field in order to prevent a repeat of this type of incident in the future.
“As part of the destruction of Hamas’ military capabilities, an operational need arises, among other things, to destroy or attack buildings where the terrorist organization places combat infrastructure. This also includes buildings that Hamas regularly converted for fighting. Meanwhile, Hamas makes systematic military use of public buildings that are supposed to be used for civilian purposes. The army’s orders regulate the approval process, so that damage to sensitive sites must be approved by senior commanders who take into account the impact of the damage to the structure on the civilian population, and this in the face of the military need to attack or demolish the structure. The decision-making of these senior commanders is done in an orderly and balanced manner.
“The burning of buildings that are not necessary for operational purposes is against the orders of the army and the values of the IDF.
“In the framework of the fighting and subject to the orders of the army, it is possible to use the enemy property for essential military purposes, as well as take the property of the terrorist organizations subject to orders as spoils of war. At the same time, taking property for private purposes constitutes looting and is prohibited according to the Law of Military Jurisdiction. Incidents in which forces acted not in accordance with orders and the law will be investigated.”
Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that in a gripping letter published by the British medical journal Lancet on July 5, three public health experts revealed that the civilian death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza could be up to 15 times higher than the official count.
