ALMOST NO ONE writing about October 7 has been willing to do the work this article is going to do. The discourse collapsed within hours. It has not recovered. You are with Israel, or you are with Hamas. You condemn the attack without conditions, or you justify it without conditions. You support the response without limit, or you oppose it without distinction. The space between those positions is where the truth lives, and almost no one is willing to stand there.
We are going to stand there.
This article applies one standard to both parties. The standard is international law — the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, the prohibitions that every state on earth has signed up to and that some have decided do not apply to them. Where Hamas violated that law, we will say so. Where Israel violated that law, we will say so. We will not pretend the two are equivalent in scale, because they are not. We will not pretend that recognising the difference in scale absolves either party of the violations they have actually committed, because it does not. Both can be true.
We will name what happened on 7 October 2023, plainly. We will name what has happened in Gaza since, plainly. We will draw the conclusions the evidence supports, and we will refuse to draw conclusions the evidence does not. The case against Hamas is in this article. The case against Israel is in this article. They are not in separate parts. They are not in separate paragraphs. They sit alongside each other because that is how the truth sits.
This is the first of three articles. Part I covers the conduct — what happened on 7 October, what has happened since, and what the law says about both. Part II covers the long causes — why 7 October happened at all, and what each side has said about why. Part III covers the verdict and the settlement — what international law has now concluded, and what an honest resolution would actually require.
We begin with the preparation, because 7 October did not come from nowhere.
The Preparation
Hamas planned the attack of 7 October for years. The tunnel network under Gaza had been expanded continuously since the 2014 war, with the militant wing — the al-Qassam Brigades — using the closure of the Strip as both grievance and cover. Fighters trained openly. Mock raids on replica Israeli settlements were filmed and posted online. The Israeli military watched these videos. The Egyptian intelligence services watched them. The Israeli intelligence services watched them. None of this was hidden.¹
The 2018 Great March of Return is part of this story. For more than a year, beginning in March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza walked to the perimeter fence each Friday in protests the organisers framed as non-violent. They asked for the right of return for refugees and the lifting of the blockade. Some of the protesters threw stones. A small number threw incendiary kites and balloons that started fires in Israeli fields. The Israeli military response was to deploy snipers along the fence with orders to fire on demonstrators who came too close. Over the course of the marches, Israeli forces killed more than 220 Palestinians, including more than 40 children, and wounded over 36,000, many of them through deliberate shots to the lower limbs. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that the snipers had targeted clearly identifiable journalists, medics, and children, and that the killings may have constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.²
That was the Israeli answer to non-violent protest. It is part of the context in which 7 October happened. It does not justify what came on 7 October. It does explain why the political space for non-violent resistance had collapsed inside Gaza by the time Hamas began the final stages of its planning.
The regional dimension is real. Iran has funded Hamas, trained its operatives, and supplied weapons and components for the rockets the group has fired into Israel for two decades. Hezbollah has provided training and coordination. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hamas’s external leadership have maintained an operational relationship that Israeli, American, and even some Iranian sources have acknowledged. What is contested is the question of operational command. Iran has claimed credit for inspiring 7 October. It has not credibly claimed to have ordered it. The US intelligence community concluded in the months after the attack that Iran was surprised by the timing, even if it had supported the capacity that made the attack possible. Hamas planned it. Hamas executed it. Hamas owns it. The regional backing is real, but it does not transfer the moral weight of what happened from the people who pulled the triggers to the people who funded the training.³
The other backer of Hamas’s capacity, less often named, was the Israeli government itself. For more than a decade, the Netanyahu governments allowed Qatari cash — eventually running to roughly thirty million dollars a month — to flow into Gaza in suitcases, crossing into the Strip through Israeli checkpoints with Israeli approval. The money paid Hamas salaries, propped up the Hamas administration, and kept the movement solvent through the years it was preparing for 7 October. Netanyahu’s reasoning was not hidden. In a Likud faction meeting in March 2019, he told colleagues that anyone who wanted to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state should support strengthening Hamas and transferring money to it, because keeping Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah would split Palestinian politics and prevent a unified push for statehood. Israeli journalists reported the meeting at the time. The strategy worked, in its own terms, for years. It is the same strategy that built the capacity that crossed the fence on 7 October. We will return to this in Part II, where it belongs in a deeper treatment. It belongs here too, because no honest accounting of how Hamas got the strength to do what it did on 7 October can name Iran as a backer and stay silent about Israel.⁴
The years from 2007 to 2023 inside Gaza are the floor on which 7 October was built. Israel and Egypt have closed the Strip’s borders since Hamas took power in 2007. The closure was justified as a response to Hamas rocket fire and to Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel. The effect on the population — more than two million people, the majority of them refugees or their descendants from the villages destroyed in 1948 — was a 16-year siege. Unemployment ran above 45 percent. The water supply collapsed; the UN warned by 2017 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, and it was overtaken by events. The Israeli military fought four declared wars in Gaza in those years — 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and 2021 — each one killing hundreds or thousands of Palestinians, destroying infrastructure that took years to rebuild, and producing what the Israeli political and military establishment publicly called “mowing the grass.”
The phrase is theirs, not ours. We will return to it in Part II. It is what Israeli generals and ministers used to describe the periodic destruction of Hamas’s military capacity, on the explicit understanding that the underlying conditions would regrow it. It was a doctrine that accepted permanent war with a captive population as the normal operating state. It is not a moral framework. It was treated, inside the Israeli security establishment, as a practical one.
By 2023, the men and women of the Qassam Brigades who would lead the 7 October assault had grown up entirely inside that system. The fighters who breached the fence had never lived a year outside the closure. They were not born when the second intifada began. The grievances they carried were not abstractions taught from textbooks — they were the conditions they had been raised inside. None of that licenses what they did to civilians on 7 October. All of it is part of the record.
The Attack
At 6:29 on the morning of Saturday 7 October 2023, the al-Qassam Brigades fired a barrage of several thousand rockets into southern and central Israel. The rocket fire was a cover. Within minutes, around 6,000 attackers — including roughly 3,800 fighters from the elite Nukhba units of the al-Qassam Brigades, alongside Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives and other militants — breached the Gaza perimeter fence at 114 separate locations. They came through on foot, on motorcycles, in pickup trucks, and in some places on paragliders. The fence had been built to stop them and it did not. The Israeli forces stationed along it had been reduced over the previous year as units were redeployed to the West Bank to protect settlers, and many of the soldiers who remained were caught asleep in their barracks.⁵
What followed lasted, in its most intense phase, about ten hours. By the time the Israeli military regained control of the breached communities, around 1,200 people in Israel were dead and 251 had been taken into Gaza as hostages. Those are the figures Israel has held to consistently and the figures the UN has accepted; the earlier figure of 1,400 was revised downward after Israeli officials confirmed that a number of the dead initially counted as victims were in fact attackers.⁶
A second figure runs underneath the 1,200, and any honest accounting has to name it. The Israeli military activated the Hannibal Directive on 7 October — an Israeli military protocol designed to prevent the capture of soldiers, by killing them if necessary along with their captors. Haaretz documented over the course of 2023 and 2024, through soldier and officer testimony and through official documents, that the directive was applied at multiple locations on the day, including at the Nova festival, at the Re’im base, at the Nahal Oz base, at the Erez crossing, and inside the kibbutzim themselves. Israeli helicopter and tank fire killed an unknown number of Israelis — soldiers and civilians, including hostages — in the course of trying to stop Hamas fighters from returning to Gaza. The Israeli officer who ordered a tank to fire on a house in Be’eri where 14 Israeli hostages were held, 13 of whom would die, told the New York Times he gave the order “even at the cost of civilian casualties.” The Hannibal Directive as applied to one’s own civilians has no defensible basis under international humanitarian law — the deliberate killing of one’s own protected persons, or the failure to take feasible precautions to protect them, is itself a serious violation. We will return to the Hannibal question in detail later in this article. We name it here because the 1,200 figure cannot be cleanly assigned to Hamas, and pretending it can be is the kind of distortion this article exists to refuse.⁷
The dead included Israelis, foreign workers from Thailand and Nepal and the Philippines, Bedouin Israelis, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. They were killed in three main locations.
At the Nova music festival near Re’im, where roughly 3,500 young people had been dancing through the night, the attackers arrived around 6:30 a.m. and spent the next several hours hunting people through the open fields. Some of the festivalgoers were shot as they tried to run. Some were burned alive in the cars they had hidden in. Some were captured and taken back across the fence. At least 364 people were killed at the Nova site. It is the single largest civilian death toll of the day. The killing at Nova is not contested. There is video. There is testimony. There are the bodies.⁸
In the kibbutzim and small towns of the Gaza envelope — Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Holit, Sderot, Ofakim, and others — the attackers went house to house. They killed elderly people in their kitchens. They killed children in their bedrooms. They killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They took families hostage and walked them back across the fence on foot. In Be’eri, roughly one in ten of the kibbutz’s residents was killed. In Kfar Aza, the figure was higher. In Nir Oz, around a quarter of the population was killed or taken. These killings are documented in Israeli police investigations, in the testimony of survivors, in the bodycam footage Hamas fighters themselves recorded and uploaded, and in the forensic work that continues to this day. They happened. They were war crimes under any reading of the laws of war, because the people killed were civilians and the people who killed them knew they were civilians.⁹
What the attackers did beyond killing them is also part of the record. At the Nova festival, fighters set fire to vehicles in which festivalgoers had hidden, burning some of them alive. At the kibbutzim, fighters set fire to homes whose residents had taken shelter in safe rooms and bathrooms; in Be’eri and Kfar Aza in particular, the fires were used to drive families out of hiding or to kill them where they hid. Survivors who escaped have testified to having heard family members in adjacent rooms calling out as the fires reached them. Israeli forensic teams, ZAKA volunteers, and Israeli police investigators have documented the pattern of burning across multiple sites. The deliberate burning of civilians is a war crime under any reading of the law.
Some of those captured at the scene were treated with cruelty before being killed or before being taken into Gaza. There are documented cases of summary executions of captured civilians and of physical abuse of those taken alive. The form and extent of sexual violence on 7 October itself has not been independently established, because the Israeli government refused the full UN investigation that could have established it; but the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, concluded after her fact-finding visit that there are reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence including rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations on the day. The Patten finding is the most reliable statement that has been allowed to be made. The Israeli government’s manufactured framing of the violence — discussed in the next section — has obscured rather than illuminated the actual record, which is bad enough on the established facts.
Indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilian areas accompanied the breach and continued through the day. The fire was directed at Israeli civilian population centres, not at military targets, and it would have killed many more Israelis than it did had the Iron Dome system not intercepted most of it. Indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas are a violation of the principle of distinction regardless of how many of the projectiles strike their targets. The legal status of Hamas’s rocket fire on Israeli cities is not contested by any serious authority.
At the military bases — Re’im, Nahal Oz, Zikim, and others — the attackers engaged Israeli soldiers. Some of those soldiers were captured. Some were killed in fighting. Combatants fighting other combatants is not, in itself, a war crime; what each side did to the prisoners they took, and to the wounded they encountered, is a separate question that the law answers separately, and we will return to it.
The hostages taken into Gaza included soldiers and civilians. They included an infant — Kfir Bibas, nine months old — his four-year-old brother Ariel, their mother Shiri, children of every age, young adults, parents, and elderly people, including 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. They included foreign nationals.¹⁰ The taking of any civilian hostage in armed conflict is a war crime under Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the customary international law that has applied to every armed group on earth since 1949. The plain text of the Convention does not require a complicated reading. Civilians cannot be taken. Hamas took them anyway. That is the violation, and the article will name it as a violation whenever it arises.¹¹
The numbers matter, and so does the precision. The killing of 1,200 people in a single day in a country of nine million was the worst single-day loss of Israeli life since the founding of the state. The killing of roughly 815 of those people who were civilians was the worst single-day loss of Jewish civilian life since the Holocaust. The taking of 251 hostages was the largest hostage-taking in modern history. None of these statements is propaganda. They are the figures, and they are what the law calls a serious matter under the Geneva Conventions, regardless of any cause the perpetrators believed they were serving.
The cause does not absolve the conduct. That is the first half of the standard this article applies, and we apply it without softening. A people under occupation has the right under international law to resist that occupation, including by armed force directed at the occupying military. A people under occupation does not have the right under any law on earth to massacre civilians at a music festival or to murder children in their bedrooms. The first proposition does not require the second. The second is not a method of resistance; it is a method of terror, and the law names it as such.
We will say the same thing about the response, when we come to it. The standard does not change.
The Propaganda War That Followed
The first casualty in any war is truth. The second is anyone who tries to tell the truth before either side has finished assembling its story. We are going to do that work here, because the version of 7 October that has dominated Western media for two years is not the version that survives contact with the evidence. It also is not the version of 7 October that those who deny anything terrible happened on 7 October are pushing. Both versions are wrong. The truth sits between them, and the truth is bad enough on its own.
Within forty-eight hours of the attack, a claim began to circulate on Israeli social media and in the Israeli press that Hamas fighters had beheaded forty babies at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The claim originated with an i24 News reporter, Nicole Zedeck, broadcasting from inside the kibbutz on 10 October, citing unnamed Israeli soldiers. A volunteer from the Israeli search-and-rescue organisation ZAKA, Yossi Landau, separately told CBS News that he had seen beheaded babies and children. The claim was repeated within hours by an Israeli army colonel on camera. It was picked up by the international press. It was repeated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement that day. It was repeated by President Joe Biden during a meeting with Jewish American leaders, who falsely claimed he had seen the photographs. The White House later clarified that the President had not seen any photographs, and had been referring to news reports. The forty figure had no source any reporter could trace back to a verified incident. The Israeli military, asked directly, could not confirm it. By December 2023, Haaretz had published a full investigation by Nir Hasson and Liza Rozovsky tracing how the story had spread, naming the people who had repeated it without checking, and concluding plainly: “this story is false.”¹²
That does not mean nothing terrible happened to children at Kfar Aza or anywhere else. It means the specific claim — forty beheaded babies, lined up, as a deliberate act — was untrue. There were children among the dead at the kibbutzim. A small number of bodies showed severe injuries consistent with what ZAKA volunteers described, though the exact circumstances were not established. The independent UN Commission of Inquiry investigated the beheaded-children claim and could not verify it. The distinction matters, and it matters specifically because the false version was used to justify what came next. It was repeated by an American president to a national audience. It was repeated by the Israeli prime minister to justify the scale of the response. It was the emotional lever that opened the door to the bombing of Gaza, and it was not true.
The mass rape claim followed a similar arc. From mid-October 2023 onward, Israeli officials and Israeli-aligned advocacy groups described 7 October as a coordinated, systematic campaign of sexual violence — rape as a deliberate weapon of war, executed under command, planned in advance. In December 2023 the New York Times published a long investigation under the headline “Screams Without Words” that became the foundational piece of Western media reporting on the question. The piece was later subjected to internal New York Times dispute, an Intercept investigation, criticism from journalism faculty, and the public withdrawal of one of its central reported cases by the family of the named victim after they said the reporters had misrepresented what happened to her. The Times stood by the erroneous piece. The doubts did not go away.¹³
In March 2024 the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, published the findings of a fact-finding mission to Israel. Her report is the most careful document on the question and it has been claimed by both sides as vindication. Both sides are wrong. Patten found "reasonable grounds to believe" that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred at multiple locations on 7 October, including in at least three places in southern Israel. She found "clear and convincing information" that hostages held in Gaza were subjected to sexual violence in captivity. She also said no survivors of sexual violence had come forward to her team; that her team had not investigated attribution to specific perpetrators, noting that Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, as well as Gazan civilians, participated in the attack alongside Hamas; and that the Israeli government's framing of a systematic, coordinated, command-directed rape campaign was not supported by the evidence she had been able to gather. Sexual violence happened on 7 October. It happened to hostages in captivity. Patten's report stands as the most reliable statement of that fact. The Israeli framing of what kind of sexual violence happened — coordinated, systematic, ordered from above — is not what the UN found, and the difference matters because the framing was used to support the same broader claim that justified everything that followed.¹⁴
What Patten did not do, the world has not been allowed to do either. The Patten mission was a fact-finding visit, not a full investigation, and her report explicitly recommended that the Israeli government grant access to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory to conduct the full investigation she could not. The Israeli government refused. In January 2024 the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the Commission of Inquiry “an anti-Israeli and antisemitic body” and instructed Israeli doctors and hospital staff who had treated October 7 victims and released hostages not to cooperate with it. When Patten herself asked, in 2025, to return for a comprehensive investigation, the Israeli government refused that too. The reason it refused, reported by Haaretz, is that any genuine investigation would have required access to Israeli detention facilities to examine allegations of sexual violence committed against Palestinians by Israeli forces — and the Israeli government would not allow that. The same government that demanded the world accept the most lurid version of what happened on 7 October has spent two years preventing the independent investigation that could have established what actually happened. That is not the conduct of a government with nothing to hide. It is the conduct of a government weaponising the genuine sexual violence that did occur on 7 October to immunise itself from accountability for the sexual violence its own forces have committed since. Both are war crimes. Only one is being investigated.¹⁵
A second document arrived this week. The “Silenced No More” report, published on 12 May 2026 by what calls itself the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, is being treated by Western media as the comprehensive evidentiary basis the earlier claims lacked. It is not. The “commission” is the work of one woman, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who was exposed in March 2024 by Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynet — the largest newspaper in Israel — as having spread debunked atrocity stories that damaged Israel’s own credibility. The story she pushed into the international press of a Hamas fighter cutting a fetus from a pregnant woman before raping her was proven untrue. She circulated a photograph of a dead Kurdish woman fighter from another country and let it be reported as a 7 October victim. Israeli government sources told Ynet that her research was inaccurate and her methodology unreliable, and that professionals had distanced themselves from her. Channel 13’s Raviv Drucker reported in 2024 that the prior “horror report” she had been credited with — the basis on which she received the Israel Prize that year — did not actually exist beyond a four-page document of which two pages were newspaper headlines. The new 290-page report has not been independently audited. None of this means nothing terrible happened to women on 7 October. It does mean that the report now being laundered through CNN, the BBC, the Daily Mail, and other outlets as definitive proof of “systematic” rape was written by the same person who has already been exposed by Israeli mainstream media as having spread proven lies. The Israeli government refuses an independent UN investigation. In its place we are offered a propaganda document by a discredited author, and Western newsrooms are running it without checking the Hebrew-language record of who wrote it.¹⁶
This is not a small problem. The original claims — forty beheaded babies, mass coordinated rape, things even more lurid that circulated and collapsed in between — were used to manufacture consent for what came next. They were repeated by heads of state. They were used to justify the cutting off of food and water and fuel to two million people, and the bombing campaign that followed. By the time the careful investigations caught up, the consent had already been manufactured and the bombs had already fallen. The truth arrived too late. That is what the propaganda war did, and we name it here because the same machinery is still operating.
The story of how Hamas treated the hostages does not fit the framing either. The hostages came home, when they came home, with different accounts. Some described abuse. Some described sexual violence. Some described sustained physical mistreatment. Some described starvation in captivity, particularly as the war ground on and conditions in Gaza collapsed. None of that should be minimised, and the article will not minimise it.
But some hostages also described being treated as the law requires prisoners to be treated. They described medical care. They described being told by their captors, on arrival, that the men holding them believed in the Qur’an and would not harm them. They described being given the same food their captors ate, and being kept in clean conditions. The clearest of these accounts came from 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, a peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, who was released two weeks into her captivity and who held a press conference outside Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv on 24 October 2023, with her daughter translating, in front of the assembled international press. She described being beaten on the way into Gaza. She described going through “hell.” She also described, in detail, being treated with care once she arrived; being seen by a doctor; being given her medications; being kept clean; being told by her captors that they would not hurt her. Asked why she had reached back to shake the hand of one of her captors as she was transferred to the Red Cross, and said “shalom” — the Hebrew word for “peace” — she answered simply: “because they treated us very nicely.”¹⁷
The mixed record includes worse than the worst of the released hostages’ testimony has so far described. On 31 August 2024, Israeli forces searching a tunnel under Rafah found the bodies of six hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. Israeli pathologists established that all six had been shot at close range within the previous forty-eight hours — that is, after the Israeli search of the area had begun. The Israeli military’s conclusion, supported by US and Israeli intelligence assessment and accepted by the families, is that the six were executed by their captors as Israeli forces closed in on the tunnel. The murder of captives by their captors is a war crime under any reading of the Geneva Conventions. The UN Special Representative also found, separately, “clear and convincing information” that hostages held in Gaza had been subjected to sexual violence in captivity. The released hostage Amit Soussana described in detail, on the record to the New York Times, the sexual assault she experienced during her captivity. Other released hostages have given similar accounts. The sexual violence against captives during captivity is a war crime. It is on the documentary record at a different evidentiary standard than the 7 October sexual violence claims, because the captives themselves have been able to give first-hand testimony after release.
She also turned, in the same press conference, to the Israeli state. The Hamas attackers, she said, had walked through a fence that cost the country two billion shekels. The intelligence services had been warned. The army had not come. She and her neighbours had been, in her word, the scapegoats.
The Israeli press treated the press conference as a disaster. Channel 12’s Daphna Liel called the descriptions “shocking.” Israel Hayom called it a “propaganda win for Hamas.” Kan, the public broadcaster, reported that Israeli PR experts called the decision to put her in front of the cameras a mistake. Lifshitz was not a Hamas propagandist. She was an eighty-five-year-old kibbutznik who had spent her life working to bring injured Palestinians to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Her husband Oded, a journalist of the same age, who had spent decades writing about Israeli expulsions of Bedouin from Sinai, remained in captivity. She would later die without seeing him again; he was murdered in Gaza and his body returned in February 2025. She had no political reason to praise her captors. She told what she had seen, and what she had seen did not match the version the Israeli government was building.¹⁸
The point of this section is not to render Hamas innocent. Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October. Hamas took civilian hostages, including a nine-month-old infant, including children, including people too old or too sick to be moved. The hostage-taking is a war crime full stop. Some of what was done to some of the hostages during their captivity is a war crime. The killing of civilians at the Nova festival and in the kibbutzim is a war crime. We have said all of this and the article continues to stand by it.
The point of this section is that the further claims — the manufactured atrocities, the lurid additions, the framing of the day as something even worse than the war crimes that actually occurred — were political weapons. They were used to justify what came next. They survived in the public consciousness long after they were debunked. They are part of why the response was as unrestrained as it became. The propaganda war is part of the war, and any honest article about 7 October has to say what happened in it.
The Hannibal Directive
The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli military protocol that has existed in some form since 1986. It was created after a series of soldier abductions by Hezbollah and other groups in southern Lebanon, and its premise was that the capture of an Israeli soldier was a strategic catastrophe — both because of what captured soldiers tended to suffer at the hands of those who took them, and because of the political cost Israel paid in the prisoner exchanges that followed. The directive instructed Israeli forces to take any action necessary to prevent the completion of an abduction, even at the risk of the soldier’s life. The intent, never written down in those words but well understood inside the army, was that a dead soldier was preferable to a captured one.¹⁹
The directive was officially rescinded in 2016 after years of criticism, including from Israeli military lawyers and from the families of soldiers who had been killed by their own forces under its application. Israel’s state comptroller had recommended its abolition. The army formally announced that the directive was no longer in effect.
It was applied on 7 October regardless.
Haaretz, in a major investigation by Yaniv Kubovich published in July 2024, documented the application of the directive through testimony from soldiers, mid-level officers, and senior commanders, and through internal documents the paper had obtained. The directive was applied, Kubovich reported, at three Israeli army facilities that had been breached — Re’im, Nahal Oz, and the Erez border crossing — and inside the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope. The order, in multiple forms and from multiple commanders, was that no vehicle was to be allowed to return to Gaza. The soldiers carrying out that order knew Israeli civilians and Israeli soldiers were inside many of those vehicles. They fired anyway.⁷
The specific incidents that have been documented are these.
At the Nova festival, an Israeli combat helicopter from the Ramat David air base arrived over the site during the killings and, according to an internal Israeli police investigation reported by Haaretz in November 2023, fired on the attackers and “apparently also hit some of the revellers who were there.” How many of the 364 dead at Nova were killed by Israeli helicopter fire has never been established. The Israeli police initially denied the Haaretz report. The reporting stood.⁷
At Kibbutz Be’eri, an Israeli tank commanded by Brigadier General Barak Hiram fired two shells into a house where Israeli civilians were being held hostage by Hamas fighters. Thirteen of the fourteen Israeli civilians inside that house died. One of them, Yasmin Porat, survived; she gave a public interview to the Israeli state broadcaster Kan in which she described the heavy crossfire she had been caught in and said it had been “insane.” Hiram later told the New York Times that he had given the order to fire on the house “even at the cost of civilian casualties.” The families of the dead have demanded an army investigation that has not produced its findings.⁷
At Re’im base, Israeli helicopter fire and tank fire on positions overrun by Hamas killed an unknown number of the IDF soldiers who had been overrun and had not yet been able to surrender or escape. Seven Israeli surveillance soldiers were nevertheless captured from the adjacent Nahal Oz outpost, suggesting that the directive’s application failed even on its own terms. Fifty-three soldiers were killed at Nahal Oz.⁷
The most chilling assessment came from an Israeli reserve pilot, Colonel Nof Erez, who gave an interview to Haaretz in November 2023 in which he characterised what had happened on 7 October as “a mass Hannibal.” His point was that any situation in which Israelis were being taken across the fence would have automatically activated the directive in the minds of commanders who had grown up with it, even after its formal rescindment. The directive had not gone away. It had become reflex.⁷
How many Israelis the Israeli military killed on 7 October has never been authoritatively answered. Haaretz concluded that “the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.” The Israeli government has not produced a number. It has not opened a comprehensive public investigation. The military police investigations that have happened have been quiet and partial. The families of the dead at Be’eri have been told, in effect, that they will receive answers when the army is ready to give them, which is to say, never.
The legal question is simpler than the political one. The deliberate killing of one’s own civilians is unlawful under international humanitarian law in any framing. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 58, requires every party to a conflict to “take all feasible precautions to protect the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control against the dangers resulting from military operations.” Firing on a house known to contain Israeli civilians, in order to prevent the escape of the fighters holding them, fails that test on every available reading. The Rome Statute, in Article 8, defines the intentional direction of attacks against the civilian population as a war crime, and contains no exception for cases where the attacker is targeting his own civilians in order to prevent their capture. There is no defensible legal theory under which the Hannibal Directive, as applied on 7 October, can be reconciled with the laws of war. It is what those laws were written to prohibit.
What it leaves us with, on the question of 7 October itself, is this. The 1,200 dead were not all killed by Hamas. Some unknown but significant number were killed by Israeli forces under an Israeli military order, applied to Israeli civilians and Israeli soldiers, with the knowledge of the commanders who gave the order that civilians were present. The Israeli government has not told its own public how many. The international press, with the exception of the Israeli press, has largely allowed the question to fade. We name it here because the question of who killed whom on 7 October is the foundation of every claim that has been made about what should be done in response. If a significant share of the dead were killed by their own state, the moral arithmetic shifts. Not all the way. Hamas crossed the fence. Hamas killed civilians at Nova and in the kibbutzim. Hamas took hostages. Those crimes remain. But the part of the figure that has been used to justify what came after is not what the figure represents, and the article exists, in part, to say so.
The intelligence that should have prevented any of this was not lacking. It was ignored.
The Intelligence That Was Ignored
The story of 7 October as an intelligence failure has been told as if it were a story of mystery. It was not. Israel had the warnings. Israel had the documents. Israel had the people on the fence telling their commanders what they were watching being prepared on the other side. The failure was not that the warnings did not arrive. The failure was that the people who had the warnings did not believe them, and the people who could have acted on them did not.
Egypt warned Israel directly. According to public statements by US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul in October 2023, Egyptian intelligence officials had told their Israeli counterparts in the days before 7 October that “an event like this” was imminent. The Egyptians had been monitoring Hamas activity in Sinai and along the Rafah crossing for years. Their warning was specific enough that McCaul, with access to American intelligence briefings, called it on the record: Israel had been warned and Israel had not listened. The Israeli government denied the framing. The Egyptian intelligence services have not retracted what they passed.²⁰
The internal Israeli warnings were earlier and more detailed. In April 2022, more than eighteen months before the attack, Israeli military intelligence obtained a document the IDF gave the codename “Jericho Wall.” The document was a forty-page Hamas operational plan. It described, in detail, the kind of operation that would unfold on 7 October: a coordinated breach of the perimeter fence at multiple points, the seizure of Israeli communities and military bases, the taking of hostages, the use of rockets as cover. The document was circulated through Israeli intelligence in 2022 and again in mid-2023. A veteran female analyst in Unit 8200 — Israel’s signals intelligence arm — wrote a detailed assessment in July 2023, three months before the attack, warning that Hamas was actively rehearsing the operation described in Jericho Wall. Her assessment included surveillance photographs and intercepted communications showing Hamas fighters practising what looked like a fence breach, hostage-taking, and the storming of replica Israeli kibbutzim. Her warning was dismissed by a colonel in the Gaza Division as “totally imaginative.” The New York Times obtained the document and published the story in November 2023. The Israeli military did not deny its authenticity.²¹
The women on the fence saw the same thing in real time. The Israeli army’s Field Observation Unit — the tatzpitaniyot, mostly young women conscripts assigned to monitor the perimeter via cameras and observation posts — had been reporting unusual Hamas activity along the Gaza fence for months before the attack. In the weeks immediately before 7 October, they reported drills involving the construction of mock observation posts, drills involving the breaching of a replica fence, drills involving the storming of replica residential buildings, and unusual movements of equipment toward the fence line. Their reports were filed up the chain. Their warnings were dismissed. On 6 October, the night before the attack, the observers reported additional unusual activity. One was told by her commander that what she was seeing was a routine training exercise. The next morning, those same observers were among the first to die. The observers’ surviving colleagues have given on-the-record testimony to the Israeli press and to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee about what they had reported and what they had been told. The army has acknowledged that the warnings were filed and dismissed. It has not explained why.²²
The political context for the dismissals is the part that gets left out of the standard Western telling. The Netanyahu government had spent 2023 in a constitutional crisis of its own making. Its judicial overhaul programme had brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets every week, including significant numbers of reservists who had publicly refused to serve under the proposed changes. The army’s senior leadership was warning the cabinet that the country’s deterrent posture was being damaged. The Netanyahu government’s response had been to escalate, not de-escalate. Internal security resources had been redirected to the West Bank to protect the settler population during a year of accelerating settler violence and Palestinian counter-attacks; the perimeter forces around Gaza had been thinned. The Israeli political establishment had spent the year telling itself, and being told by Netanyahu directly, that Hamas was deterred, that Hamas was contained, that Hamas was preoccupied with running Gaza and would not risk what it had built. This was the working assumption that ran through the security cabinet in the months before the attack. It was the assumption inside which the Jericho Wall document, the female analyst’s report, the tatzpitaniyot warnings, and the Egyptian message were each individually evaluated and individually dismissed.²³
The role of Netanyahu’s Hamas policy in that dismissal cannot be separated from the dismissal itself. If the strategic logic of the government had been that Hamas was a contained problem to be managed, then warnings that Hamas was preparing an unprecedented attack were warnings the strategic framework could not accommodate. They were politically inconvenient. The same prime minister who had told his own party in 2019 that strengthening Hamas was a way of preventing Palestinian statehood was now leading the government that received and dismissed the warnings that Hamas had been allowed to become strong enough to do what it did on 7 October. The intelligence failure and the strategic failure were the same failure. They cannot be separated. The Israeli press has reported them as a single story. The international press, with rare exceptions, has reported them as two.
What happened on the morning of 7 October itself, once the breach was under way, was a further failure of response. The army’s quick reaction units took hours to reach the Gaza envelope. Soldiers stationed at nearby bases were not deployed in time. The decision-making chain in the first hours was paralysed. The Israeli families and communities under attack called and called and were told that help was coming. In many cases it did not. In some cases the help that arrived produced the killings under the Hannibal Directive we have already named. The full accounting of who knew what, when, and what they did about it, will not come from this article. It will come, when it comes, from the Israeli state commission of inquiry that the families of the dead have been demanding for two years and that the Netanyahu government has refused to convene. The refusal is its own answer.
This is the standard the next section measures against. Israel had the warnings. Israel had the right to defend itself when the attack came. What Israel did in response went far beyond defence, and the law has names for what it became. We turn now to Gaza.
The Response — Gaza, Day One Onward
On 9 October 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced the policy that would govern what came next. “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” he told the world. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The statement was not a slip of the tongue. It was repeated. It was elaborated. It was the explicit policy of the Israeli government for the population of the Gaza Strip — two million civilians, of whom roughly half were children — at the moment the response began.²⁴
What followed unfolded under that announced framework. Within the first week, the Israeli Air Force dropped more high-explosive ordnance on Gaza than the United States had dropped on Afghanistan in any single year of its twenty-year war there. Within the first month, the tonnage exceeded the bombing of Dresden. Within the first six months, Gaza had been hit with more explosive force, per square mile, than any populated area since the Second World War. The Israeli military’s preferred munition for densely populated targets was the American-supplied Mk 84 — a two-thousand-pound bomb with a casualty radius of more than 360 metres in any direction. The decision to use a Mk 84 in a residential neighbourhood is a decision that civilians will die. The Israeli military made that decision repeatedly. CNN, drawing on satellite analysis and US official sources, reported in December 2023 that nearly half of the bombs Israel had dropped on Gaza in the first weeks of the war were unguided “dumb” bombs, including the Mk 84.²⁵
The death toll climbed accordingly. The Gaza Health Ministry’s figures, which have been validated repeatedly by independent statistical reviews and by The Lancet, were initially dismissed by the Israeli government and the Biden White House. They have not been seriously challenged since. By the spring of 2024 the documented Palestinian death toll had passed 30,000. By the autumn it had passed 40,000. By late 2025 the direct death toll had passed 60,000, with credible peer-reviewed estimates of total excess mortality — including deaths from starvation, untreated illness, and disease — running between 100,000 and 200,000. The majority of the dead are women and children. The Israeli military has produced no comparable figure of its own, and has not contested the underlying methodology.²⁶
The targeting tells the story. Hospitals first.
Al-Shifa, the largest medical complex in Gaza, was besieged, evacuated under fire, raided, evacuated again, and finally reduced to rubble in a two-week operation in March and April 2024 that the World Health Organisation called the destruction of a hospital and that the Israeli military called a counter-terrorism operation. Medical staff were killed and detained. Patients were killed in their beds. Premature babies in the neonatal unit died after Israeli operations cut the power and the staff was forced to flee. The Israeli claim that Al-Shifa was a Hamas command centre — the central justification for the entire operation — was investigated by the Washington Post in December 2023 and found unsupported by the publicly available evidence. The hospital was destroyed regardless.²⁷
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the Anglican-run hospital in Gaza City, was hit on 17 October 2023, with hundreds of casualties; the question of who fired the round became one of the first contested incidents of the war and is treated separately in the propaganda section above. What is not contested is that the same hospital was struck again repeatedly through 2024 and 2025, by Israeli munitions, in attacks the Israeli military has not denied. Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza was raided, its director Hussam Abu Safiya detained without charge in December 2024 and held without trial; the hospital itself was rendered non-functional. The Indonesian Hospital was bombed in November 2023. The European Gaza Hospital. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital. The Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. By the end of 2024, the World Health Organisation had documented over 600 attacks on health facilities in Gaza. Not one of Gaza’s hospitals remained fully functional.²⁸
The Israeli campaign has also burned identifiable Palestinian civilians alive, and has done so on video that has been seen worldwide. On 14 October 2024, an Israeli airstrike hit the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where displaced families had pitched tents because there was nowhere else for them to go. The strike ignited the tents. Footage taken at the scene by Palestinian journalists shows displaced civilians, including patients still connected to intravenous drips, burning alive while bystanders are unable to extinguish the flames. One of the dead was Shaban al-Dalu, a nineteen-year-old engineering student. The image of his death — visible in the moment, on film, attached to his IV — was carried by the Washington Post, by Reuters, by Al Jazeera, by Middle East Eye. It was the seventh Israeli attack on the grounds of the same hospital that year. In April 2025 the journalist Ahmed Mansour was burned alive in his tent near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in a strike that the IDF acknowledged. The pattern across 2024 and 2025 included repeated strikes on tent camps housing the displaced — populations who had been ordered south by Israeli evacuation directives and who had complied, and who were then burned in the camps to which they had been directed. The deliberate burning of civilians is a war crime, and the war crime is the same war crime regardless of which armed force commits it.
The destruction of religious and educational sites followed the same pattern. By figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, validated in part by BBC and AFP investigations, more than 800 mosques have been destroyed or damaged. Three churches have been struck — the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third-oldest standing church in the world, hit on 19 October 2023, killing eighteen people who had taken shelter inside; the Holy Family Catholic Church, struck repeatedly through 2024; and the Ahli Baptist Church at Al-Ahli Hospital, struck repeatedly. The destruction of mosques and churches in Gaza has no military rationale that any party to the conflict has been able to articulate. Universities have been destroyed systematically — al-Azhar University, the Islamic University of Gaza, al-Aqsa University. Schools have been used as shelters and then bombed as shelters; the UNRWA schools that housed displaced Palestinian families were among the most regularly targeted structures in the strip. Archives, libraries, the central public library of Gaza City: gone. This pattern — the systematic destruction of the institutions through which a people transmits its identity across generations — is what international law has, since the 1990s, treated as a marker of intent in the context of the Genocide Convention.²⁹
The killing of journalists became its own indictment. As of the end of 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented more than 230 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli forces — more than the journalists killed in the entire Second World War, more than were killed in Vietnam, more than were killed in any single conflict in modern history. Many were killed while wearing press identification, in marked press vehicles, in well-known journalist gathering points. Some were killed alongside their entire families in the buildings where they lived. Reporters Without Borders has filed multiple ICC submissions documenting what it describes as the deliberate targeting of journalists. The Israeli military has, in several documented cases, openly named journalists it killed and accused them of being Hamas operatives after the fact, without producing the evidence that would substantiate the accusation. The pattern has been to kill first and justify second. Killing journalists is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions whether or not the killer issues a justification afterward.³⁰
The killing of medical workers and aid workers and UN staff was on the same scale. More than 1,000 health workers have been killed in Gaza. The Palestine Red Crescent Society lost ambulance crews repeatedly; in March 2025, fifteen medics and rescue workers were killed in a single Israeli attack on their convoy and buried in a mass grave, their hands tied. The World Central Kitchen lost seven workers in a sequence of three separate Israeli drone strikes on the night of 1 April 2024. The aid workers — citizens of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Poland, and Palestine — had coordinated their route in advance with the Israeli military. They were in three marked vehicles. After the first strike, survivors transferred to the second vehicle; the IDF struck it. Survivors transferred to the third; the IDF struck it too. Bellingcat’s open-source analysis concluded the strikes bore the hallmarks of a precision attack of the kind only the IDF could conduct in Gaza. Human Rights Watch documented this case alongside at least seven other incidents in which Israeli forces struck aid workers and premises whose coordinates had been shared in advance to ensure their protection. The pattern is not error, it is policy executed under cover of error. UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has lost more staff in this war than the UN has lost in any conflict in its history — more than 350 by the end of 2025. The UN has named those killed and continued to name them. The Israeli government’s position has been that UNRWA is a Hamas-infiltrated organisation that should be dismantled. The Israeli Knesset has passed legislation to that effect. The agency that has fed, schooled, and provided medical care to Palestinian refugees for seventy-five years is being shut down by the same government that has spent two years destroying the population it served.³¹
The hostages were killed too — by the same Israeli forces who were supposed to be rescuing them. Beyond the Hannibal Directive applications on 7 October itself, Israeli air strikes have killed an unknown but significant number of hostages held in Gaza throughout the war. The Bibas children — Kfir, the nine-month-old, and his four-year-old brother Ariel — died in captivity. Hamas claimed they had been killed in an Israeli air strike in late 2023. The Israeli forensic findings, presented publicly by the IDF in February 2025, concluded the children had been murdered by their captors in November 2023, with the bodies subsequently mutilated to simulate airstrike injuries. The Bibas family accepted the Israeli forensic findings. The bodies were returned in February 2025. In December 2023, Israeli soldiers shot dead three Israeli hostages — Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka, and Alon Shamriz — who had escaped their captors, were shirtless to signal they were unarmed, were waving a white flag, and were calling for help in Hebrew. The Israeli military acknowledged the killings, called them a tragic error, and did not prosecute the soldiers responsible. The Israeli military has not produced an accounting of how many hostages it has killed by its own fire. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the organisation representing the families of the hostages, has called repeatedly for that accounting. It has not been forthcoming.³²
The displacement is the framework underneath all of it. By the end of 2024, more than 1.9 million Palestinians — roughly 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population — had been displaced from their homes, many of them multiple times. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders that pushed Palestinians south, then bombed them in the south, then issued new orders that pushed them west, then bombed them in the west, then north, then back south again. The al-Mawasi “safe zone” on the coast was bombed repeatedly. The Israeli military demolished entire neighbourhoods after their populations had fled — not bombed in combat, but levelled in controlled demolitions, with rigged buildings filmed by Israeli soldiers and uploaded to social media. The buffer zone that Israel established along the Gaza perimeter — taking, by the end of 2024, roughly 16 percent of Gaza’s total territory — was created by the systematic destruction of every standing structure inside it. Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab and Forensic Architecture, working independently, have documented the pattern. The pattern is forced displacement, executed through destruction of the homes to which return would otherwise be possible. The Rome Statute calls this a war crime. The cumulative pattern, when combined with the targeting of cultural and religious sites and the explicit statements of intent from Israeli officials, is also the conduct that international law has recognised as ethnic cleansing.³³
The explicit statements of intent matter, because they distinguish the legal questions that this war presents from the legal questions presented by other recent conflicts. The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said on 13 October 2023 that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” — a statement directly contradicting the legal principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. The Defence Minister called Palestinians “human animals.” The Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, said in November 2023 that dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza was “an option.” The Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the population of Gaza had to be made to “leave to the desert.” The Agriculture Minister, Avi Dichter, called the operation “the Gaza Nakba.” A senior Major General, Ghassan Alian, told the population of Gaza in October 2023: “human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” These statements are not edge cases. They are not the speech of fringe figures. They are statements from the senior officials of the government conducting the war. They were collected and submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice in its January 2024 application under the Genocide Convention. The Court found, in its January 2024 provisional measures order, that South Africa had standing and that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. It is on the record, because the officials of the Israeli government put it there themselves.³⁴
What this section is describing is not a controversial reading of events. The figures are from the UN, from the World Health Organisation, from Amnesty International, from Human Rights Watch, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, from Israeli human rights organisations including B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, from the Israeli press where it has been allowed to report. The explicit statements are from the Israeli officials who made them, on the record, in many cases on camera. The legal framework is the same framework that every party to the conflict has formally accepted by signing the Geneva Conventions. What we are describing is not contested. It has been contested only in the sense that the Israeli government has refused to allow the investigations that would document it more fully, and the Western governments that have armed and supplied this campaign have refused to draw the conclusions that the evidence supports.
This is the body of conduct against which the law’s verdict will be set out, when we come to it. We turn to Lavender.
The Killing Machines — Lavender, Gospel, Where’s Daddy
In April 2024, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and its Hebrew sister site Local Call published an investigation by Yuval Abraham based on the testimony of six Israeli intelligence officers who had served in the targeting units of the IDF’s elite Unit 8200. The officers described, in their own words, three artificial intelligence systems that had been used to generate the targeting decisions of the Gaza war. The systems are called Lavender, The Gospel, and Where’s Daddy. The investigation has not been seriously challenged. The Israeli military has not denied that the systems exist. It has disputed only the framing of how they were used, while confirming the basic operational facts. The investigation is the closest thing the public has to a description of how the killing in Gaza was actually decided. It deserves to be understood in plain terms.³⁵
The Gospel is the older of the systems. It generates targets in the form of buildings — structures associated, by the model’s calculations, with Hamas activity. The decision to strike the building, and to strike it knowing civilians will die in it, is made by a human officer on the basis of the Gospel’s recommendation. The Gospel does not make moral decisions. It does not weigh proportionality. It produces target packages. The pace at which it produces them — hundreds per day at peak operations — is what changed the character of the war’s targeting operations. The Israeli military had previously been constrained, on its own statements, by the number of targets its human intelligence analysts could produce. The Gospel removed that constraint.³⁵
Lavender is the system that drew international attention. Lavender generates targets in the form of people. The system was trained, by the IDF’s own description, to identify suspected operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — not senior commanders, but the rank and file. The training data was drawn from the IDF’s existing intelligence database. The output was a list of names, each name marked with a probability score that the person was a militant. At the height of operations in the first weeks of the war, Lavender’s list contained approximately 37,000 names. Each of those 37,000 people became, by the system’s output, a candidate for assassination.
The officers who described the system to +972 said the human review of each name was, in practice, perfunctory. One officer described his role as “rubber-stamping” the system’s output, with an average of twenty seconds of human verification before the kill order was approved. The verification consisted, the officer said, of confirming that the target was male — because Lavender’s known false positive rate of approximately ten percent included women, who were assumed not to be Hamas fighters. Beyond that, the human in the loop was not in any meaningful sense reviewing the system’s judgement. The officer said: “I would invest twenty seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”³⁵
The third system, Where’s Daddy, was the one that converted the kill list into actual deaths. Where’s Daddy tracked the targets identified by Lavender and notified Israeli forces when those targets had entered their family homes. The system’s name is, in this context, descriptive. The intention was to strike the targets at home. Striking the targets at home meant striking them with their families present. The Israeli officers told +972 that the decision to strike at home rather than at a military site was a deliberate operational preference, because military sites were harder to locate and to strike accurately. Family homes were easier. Striking at home meant the families died too.³⁵
The collateral damage tolerances are documented. The officers told +972 that the IDF’s authorised collateral damage limits for Lavender-generated strikes were as follows. For a low-ranking Hamas operative, the system was permitted to kill up to fifteen or twenty uninvolved civilians. For a senior commander, the figure rose to one hundred. These are not numbers from human rights critics. They are the operational parameters described by the officers running the system. The officers said the parameters were applied. In one operation, an officer told +972 that the army authorised the killing of approximately three hundred civilians in the assassination of a single Hamas brigade commander, the strike approved in advance under the existing collateral damage parameters.³⁵
The munitions used in these strikes were, by the officers’ account, deliberately mismatched to the target. Junior operatives were struck with the same unguided “dumb bombs” that we have already discussed — bombs that level entire buildings. The officers said the choice of unguided munitions for low-value targets was a matter of stockpile management: precision munitions are expensive and limited, and the IDF chose not to expend them on targets the system identified as low-priority. The consequence of using a Mk 84 to kill one person identified by an AI system as a Hamas foot soldier, in a residential apartment building, in the middle of the night, with the building’s other residents present, is that the building falls down and everyone in it dies. The officers knew this. The system was designed around this knowledge.³⁵
The Israeli military’s response to the +972 investigation was, in part, to dispute the framing — to deny that the system had been used “as described” and to insist that human officers remained “in the loop” on every strike. The military denied that Lavender functioned as a kill list, while acknowledging the existence of database tools used to cross-reference intelligence. It did not contest the collateral damage figures with any specificity. It did not produce evidence that the human review of Lavender targets was substantively more rigorous than the officers had described. The substance of the investigation has stood. It has been corroborated by subsequent reporting in The Guardian, Le Monde, The Washington Post, and Haaretz, drawing on additional Israeli intelligence sources.³⁶
The legal question is not whether the use of AI targeting in armed conflict is, in principle, unlawful. It is not. The question is whether the systems as deployed in Gaza were used in a manner consistent with the laws of war. The relevant legal standards are the same as for any targeting decision: distinction, proportionality, precaution. A system that produces a kill list of 37,000 people with a known ten percent false positive rate, that is approved at an average rate of twenty seconds per name, that strikes those targets in their family homes with munitions chosen for their indiscriminate effect, under collateral damage parameters that authorise the killing of up to one hundred uninvolved civilians per senior target, cannot satisfy distinction. It cannot satisfy proportionality. It is not, in any meaningful sense, taking precautions to minimise civilian harm. It is the systematisation of the failure to do so.
There is one more dimension worth naming. The officers who spoke to +972 described the psychological and political function of the systems alongside their operational function. The systems removed the human officer from the responsibility for each individual decision. The human officer was not deciding to kill a person. The human officer was confirming a system’s output. The same decision, made the same way, with the same outcome, was now somebody else’s responsibility — or no one’s. The diffusion of moral responsibility through the machine was a feature, not a side effect. It is what made it possible for the Israeli intelligence corps to participate in an operation of this scale without the kind of mass refusals, mass resignations, and mass psychiatric breakdowns that have historically accompanied military operations against civilians on this scale. The officers, in their own words, were able to do this. The system permitted them to do this. The system was designed to permit them to do this.
The civilians who died were not, however, killed by a machine. They were killed by the same human beings who continue to insist that they did not kill them. The law does not treat the introduction of an AI system as a defence. It treats it as evidence. The evidence is on the record.
Starvation as Policy
A bombing campaign kills the people it hits, indiscriminate of combatants or civilians. A starvation campaign kills everyone else. The Israeli government chose both. The siege Yoav Gallant announced on 9 October 2023 — no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed — was not a rhetorical flourish. It was implemented. The crossings into Gaza were closed. The water pipelines were cut. The electricity was switched off. The fuel that powered Gaza’s bakeries, its hospitals’ generators, its water pumps, its sewage treatment plants was shut off at the Israeli switch. For weeks, then months, what entered Gaza entered only at the discretion of the government that had announced it would let no food in.
The international protest was enough to produce a partial reopening of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and the establishment of a coordination mechanism through which aid trucks could attempt to enter. The mechanism was administered by the Israeli authority COGAT, which retained the right to inspect, refuse, and delay each shipment. The volume that entered was a fraction of what was needed. In the months before 7 October, Gaza had typically received roughly 500 truckloads per day of food and supplies. In the months after, the figure ran at one hundred per day, then sixty, then twenty, with weeks at a time during which no trucks crossed at all. UN officials publicly described the bottleneck as deliberate. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Programme and the widow of a US Republican senator — not a figure who could be dismissed as anti-Israeli — told NBC’s Meet the Press in May 2024 that there was “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and that the famine was “moving its way south.” The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the international system that declares famines, declared Phase 5 — famine — in parts of Gaza in March 2024 and again, more comprehensively, in August 2025. Phase 5 is the highest level. There is no level above it. It is the term the international community uses when people are starving to death and there is no longer any plausible argument that the situation can be reversed by ordinary humanitarian response.³⁷
The Israeli officials who designed the policy did not pretend otherwise. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in 2024 there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza” and publicly called for the bombing of aid stocks. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who controlled the budgets for the West Bank and Gaza administration, said in August 2024 that it might be “just and moral” to starve two million Gazans, “but the world will not let us.” The Israeli press reported these statements at the time. They were not corrected. They were not retracted. They were not punished. The ministers who made them remained in office. The policy they described was, on the available evidence, the policy that was carried out.³⁸
The starvation was not only state policy. It was state-tolerated mob violence as well. Through 2024 and into 2025, organised groups of Israeli settlers and their supporters — most prominently the group calling itself Tzav 9, “Order 9” — repeatedly blockaded aid convoys at the crossings into Gaza, stopped them on the roads, climbed onto the trucks, and looted or destroyed the flour, rice, and medical supplies inside. In one widely circulated incident in May 2024, settlers stopped a convoy on a road in the West Bank, dragged the food onto the tarmac, and set it on fire. Drivers were beaten. Israeli police and IDF soldiers, where they were present, frequently stood by and watched. Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, and the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din documented the pattern across dozens of incidents. The Israeli government took no meaningful action against the groups responsible. The US Treasury Department, in June 2024, imposed sanctions on Tzav 9 under the executive order on settler violence — a sanctioning of a civilian Israeli organisation by the country that was simultaneously arming the war. The Israeli government denounced the sanctions. The destruction of aid continued. None of this happens in a country whose government is making a good-faith effort to feed the population under its control.³⁹
The Flour Massacre of 29 February 2024 was the first incident at which the world saw what starvation policy looked like at the point of contact. A convoy of aid trucks carrying flour reached the Nabulsi roundabout in northern Gaza City before dawn. The scene that followed has no good description. Thousands of starving Palestinians, many of whom had walked through the night, many of whom had not eaten in days, swarmed the trucks in the dark — climbing onto them, reaching for the bags of flour, fighting each other for the food. Israeli tanks and snipers were positioned in the buffer zone overlooking the road. They fired on the crowd. The death toll was at least 118 Palestinians killed, with more than 760 wounded. The Israeli military’s initial claim was that most of the dead had been crushed or run over in the chaos. Forensic analysis of the wounds, including by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and by the Al-Awda Hospital that received the casualties, established that the majority of the dead and wounded had gunshot wounds. The Israeli military adjusted its claim to say that the gunfire had been limited and that its troops had felt threatened. Video and satellite imagery analysed by The Washington Post and by Forensic Architecture established that the gunfire had been sustained, that it had been directed into the crowd, and that the crowd had posed no threat. The massacre at the Nabulsi roundabout was not a single incident. It was the first widely documented instance of a pattern that would, by mid-2025, become routine.⁴⁰
That pattern was institutionalised in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF was launched in May 2025 as a replacement for the UN-led aid distribution system, which the Israeli government and the second Trump administration had spent the previous twelve months working to dismantle. UNRWA had been banned from operating in Israel. The UN agencies that had distributed aid throughout the war had been accused, without evidence, of being Hamas-infiltrated. The GHF was the alternative. It was registered as a private American nonprofit, funded largely by anonymous donors with a substantial first tranche from the US government. Its operational arm was Safe Reach Solutions, a private security firm staffed by former US special forces personnel, working alongside subcontractors that included an outfit calling itself UG Solutions. The aid distribution sites were established in southern Gaza, in locations that required Palestinians to walk for hours through Israeli-controlled corridors to reach them. The sites were guarded by armed contractors. They were monitored by Israeli forces. They were not coordinated with the UN.⁴¹
What happened at the GHF sites between May and October 2025 was a slow-motion massacre. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented that between the GHF’s launch and the end of October 2025, more than 2,600 Palestinians had been killed at or near the foundation’s distribution sites, with more than 19,000 wounded. The pattern was consistent: crowds of desperate, starving Palestinians, often having walked through the night to reach the sites, would be fired on as they approached. The fire came sometimes from the Israeli forces surrounding the sites, sometimes from the contractors themselves. The contractors, as it turned out, were not bashful about what they were doing. Photographs and videos that emerged through 2025, some uploaded by the contractors to their own social media, showed members of UG Solutions wearing patches identifying themselves as members of the “Infidels Motorcycle Club,” displaying banners that read “Make Gaza Great Again,” and bearing tattoos of the number 1095 — a reference, the contractors themselves explained, to the date of the launch of the First Crusade. Doctors Without Borders, after months of treating the wounded at GHF sites, issued a public statement: “This is not humanitarian aid. This is orchestrated killing.” The Norwegian Refugee Council called the GHF a “death trap.” The UN Secretary-General called for an immediate end to the operation. The Israeli government and the Trump administration declared it a success.⁴²
The mechanism the GHF replaced — the UN-coordinated distribution system through UNRWA, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and the international NGOs — was the mechanism that had, for decades, fed populations in war zones around the world without resulting in the routine killing of the people being fed. There is no precedent in modern humanitarian practice for the kind of figures the GHF produced. There is no comparable operation in which civilians seeking food were routinely shot by the armed personnel administering the distribution. The system did not produce these outcomes by accident. The system was designed in such a way that these outcomes were the predictable result of its operating procedures. The Israeli government and the US government built it that way and continued to defend it as people died at it.
The law on starvation as a method of warfare is unambiguous. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 54, prohibits “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” The prohibition is absolute. The Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv), defines the deliberate starvation of civilians, “including by wilfully impeding relief supplies,” as a war crime in international armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law require parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief to civilians in need. The Israeli government has done the opposite of each of these things. It has impeded relief. It has destroyed relief infrastructure. It has killed relief workers. It has constructed a parallel distribution system at which relief seekers are killed. The IPC has declared famine. The ICJ has, in its provisional measures orders of January, March, and May 2024, ordered Israel to allow the unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid. The orders have been ignored.⁴³
The cumulative pattern is what international law has, since the drafters of the Genocide Convention sat down in 1948 and wrote it, regarded as a marker of intent. Article II of the Convention defines genocide to include the “deliberate inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The drafters had in mind, specifically, the conditions imposed on Jewish populations under Nazi occupation: the ghettoisation, the starvation rations, the prevention of escape, the systematic deprivation of medical care. They wrote the Convention in such a way that the same conditions, imposed on any group, by any state, would be recognised as the same crime. The conditions imposed on Gaza meet that definition. Saying so does not diminish the Holocaust. It honours the lesson the survivors of the Holocaust insisted the world take from it.
The West Bank, Where No Hamas Exists
The defence of everything described above is, in the Israeli government’s framing, the existence of Hamas. The bombing, the starvation, the destruction of hospitals, the killing of journalists — all of it is, on the official Israeli account, the regrettable but necessary cost of fighting a terrorist organisation that controls Gaza and that committed the atrocities of 7 October. Whatever one makes of that defence as applied to Gaza, it has nothing to say about the West Bank. There is no Hamas government in the West Bank. There is no Hamas military force in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the parts of the West Bank that Israel allows it to govern, is the same authority Israel itself has spent thirty years dealing with as its negotiating partner. The conduct of the Israeli state and the Israeli settler movement in the West Bank since 7 October is therefore, in a way, the clearer case. It is the conduct that cannot be explained by Hamas. It is what the Israeli state does when there is no Hamas to point at.
By the end of 2025, Israeli forces and Israeli settlers had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The figure is itself the lower bound; B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has tracked higher numbers. Among the dead are more than 200 children. The killings are not concentrated in single incidents but distributed across thousands of operations — military raids on the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus; settler attacks on villages; checkpoint shootings; targeted killings carried out by drone in the West Bank for the first time in the conflict’s recent history. Whole neighbourhoods of Jenin’s refugee camp have been bulldozed in operations the IDF has described as counter-terrorism and that have produced the displacement of tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians inside their own territory.⁴⁴
The settler violence is the part that cannot be assimilated to any defensible narrative. Through 2024 and 2025, organised settler militias attacked Palestinian villages across the West Bank — burning homes, destroying olive groves, killing residents, and forcing the depopulation of dozens of villages. The villages of Khirbet Zanuta, Wadi al-Siq, Khirbet al-Ratheem, and dozens of others have been documented by Israeli human rights organisations including B’Tselem, Yesh Din, and Breaking the Silence as having been emptied by sustained settler violence under IDF protection. The settlers operate, in many cases, alongside or in coordination with IDF reservists who have been called up since 7 October and who have used their military equipment and their military authority to facilitate the attacks. The US government, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, briefly sanctioned individual settlers and settler organisations under the executive order on settler violence; the Trump administration rescinded most of those sanctions in early 2025. The pattern continues.⁴⁵
The Israeli government has, in the same period, accelerated the formal annexation of West Bank territory. Smotrich, in his dual role as Finance Minister and minister within the Defence Ministry with authority over civilian administration in the West Bank, has used administrative powers to transfer responsibility for settlement expansion from the military to civilian Israeli ministries — a transfer the ICJ in its July 2024 advisory opinion identified as itself a marker of de facto annexation contrary to international law. New settlements have been approved at the highest rate in the history of the occupation. Outposts previously illegal under Israeli law have been retroactively legalised. The settler population in the West Bank has passed 750,000.
The administrative detention regime has expanded in parallel. By the end of 2025, more than 9,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli custody, of whom roughly 3,400 were West Bank administrative detainees held without charge under Military Order 1651, and another 3,400 were Gazans held under the Unlawful Combatants Law that was substantially amended in December 2023 to permit longer detention without judicial review and that has produced repeated, credible allegations of torture in the detention facilities. The conditions of their detention are the subject of the next section.
The point of this section is not to inventory every act of West Bank violence since 7 October. It is to establish, for the reader, that the conduct described in the previous sections is not specific to the war against Hamas. It is the conduct of a state that has, in the past two years, deepened a system of dispossession and violence that long predated 7 October and that has nothing to do with Hamas in any part of the territory where Hamas does not exist. That is not a side effect of the Gaza war. It is the same project, executed in a different terrain.
Sde Teiman and the Detention System
The sexual violence committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians did not begin at Sde Teiman, and it did not begin in response to 7 October. It is older than the state. The documented record runs from before the founding.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, drawing on Israeli military archives, documents rape as a feature of the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians from villages including Deir Yassin, Tantura, Ramleh, and Lydda. Aharon Zisling, Israel’s first agriculture minister, told a cabinet meeting in July 1948, in words later recovered from the Israeli state archives by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2022, that he “could forgive instances of rape [in Ramleh]” but not other acts. The remark was made by a senior minister of the new state, on the record, in cabinet, and it was a remark about acts already committed by Israeli forces, casually disposed of. In 1949 a young Bedouin girl in the Negev was abducted by an Israeli platoon, gang-raped over several days, then murdered. The case is documented in Israeli military court testimony — the only such court martial recorded — and was uncovered fifty-four years later by Haaretz. The Red Cross documented the rape of an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl after the takeover of Jaffa in December 1948.⁴⁶
Haaretz, in 2019, reported that the Israeli Defence Ministry has been systematically removing references to Nakba-era atrocities — including expulsions, massacres, and rape — from declassified military archives. The Israeli state, in other words, has known about this conduct for seventy-eight years and has taken active measures to conceal it from its own public. The Palestinian historian and law professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, in three decades of academic work on the subject, has documented sexual violence against Palestinian women and men as a continuous feature of the Israeli military’s encounter with Palestinians — during the Nakba, during the occupation, during the intifadas, during the long period in which it has held Palestinians in custody. The pattern is older than 7 October. It is older than Hamas. It is older than the modern occupation. It is part of the founding.
What is described in the rest of this section is the most recent and most heavily documented chapter of that record. It is not the beginning. The article would be doing the work of Israeli archive-suppression itself if it allowed the reader to think otherwise.
In the early weeks of the war, the Israeli military established a holding facility at Sde Teiman, an air force base in the Negev desert near Beersheba. Palestinians taken into custody in Gaza — combatants, suspected combatants, men and women rounded up from buildings the IDF had taken, doctors and journalists arrested at hospitals and crossings — were transported to Sde Teiman before being moved on to longer-term Israeli prisons. The facility was not built as a detention centre. It had no infrastructure for holding human beings. What was set up there, in the months that followed, became the place that has done more than any other single thing to expose the character of the system the Israeli state built in response to 7 October.⁴⁷
Detainees at Sde Teiman, in their testimony given after release and corroborated by the testimony of Israeli soldiers, doctors, and human rights investigators, were held in conditions that violated every relevant standard of international and Israeli law. They were blindfolded for days and weeks at a time. They were shackled in stress positions. They were denied medical care. Their wounds were untreated; the most documented detail of the facility is the number of detainees who arrived with combat injuries and lost limbs because the necrotic tissue went untreated until amputation was the only option. The Israeli human rights organisation Physicians for Human Rights — Israel sent representatives to the facility and documented routine amputations performed without anaesthesia. Haaretz obtained testimony from Israeli reservist doctors who had served at the facility and who described what they had seen and what they had been ordered to participate in. One of those doctors went on the record. The descriptions are consistent across sources. They describe a torture camp run by the state of Israel.⁴⁸
The sexual violence was on a different order. The single Sde Teiman case that produced the indictment in July 2024 — five reservists captured on video raping a Palestinian detainee with a sharp object, an act that required the man to be hospitalised with injuries that, according to Kan public radio, left him unable to walk — was not an isolated event. It was the visible piece of what released detainees, Israeli soldiers, and the UN Commission of Inquiry have since described as a routine practice. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in November 2025, published the consolidated testimonies of released detainees describing systematic rape and sexual torture across the Israeli detention system, including penetration with batons, metal rods, sharp objects, and other implements. Euro-Med Monitor published a parallel report describing the same pattern across multiple facilities. The UN Commission of Inquiry, in March 2025, found that sexual violence had been used by Israeli forces as a tool to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part,” and that the use of dogs to intimidate and to assault Palestinian detainees was documented across detention sites.⁴⁹
The use of military dogs trained to rape Palestinian detainees is the detail that most readers will find hardest to accept, and it is the detail that is most consistently corroborated. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights collected the testimony of A.A., a 35-year-old father arrested at Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, who described being taken with a group of detainees to a corridor between sections of Sde Teiman, stripped, and raped by a trained military dog while soldiers beat and pepper-sprayed the prisoners. Euro-Med Monitor’s report Another Genocide Behind Walls contains the testimony of a second detainee describing the same act. Fadi Bakr, in an Al Jazeera documentary, described being forced to watch a young Palestinian man raped by a dog at Sde Teiman. Mohammed Arab, the Gaza correspondent for Al Araby television, told his lawyer in July 2024 that he had personally witnessed soldiers use dogs to sexually abuse detainees at the same facility and had been told by the soldiers that the dogs were trained for it. Drop Site News, in November 2025, published the corroborating testimony of two Israeli prison guards who had served at Sde Teiman, one of whom said he had personally witnessed the use of dogs in sexual assault and that what he had seen was “too awful to describe.” The New York Times, in May 2026, published a long investigation by Nicholas Kristof drawing on the testimony of fourteen released Palestinian men and women, in which the practice is described and in which the UN’s characterisation of it as Israeli “standard operating procedure” is endorsed.⁵⁰
In July 2024, Israeli military police entered Sde Teiman to investigate a specific allegation against a group of reservist soldiers: the rape of a Palestinian detainee with a sharp object. The allegation was supported by video footage filmed inside the facility. The military police arrested nine reservists for questioning. The response of the Israeli right was immediate and unmistakable. Hundreds of Israeli protesters, including members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition — Knesset members Tally Gotliv, Nissim Vaturi, and Zvi Sukkot were photographed at the scene — stormed the Sde Teiman base in physical attempts to free the soldiers from custody. A second mob attacked the Beit Lid military court where the soldiers were being questioned. Senior coalition figures — Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin — called the investigation itself a “blood libel” against the IDF; Israel Katz, then Foreign Minister, would later, after his promotion to Defence Minister in November 2024, repeat the same framing throughout the case. The Israeli state’s response to the discovery of the rape of a Palestinian prisoner by its soldiers was, in significant part, the public defence of the soldiers by ministers of the Israeli government and the storming of the military’s own facilities by Knesset members to obstruct the investigation.⁵¹
In August 2024, video footage from the incident was leaked to the Israeli press. The public saw what was on the recording. Five of the reservists were formally indicted, including on charges of aggravated abuse and the specific act named in the indictment: penetration of the detainee with a sharp object, causing the wounds for which he had required surgery. The case proceeded through 2024 and into 2025 under sustained political pressure from the governing coalition and the broader Israeli right. The Military Advocate General — Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the most senior legal officer in the Israeli military — was identified by the political right as the figure responsible for the investigation, and she became the target of a sustained campaign of vilification by ministers, by coalition Knesset members, and by mainstream Israeli media on the right. Ben-Gvir was prominent among her attackers. The Defence Minister publicly questioned whether the case should proceed at all. The pressure was relentless.⁵²
In October 2025, Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that she had personally authorised the release of the video footage to the Israeli press — the action that had broken the case open the previous year. She wrote that she had done so to counter what she called the incitement campaign against the military’s law enforcement system and to make clear that “even the worst terrorists cannot be abused.” On the day of her resignation, she disappeared for several hours. There was public speculation that she had attempted suicide. She was located, alive. Two days later, Israeli police arrested her. She was held in custody on suspicion of fraud, breach of trust, abuse of official power, obstruction of justice, and the unauthorised disclosure of information by a public official. The soldiers she had ordered investigated remained free.⁵³
On 12 March 2026 — two months before this article was written — the charges against the five Sde Teiman soldiers were dismissed in their entirety. The decision was made by the new Military Advocate General, Major General Itay Ofir, who had been appointed to replace Tomer-Yerushalmi on the express recommendation of Defence Minister Katz. Katz called the dismissal a vindication of soldiers who had been subjected to a “blood libel.” The Palestinian detainee whose rape the original investigation had been concerned with — the man whose wounds had required surgery, whose treatment had been documented on video, whose case had set the entire scandal in motion — has not received any form of justice from the Israeli system. The woman who tried to investigate the crime is in custody. The men who committed it are free. That is the verdict the Israeli military justice system rendered on its own conduct, and it is the verdict the Israeli state has accepted.⁵⁴
The detention regime at Sde Teiman is one node in a larger system. By the end of 2025, more than 11,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli custody — the largest detained population in any war Israel has fought. Many of them are held without charge under administrative detention. Many of them are held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, an Israeli statute originally designed for Lebanese fighters in the 1990s and now applied broadly to Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, that suspends the normal protections of the Israeli criminal justice system. The B’Tselem report Welcome to Hell, published in August 2024, documented the conditions across the network of Israeli detention facilities holding Palestinians from Gaza. Its conclusion was that Israel had created, in the words of the report, “an entire network of torture camps.” The report drew on the testimony of fifty-five released detainees and on the testimony of Israeli soldiers and medical personnel. The Israeli government did not contest its findings substantively. It dismissed them politically.⁵⁵
Hundreds of detainees have died in Israeli custody since 7 October. The exact figure is contested because the Israeli government has not produced a comprehensive accounting. The Israeli prison authority and the Israeli military have repeatedly returned the bodies of dead Palestinians to Gaza for burial, sometimes after years of refusal. In one tranche of returns documented in early 2025, 135 bodies were returned, including bodies that had been held at Sde Teiman. Forensic examination by Palestinian medical authorities, where it was possible, found bodies that had been mutilated, bodies still blindfolded, bodies still bound, bodies showing the signs of the conditions the released detainees had described. The Israeli government has not provided cause-of-death information for the majority of these detainees. The detainees who have come home alive have come home, in many cases, broken — psychologically, physically, in many cases both.⁵⁶
What the Sde Teiman case has established, and what the detention regime around it confirms, is that the Israeli state has institutionalised the abuse of Palestinians taken into its custody and that the Israeli state’s own mechanisms of accountability cannot or will not stop it. The crimes are documented. The investigators have been driven out. The crimes are not punished. This is not a system in which abuse occurs as a violation of the rules. It is a system in which abuse is the operating procedure and in which the rules have been bent, and where necessary broken, to protect it.
The Law, in Plain English
We said at the start of this article that we would apply one standard to both parties, and that the standard would be the law every state on earth has signed. We are now at the point in the argument where we say what the law concludes.
Start with Hamas. The killing of civilians at the Nova festival and in the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope is a war crime under any reading of the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3, which applies to all armed conflicts and to all armed groups whether or not they are states, prohibits “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” committed against persons taking no active part in hostilities. The young people at Nova were taking no active part in hostilities. The elderly residents of Be’eri and Kfar Aza and Nir Oz were taking no active part in hostilities. The children killed in their bedrooms were taking no active part in hostilities. The deliberate killing of all of them was a war crime. The burning of civilians alive at Nova and in the kibbutzim, established by Israeli forensic investigators and survivor testimony, is a war crime — the same war crime in form that Israel later committed against Palestinian civilians at the Al-Aqsa Hospital tent camp and elsewhere, named in the same Geneva Conventions and prohibited by the same Common Article 3.
The taking of civilian hostages — including a nine-month-old infant, including elderly people, including foreign nationals — is a war crime under Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The murder of those hostages during their captivity, established in the case of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the five others executed in the Rafah tunnel in August 2024, is a war crime — the same war crime as a summary execution of any prisoner under any law of war. The sexual violence committed against hostages in captivity, found by the UN Special Representative to be supported by clear and convincing information, is a war crime. The form and extent of sexual violence committed on 7 October itself has not been independently established because Israel refused the investigation that could have established it; the Patten finding of reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations on the day stands as the highest authority. Indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilian population centres, which Hamas conducted on 7 October and has conducted before and since, violates the principle of distinction set out in Article 48 of Additional Protocol I.
The cause Hamas claims to be serving does not, under any reading of the law, license the methods it used on 7 October or during the captivity that followed. The legal verdict on Hamas’s conduct is plain. The conduct was unlawful. The conduct was a war crime, in multiple separate categories established to multiple separate evidentiary standards by multiple separate authorities. The cause itself, however, is not the same as the conduct. Armed resistance to belligerent occupation, to a siege, and to the denial of self-determination is a right recognised under international law. UN General Assembly resolutions over decades have affirmed it. The crimes Hamas committed in pursuit of that right are crimes. The right itself remains.
Now turn to Israel. The legal framework that Israel has signed up to is the same one. The standards Hamas violated on 7 October are the standards Israel has been violating, on a different scale, since the response began.
Take the conduct one element at a time.
The bombing campaign violates the principle of distinction. Distinction is the rule that combatants must be distinguished from civilians, and that civilians must not be the object of attack. It is set out in Article 48 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, and it is customary international law that applies to every party to every armed conflict. The dropping of 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated residential neighbourhoods, in the deliberate knowledge that civilians will die in them, is not a failure of distinction. It is the abandonment of it. The use of an AI targeting system that produces a kill list of 37,000 people, approved at an average rate of twenty seconds per name, with a known false-positive rate of ten percent and an authorised collateral damage tolerance of up to one hundred civilians per senior target, is not a failure of distinction. It is its systematisation.
The bombing campaign violates the principle of proportionality. Proportionality is the rule that the expected civilian harm of an attack must not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. It is set out in Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I, and in customary international law. The destruction of an entire residential building to kill one mid-level operative is disproportionate by any reading. The flattening of entire neighbourhoods is disproportionate. The killing of more than 60,000 people, the majority of them women and children, in the course of a campaign whose stated military objective was the destruction of an armed group estimated at the start of the war at between 30,000 and 40,000 fighters, is disproportionate by any reading any state has ever offered.
The bombing campaign violates the duty of precautions. Precaution is the rule that all feasible measures must be taken to minimise civilian harm. It is set out in Article 57 of Additional Protocol I, and in customary international law. Striking targets in their family homes, with their families present, by deliberate operational choice, is the opposite of precaution. The use of unguided “dumb” munitions in densely populated residential neighbourhoods, by deliberate operational choice, is the opposite of precaution. The deliberate destruction of hospitals, of medical infrastructure, of water and sanitation systems — each of which is a protected object under the law — cannot be reconciled with the duty of precaution.
The targeting of journalists is a war crime. Journalists are civilians under international humanitarian law, and the deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute. The killing of more than 230 Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces, including the killing of clearly identified journalists in marked press vehicles, is not the cost of war. It is the prosecution of war against a protected class.
The targeting of medical workers and aid workers is a war crime. Medical personnel and humanitarian aid workers are protected persons under Article 12 of the First Geneva Convention and under Articles 15 and 71 of Additional Protocol I. The killing of more than 1,000 health workers in Gaza, including the killing of fifteen medics in a single attack on a clearly marked ambulance convoy in March 2025, is a war crime. The killing of the seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in three sequential drone strikes on three vehicles whose route had been pre-coordinated with the Israeli military is a war crime. The pattern of strikes on aid worker premises whose coordinates had been shared with Israeli authorities is a war crime committed not once but as a matter of policy.
The destruction of cultural and religious property is a war crime. The deliberate destruction of religious buildings is prohibited under Article 53 of Additional Protocol I and under Article 8(2)(b)(ix) of the Rome Statute. The destruction of more than 800 mosques, of three Christian churches including one of the oldest standing churches in the world, of every university in Gaza, of the central archives of the territory, has no military rationale that the Israeli government has been able to articulate. The law treats it as a war crime.
Starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I prohibits “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” without exception. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute makes the deliberate starvation of civilians, “including by wilfully impeding relief supplies,” a war crime. The IPC has declared famine in Gaza. The ICJ has, in successive provisional measures orders, instructed Israel to allow the unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid. The orders have been ignored. The starvation has continued. The Israeli ministers responsible for the policy have described it openly as a policy. There is no ambiguity in this part of the law and there is no ambiguity in this part of the conduct.
The conduct of the Israeli detention regime is the systematic violation of every relevant law. The Convention Against Torture, to which Israel is a state party, prohibits torture absolutely. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the abuse, sexual violence against, and degrading treatment of detained persons under any circumstances. The use of rape, including the use of trained dogs in rape, as a tool of detention is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act that meets the threshold of torture under the Convention. The Israeli government’s response to the discovery of these crimes — the dismissal of the charges against the soldiers who committed them, the prosecution of the official who exposed them — does not change the legal status of the underlying conduct. It establishes only that Israeli domestic accountability mechanisms have failed.
The cumulative pattern is what international law has, since 1948, treated separately. The drafters of the Genocide Convention did not write Article II as a prohibition on the desire to commit genocide. They wrote it as a prohibition on certain acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group in whole or in part. The relevant acts are listed: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The conduct in Gaza meets the first three of these definitions on the face of the record. The intent, which is the legal element that distinguishes genocide from mass atrocity, is established not by inference but by the explicit statements of senior Israeli officials, on the record, on camera, collected in the South African application to the International Court of Justice.
The legal bodies whose job it is to apply these standards have, where they have been asked, applied them.
The International Court of Justice, in January 2024, found that South Africa had standing to bring a genocide case against Israel and that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. The Court ordered Israel to take provisional measures to prevent further harm. The Court has not yet ruled on the merits. The Court repeated and expanded those orders in March and May 2024. The Court ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is itself unlawful and must end. The case on the merits is ongoing. The conclusion the Court will reach is, at this stage, foreshadowed by what the Court has already said.
The International Criminal Court, in November 2024, issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, alongside a warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif for the crimes of 7 October. The warrants are the formal conclusion of the Court’s prosecutor that there are reasonable grounds to believe these specific individuals bear criminal responsibility for the conduct on each side. The United States government has, under the second Trump administration, sanctioned the ICC and its prosecutor in response. The sanctioning of an international court for issuing warrants that the United States does not like is itself a measure of where the legal record stands.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in September 2025, formally concluded that Israel has committed and is committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. The finding is a finding of a UN-mandated body of investigators, not a court ruling, and it does not have the binding legal force of an ICJ judgement. It is, however, the highest-level investigative finding by an international body that the conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. It is on the public record. It is what the body charged with investigating these things found.
The verdict, on the basis of what the law says and what the relevant bodies have applied it to find, is not difficult to state in plain language.
Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October. The cause it claims to be serving does not license the methods. Hamas is responsible for those crimes, and the rule of law requires that the responsible individuals be held to account.
Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza on a scale and over a duration that meets the definitional threshold of the Genocide Convention. The ICJ has ordered provisional measures and has not yet ruled on the merits. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for the prime minister and the defence minister. The UN Commission of Inquiry has formally concluded that genocide has been committed. The Israeli state has, in addition, conducted parallel campaigns of unlawful conduct in the West Bank, where Hamas does not exist, and in a detention regime that has been documented as a network of torture camps. These conclusions are not contested by the international institutions that exist to find them. They are contested only by the governments that have armed and supplied the campaign and that have refused to draw the conclusions the evidence supports.
That is the verdict on the conduct. The question of why — why Hamas built what it built, why Iran funded what it funded, why Palestinian leadership failed where it failed, why Netanyahu propped up the very organisation that attacked his country, why the occupation persisted across half a century until 7 October became thinkable — is the question Part II takes up. The conduct is what the law judges. The causes are what the politics has to face.
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
Photo: Ashraf Amra / UNRWA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and text overlay added for header.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago,” New York Times, 30 November 2023.
² UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, A/HRC/40/74, 28 February 2019.
³ Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Iran Was Surprised by Timing of Hamas Attack, US Intelligence Says,” New York Times, 11 October 2023.
⁴ Tal Schneider, “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces,” Times of Israel, 8 October 2023; David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner, “Israel’s Premier Pursued Strategy to Keep Hamas in Power,” New York Times, 11 October 2023.
⁵ “How Hamas Built a Force to Attack Israel on 7 October,” Reuters, 12 October 2023; Amos Harel, “How Israel Was Caught Unprepared on October 7,” Haaretz, 12 October 2023.
⁶ AFP, “Israel revises October 7 death toll to about 1,200,” 11 November 2023.
⁷ Yaniv Kubovich, “Hamas Took Israeli Hostages on Oct. 7. The Israeli Army Ordered Their Killers Killed With Them,” Haaretz, 7 July 2024; Adam Sella, Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman, “The Battle for Be’eri,” New York Times, December 2023; on Colonel Nof Erez’s “mass Hannibal” characterisation, see the audio interview published by Haaretz, 9 November 2023.
⁸ Times of Israel, “364 confirmed dead at Nova festival,” 18 October 2023.
⁹ UN OHCHR, “Detailed findings on the attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel,” March 2025; Israel Police preliminary findings released 30 November 2023.
¹⁰ Times of Israel, “IDF finds video of Bibas family in Gaza, ‘very concerned’ for mother, youngest hostages,” 19 February 2024.
¹¹ Geneva Convention IV, Article 34: “The taking of hostages is prohibited.”
¹² Nir Hasson and Liza Rozovsky, “How an Unverified Story About Beheaded Babies Spread Around the World,” Haaretz, 4 December 2023; Reuters, “White House walks back Biden remark on beheaded children in Israel,” 12 October 2023.
¹³ Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw, “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” The Intercept, 28 February 2024.
¹⁴ UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Mission report — official visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank, 29 January to 14 February 2024, published 4 March 2024.
¹⁵ Times of Israel, “Israel forbids doctors from speaking to UN group investigating Oct. 7 atrocities,” 16 January 2024; Haaretz, “Israel Blocks UN Probe Into Hamas Sexual Crimes From October 7 to Avoid Inquiry Into Abuse of Palestinians,” 8 January 2025.
¹⁶ On the prior Israeli mainstream exposure of Cochav Elkayam-Levy, see the Yedioth Ahronoth/Ynet investigation, March 2024; reported in English by Middle East Monitor, “Israel media questions awarding prize to fraudulent lawyer behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ allegations,” 28 March 2024.
¹⁷ Times of Israel, “Freed Hamas hostage recounts ordeal, slams Israeli failures, speaks well of captors,” 24 October 2023.
¹⁸ Times of Israel, “Lifshitz press conference panned as disastrous for Israel, PR win for Hamas,” 24 October 2023.
¹⁹ Anshel Pfeffer, “The Hannibal Directive: Why Israel Risks the Lives of Its Captured Soldiers,” Haaretz, October 2014; Gili Cohen, “IDF Cancels ‘Hannibal Directive,’ Replacing It With New Orders for Soldier Abductions,” Haaretz, 28 June 2016.
²⁰ Reuters, “Egypt warned Israel days before Hamas struck, US committee chairman says,” 11 October 2023.
²¹ Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago,” New York Times, 30 November 2023.
²² Times of Israel, “Gaza border observers raised alarms about Hamas drills for months before October 7,” 17 October 2023.
²³ Amos Harel, “How Israel Was Caught Unprepared on October 7,” Haaretz, 12 October 2023.
²⁴ Reuters, “Israel orders ‘complete siege’ of Gaza,” 9 October 2023.
²⁵ Natasha Bertrand et al., “Nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise ‘dumb bombs,’ US intelligence assessment finds,” CNN, 13 December 2023.
²⁶ Zeina Jamaluddine et al., “Excess mortality in the Gaza Strip during the conflict, 7 October 2023 to 30 June 2024,” The Lancet, January 2025.
²⁷ Susannah George, Sarah Cahlan and Hajar Harb, “Israel’s evidence for Al-Shifa hospital as Hamas base is hard to find,” Washington Post, 21 December 2023.
²⁸ World Health Organisation, Health Cluster Bulletin — Gaza, monthly editions through 2024–2025.
²⁹ BBC, “Verified: How Israeli forces struck the Greek Orthodox church in Gaza,” 21 October 2023; Forensic Architecture, “Living Archaeology in Gaza,” 2024.
³⁰ Committee to Protect Journalists, Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War, ongoing tracker.
³¹ Nick Waters, “Strike That Killed World Central Kitchen Workers Bears Hallmarks of Israeli Precision Strike,” Bellingcat, 2 April 2024; Human Rights Watch, Gaza: Israelis Attacking Known Aid Worker Locations, 14 May 2024.
³² Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, “Israeli Military Says Troops Mistakenly Killed Three Hostages,” New York Times, 15 December 2023.
³³ Amnesty International Crisis Evidence Lab, Hidden in Plain Sight, 2024; Forensic Architecture investigations into the buffer zone demolitions.
³⁴ Republic of South Africa, Application instituting proceedings in South Africa v. Israel, filed at the ICJ on 29 December 2023; ICJ, Order of 26 January 2024.
³⁵ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024.
³⁶ Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies, “’The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas suspects,” The Guardian, 3 April 2024.
³⁷ Margaret Brennan, “Transcript: Cindy McCain on ‘Face the Nation,’” CBS News, 5 May 2024; Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Gaza Strip: Acute Food Insecurity Situation, reports of March 2024 and August 2025.
³⁸ Times of Israel, “Ben Gvir: ‘Nothing more just’ than blocking aid to Gaza,” 4 February 2024; Times of Israel, “Smotrich: It might be ‘just and moral’ to starve 2 million Gazans, but ‘world won’t let us,’” 5 August 2024.
³⁹ Haaretz, “Settlers Attack Aid Trucks Heading to Gaza, Burn Their Cargo,” 13 May 2024; US Department of the Treasury press release, “Treasury Sanctions Tzav 9 for Blocking Humanitarian Aid to Gaza,” 14 June 2024.
⁴⁰ The Washington Post, “How Israeli forces opened fire on Gazans waiting for flour aid,” visual investigation, 5 March 2024; Forensic Architecture, The Flour Massacre, March 2024.
⁴¹ The New York Times, “How a Murky US-Backed Aid Effort in Gaza Became a Killing Field,” May–October 2025 series.
⁴² UN OCHA, Casualties at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Sites — Monthly Updates, June–November 2025; The Intercept, “The Christian Nationalist Mercenaries Killing Palestinians for Food,” September 2025.
⁴³ Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 54; Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv); ICJ provisional measures orders of 26 January, 28 March, and 24 May 2024 in South Africa v. Israel.
⁴⁴ UN OCHA, Reported impact since 7 October 2023 — West Bank, ongoing data tracker.
⁴⁵ B’Tselem, State Business: Israeli Authorities and Settler Violence in the Occupied West Bank, November 2023 and subsequent updates; ICJ, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 19 July 2024.
⁴⁶ Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “Sexual violence, women’s bodies, and Israeli settler colonialism,” Jadaliyya, November 2014; Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs,” Haaretz, 5 July 2019.
⁴⁷ The New York Times, “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Held Thousands of Gazans,” 6 June 2024; CNN, “Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center,” 10 May 2024.
⁴⁸ Haaretz, “Israeli Doctors Tell Sde Teiman Detainees: ‘I Lost My Faith in Humanity Here,’” June 2024; Physicians for Human Rights — Israel reports, May–August 2024.
⁴⁹ Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees, November 2025; UN Human Rights Council, Detailed findings on the use of sexual violence against Palestinians by Israeli forces, A/HRC/58/CRP, March 2025.
⁵⁰ Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Testimonies of Systematic Rape, November 2025; Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Another Genocide Behind Walls, 2025; Nicholas Kristof, “The Hidden Rape Epidemic Inside Israeli Prisons,” New York Times, May 2026.
⁵¹ Times of Israel, “Mobs storm Sde Teiman base and Beit Lid court as soldiers held over alleged abuse of detainee,” 29 July 2024.
⁵² Times of Israel, “Five Sde Teiman reservists charged with aggravated abuse, sodomy of Palestinian detainee,” 11 September 2024.
⁵³ CNN, “Top Israeli military prosecutor resigns over leaked detainee abuse video,” 31 October 2025.
⁵⁴ CNN, “Assault charges against Israeli soldiers dropped in controversial end to a yearlong scandal,” 12 March 2026.
⁵⁵ B’Tselem, Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps for Palestinians, August 2024.
⁵⁶ Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, ongoing tracker; Middle East Eye, “Mutilated bodies returned to Gaza include detainees held at Sde Teiman,” February 2025.