Soon after the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing aid to war-torn Gaza in May, disturbing reports emerged of Israeli soldiers killing unarmed Palestinians approaching aid points for food.
As the world's eyes turned from Gaza to Israel attack on Iran, the pace
of these reported killings increased -- with multiple incidents
claiming more than 50 lives each. Now, Israel's oldest daily newspaper has dropped a bombshell report, with Israeli soldiers and officers confirming the routine use of deadly force on unarmed Palestinians as a barbaric form of crowd control -- with the practice carried out under orders from superior officers.
Gaza's Hamas-run health authority says 529 Palestinians have been killed at humanitarian aid sites
or while waiting for food trucks just since late May, when the Gaza
Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) took on the task of distributing food in
the strip. While Israel's defenders invariably discredit Gaza casualty
counts,
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bombshell-idf-soldiers-confirm-lethal-force-used-unarmed-crowds-gaza-aid-sites
According to the enlisted soldiers and officers who spoke to Haaretz,
a variety of deadly weapons have been routinely used as a means of
communicating whether Palestinians have permission to approach the aid
stations.
The distribution centers typically open
for just one hour each morning. According to officers and soldiers who
served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them.
Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night – ahead of the
opening – it's possible that some civilians couldn't see the boundaries
of the designated area. -- Haaretz
These soldiers are not talking about rifles being fired in the air. As one of them tells it:
"It's a killing field. Where
I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day.
They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no
tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable:
heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center
opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."
"We
open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a
few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close
range. But there's no danger to the forces. I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons."
According
to the same whistleblower, IDF soldiers refer to the practice of using
lethal fire to control Palestinians' approach to food distribution
points as Operation "Salted Fish," using the Israeli name for the children's game Americans call "Red Light, Green Light" -- in which players caught moving at the wrong moment are eliminated.
An IDF officer offered a similar description:
"At
night, we open fire to signal to the population that this is a combat
zone and they mustn't come near. Once, the mortars stopped firing, and
we saw people starting to approach. So we resumed fire to make it clear
they weren't allowed to. In the end, one of the shells landed on a group of people... [In another incident], we fired machine guns from tanks and threw grenades. There was one incident where a group of civilians was hit while advancing under the cover of fog. It wasn't intentional, but these things happen."
Shedding light on another dimension of Israel's conduct in Gaza, a
veteran IDF soldier gave insight into the ongoing physical destruction:
"Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives [roughly $1,500] for every house they demolish.
They're making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they
don't demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure
their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish
wherever they want along the entire front."
The
soldier said that deadly force is used even when the bulldozers are in
areas where Palestinians have permission to be -- and even where the
proximity to the Palestinians was created by the advancing of the
equipment. Lethal force is used anyway. "For a contractor to make
another [$1,500] and take down a house, it's deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food," he said.
After one streak of three June incidents near food points in which the IDF took 50 or more lives each time,
a meeting was held at the IDF's Southern Command, according to senior
officer who attended. The review elicited the fact that troops had used artillery shells to disperse crowds.
The senior officer said the conversation about the use of artillery on
unarmed people was only framed only by how publicity of such force might
undermine Israel's ability to keep proceeding with its campaign:
"[Nobody asked] why that weapon was needed in the first place. What
concerns everyone is whether it'll hurt our legitimacy to keep
operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day."
