As bodies pile up around Gaza’s aid trucks, Israeli soldiers are breaking ranks — telling Haaretz they were ordered to open fire on unarmed civilians, including children, desperately trying to collect food.
The new report in the Israeli newspaper included testimonies from several IDF soldiers and officers who described a daily operation that opened fire on civilians seeking aid as a method of “dispersal”, despite the civilians posing no threat.
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Haaretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
Thousands of Gazans come to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) four aid distribution sites daily as one of the only lifelines for food in the area, but the sites are only open for one hour each morning, and soldiers routinely fire into the crowds before and after they open to disperse them, according to Haaretz.
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the anonymous soldier said. “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
JTA report: One anonymous senior officer familiar with the fighting in Gaza told Haaretz that the indiscriminate firing of civilians went against “everything the army is supposed to stand for.”
“The fact that live fire is directed at a civilian population — whether with artillery, tanks, snipers or drones — goes against everything the army is supposed to stand for,” the senior officer said. “Why are people collecting food being killed just because they stepped out of line, or because some commander doesn’t like that they’re cutting in? Why have we reached a point where a teenager is willing to risk his life just to pull a sack of rice off a truck? And that’s who we’re firing artillery at?”
During the meeting of the Israeli Military Advocate General and the IDF General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism, senior officers in the IDF asserted that the incidents were isolated and that fire was directed at individuals who posed a threat to troops, but representatives of the Advocate General’s Office rejected the IDF’s claims, according to Haaretz.
“The claim that these are isolated cases doesn’t align with incidents in which grenades were dropped from the air and mortars and artillery were fired at civilians,” said one legal official. “This isn’t about a few people being killed — we’re talking about dozens of casualties every day.”
An IDF spokesperson responded to the claims, telling Haaretz that Hamas was the primary hindrance to the successful distribution of aid and that “in depth investigations” were conducted over reports of harm to civilians at distribution centers.
“Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that starves the Gazan population and endangers them to maintain its rule in the Gaza Strip. Hamas does everything in its power to prevent the successful distribution of food in Gaza and to disrupt humanitarian aid,” the spokesperson said.
“The IDF allows the American civil society organization (GHF) to operate independently and distribute aid to Gaza residents. The IDF operates near the new distribution areas to enable distribution while continuing operational activities in the Strip,” according to the IDF spokesperson.
По материалам: http://www.planet-today.com/2025/06/idf-soldiers-testify-they-are-ordered.html