What has the IDF done to Gaza — and to itself?

If there is a hostage-ceasefire deal in Gaza, what will Israel and Hamas have achieved after 466 days of fighting?

Hamas’s military and political leadership has, for sure, been greatly weakened.

Yet, with some 9000 surviving fighters, recruitment outpacing losses, and many tunnels still operative, Hamas is far from being destroyed as a fighting force.   

It also still controls most of Gaza’s population.

There is “no substitute for complete victory over our enemies” , Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year during a visit to the IDF’s Gaza Division headquarters.

It turns out that there is: pressure from the incoming US President Donald Trump to agree a deal before his inauguration on Monday, all part of Trump’s ambition to repeat his Abrahamic accords triumph as midwife to an equally historic normalisation of Israeli- Saudi relations.

For that dream scenario to come true, Saudi Arabia would require Israel to accept some kind of partnership arrangement with the Palestinian Authority – another red line for Netanyahu, or so he has said, but certainly a red line for the more extreme members of his coalition.

So while Netanyahu’s political future was bolstered by his undoubted success in emasculating Hezbollah and Iran, if the hostage-release deal does come off, his future once again becomes uncertain. 

There is in fact, only one certain outcome of this war, which is that both Israelis and Palestinians – but especially the latter — have paid a very high price indeed.

Palestinian deaths are now estimated at over 46,000, and quite possibly higher,  some 60% of whom are women, children and the elderly. The physical scale of destruction in Gaza is apocalyptic: schools and universities have almost all been destroyed with 92% of housing units destroyed or damaged.

The word “genocide” has been thrown around this conflict by Israel’s enemies like confetti. Despite the enormous scale of death and destruction, no credible evidence has yet emerged that the Netanyahu government intended to destroy the Palestinian people.

Inadequate though they’ve been, the millions of calls, texts, voice messages and airdropped leaflets in Israel’s attempt to move Gazan civilians from harm’s way as the IDF  worked its way through military targets, is testament to that. There is, of course, not the remotest doubt about Hamas’s genocidal intent: several of its leadership proudly announced it would repeat October 7 again and again at every opportunity.   

Nevertheless, like most armies at war – including the British army — there is also little doubt that the IDF has committed war crimes.

So if this war really is about to end, how will history judge Israel?

Three weeks into the war, Netanyahu declared that the IDF was “the most moral army in the world” – a claim often repeated by others – but nigh impossible to prove. 

15 months later, his ex-defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, also once IDF Chief of Staff, said that Israel no longer had “the most moral army in the world.” Claiming to speak “on behalf of commanders who serve in northern Gaza” Ya’alon said: “War crimes are being committed here.”   

The IDF denied this.  What the IDF has, however acknowledged is that from the start of the war, it changed its rules of engagement.

As a consequence,  one of the deadliest wars for children in the history of modern warfare was unleashed.

The air campaign – loosening the targeting rules

A recent New York Times investigation says that in the war’s first seven weeks, the IDF fired 30,000 munitions into Gaza. At 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, standard rules minimising civilian deaths were loosened. 

By 30 November the Gaza Media Office said some 6150 children had been killed. The GMO is, of course, Hamas run. Even so, that estimate may turn out to have been conservative.  

Based on a sample of 8119 deaths over five months which the UN claims to have independently audited, 44% were found to be children, with those aged 5 to 9 representing the single biggest age category. By that metric, it’s possible that some 6600 children were killed in the first seven weeks.

Amongst soldiers and officials quoted by the New York Times were those involved in the targeting. They told the paper that loosening the IDF’s rules to minimise collateral deaths meant a doubling of the allowable civilian to target death ratio: from a maximum of ten civilian deaths per target, to 20; for high value targets, up to 100 civilian deaths per strike. Even then, the paper said, the method to calculate the risks were “simplistic.” 

IDF critics argue a target ratio of 100 to 1 would never have been contemplated by NATO forces in the 9/11 wars. However, unlike Israel, NATO member states didn’t feel existentially threatened by an armed militia almost half the size of the British army with indisputably genocidal intent and supported by Iranian proxies. 

IDF defenders invoke the US and UK WW2 carpet bombing of Dresden, killing 25,000 Germans to force a German surrender. That defence no longer holds either. Since 1949, the Geneva Convention has ruled out the likes of Dresden as an acceptable standard for war. It also sits uncomfortably with the IDF claim that “Purity of Arms” is its ethical epicentre.

The New York Times alleges that 90% of the bombs dropped in the first fortnight were 1,000 and 2,000 pounders and that by November the air force had run low on precision guided kit, turning them into unguided or “dumb” bombs. 

Targets were acquired using two AI systems called “The Gospel” and “Lavender” which process data on home addresses and phone numbers to locate suspected terrorists, including “low ranking” suspects, for assassination.

The IDF has acknowledged that it has used “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination”, but insists that no target was attacked unless verified by an “analyst.”  However, a senior officer, who’d used Lavender, told Israeli journalists who first exposed the use of AI in targeting that such checks were cursory: “I would invest 20 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.”

The picture painted by both American and Israeli media outlets is of targets being hurriedly acquired using flawed methods to seek them out and equally flawed methods to assess the risk of civilian casualties. 

When I was in Israel for the BBC a month after the war started, well-placed sources within IDF HQ were telling me that restraints on collateral deaths had been eased so it is unsurprising that the IDF has now acknowledged this to the New York Times, justified on the basis that Israel faced an “existential threat.” The IDF insist it nonetheless “adhered to the rules of law.”  

Israel’s critics don’t accept that Hamas posed an existential threat, since a strategic defeat of the middle east’s most powerful military would have been near impossible. Still, no country could possibly be expected to tolerate a large and well-armed militia on its doorstep with genocidal intent, which had not only already committed a massacre but proudly announced it would do so again at every opportunity.   

The precise requirements of the law are for others to determine. The IDF began to tighten the rules from November, although not back to pre-October 7 standards. Yet the fact that the IDF admits to having bombed Gaza with fewer restraints than in previous campaigns self-evidently undermines Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel was doing “everything to avoid harming those not involved”, which was the justification for his claim that it was also “the world’s most moral army.”

The ground campaign – commanders operating as “independent militias”

Have Israeli troops on the ground conducted themselves as expected of an army that avers to be the world’s most moral? Gaza’s complex battlescape — high population density, a maze of fortified tunnels, and years for Hamas to prepare their defences – would certainly test the most ethical of commanders.    

However, evidence gathered by the Left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz from a “long list of soldiers and officers” has portrayed the IDF operating as if they are “independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.” Israel, laments Haaretz , is “losing its humanity in Gaza.”

It alleges, for example, that “arbitrary killings and rampant lawlessness” in the Netzarim corridor sullied operations last summer and autumn by 252 Division under the command of a newly promoted Brigadier General, Yehuda Vach. That corridor, just south of Gaza City, splits the Gaza Strip down the middle: it stretches from the Gaza-Israel border to the Mediterranean.

Haaretz’s investigation is the work of its military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich. By my count he has spoken to at least 16 soldiers, mostly officers, some senior enough to have served alongside Vach, who was born and raised in a West Bank settlement. 

Vach is alleged by fellow officers to have authorised indiscriminate fire on civilians by designating a “kill-zone” north of the Netzarim corridor where Palestinians were officially excluded from entering and whose boundary was arbitrarily set. Anyone who entered is alleged to have been shot, irrespective of whether they were armed.  

To be clear: Haaretz is no friend of the Netanyahu government, settlements or messianic Zionism generally. It has frequently exposed IDF misconduct, abuse of power by Netanyahu’s cronies and regularly sounds the alarm about the Jewish state’s rightwards drift from democracy towards what its opinion writers refer to as its “pariah” status.   

Andrew Fox, a former Major in Britain’s Parachute Regiment , says he doesn’t recognise the picture painted by Haaretz .  In late November 2024, he spoke to soldiers in the Netzarim Corridor and “saw nothing in the behaviour, conversation or ethos in the many soldiers I spoke to there that resembled the accounts described in Haaretz .” By then, however, Division 252 had been replaced and also as Fox acknowledges his visit had been “laid on for us” by the IDF.

Still, Fox acknowledges, the IDF will likely have committed war crimes in Gaza and that there are bound to be “kernels of truth” in Haaretz’s article. What he objects to is the “black and white” way Haaretz presented its evidence: “ This is a war desperately in need of analysis with shaded nuance.” I agree with him about that, save for two points in this particular case: first, the rigour of Haaretz’s investigative journalism is generally respected (amongst mainstream journalists anyway); second, the fact that the evidence is based largely on verbatim quotations mainly from officers, including some senior ones. Against Haaretz’s charge that Israel is losing its humanity is the fact that there clearly remain within the IDF many deeply moral soldiers, to say nothing of Israel’s many civic organisations for peace.

The reason Fox acknowledges there are at least “kernels” of truth in Haaretz is because “armies recruit from societies” and “societies contain both good and bad people.” Added to which war hardens hearts. So, it is scarcely surprising that the sheer viciousness of Hamas’s assault on 7 October has dulled any empathy Israelis might otherwise feel for their Palestinian neighbours. That said, the hatred openly and confidently expressed towards Palestinian society has often been striking.

There’s the stand-up comic who — to loud applause and whistles — joked that Israel doesn’t need the IDF to give a job title to every assassinated terrorist: “’Head of Rocket Division’?…..as far as I’m concerned it could be ‘Mohammed 1’, ‘Mohammed 2’, ‘Mohammed 3′,” he cracks. “Until we get to 100,000 and we’ll be done. Enough!”. Then there is “Doctors for the Rights of Israeli Soldiers” who openly support attacks on hospitals hiding terrorists “by any means”, which presumably includes bombs. Children have sung on Israel’s public broadcaster Kan (now removed): “Within a year we will annihilate everyone… and then we will return to plough our fields.”  There are reports of Israelis ecstatically mutilating the bodies of dead Palestinians from the October 7 invasion, just as Hamas ecstatically mutilated Israelis hours earlier.  There’s  also this response to the photograph of a handcuffed 62-year-old Palestinian reportedly run over by a tank, his body mangled beyond recognition: “You’re going to love this!” says the post on an Israeli Telegram channel, shared by soldiers who made it clear that they did indeed.    

However widely reflected such attitudes may be in a society, a tightly disciplined army does not tolerate their public embrace, especially when voiced by a divisional commander. Yet Vach is reported to have declared to his officers: “There are no innocents in Gaza.”  After October 7, this view is quite widely held in Israel, particularly given that some hostages abducted on October 7 were taken by civilians , and that ordinary Gazans yelling “God is Great” were delirious with joy as Hamas paraded dead, injured and dazed hostages like trophies through Gaza city streets.   

However, when mere opinion turns into military doctrine, everyone becomes a terrorist – and gets identified as a legitimate target for the IDF.  “We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,” one officer tells Haaretz . “Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise,” another officer explained. “Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists’ collaborators.” 

Uncollected bodies from shootings attract packs of dogs who eat them, another soldier explains: “In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you shouldn’t go.”

A database compiled by Lee Mordechai, an ex-IDF Combat Engineering Corps Colonel turned historian, tells a similar story.  Amongst its list of some 1400 examples of objectionable conduct by sections of Israeli society post October 7, is a clip of a soldier casually watching a large dog eating the corpse of a Palestinian. “Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses,” says the soldier casually who filmed this. After a few seconds the soldier raises the camera and adds, “But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip.”  

I showed the two reports of Haaretz’s investigations to Lieutenant General Sir Robert Fry (a regular contributor to TheArticle) . For three decades, FRY — a Royal Marine — was involved in special forces in Northern Ireland and operations in the Gulf, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Military morale is a “delicate flower”, Fry tells me. “It is easily undermined by compromising conduct by your own side; there are real risks in this”. 

Military morale is directly related to military discipline — and discipline, or the lack of it — comes from the top. A soldier tells Haaretz how a Gazan who miraculously escaped “hundreds” of machine gun rounds killing three of his friends when they strayed into the “kill-zone” was then stripped of his clothes and “put in a cage set up near our position“. Soldiers passing by “spat on him.”

Later, a military interrogator questioned the survivor “while holding a gun to his head” before releasing him. The man said he was trying to reach relatives in northern Gaza. “Later, officers praised us for killing ‘terrorists’” the soldier told Haaretz. “I couldn’t understand what they meant.” The bodies were buried by bulldozer in the sand. “This doesn’t just kill Arabs,” said the soldier. “It kills us too. If called back to Gaza, I don’t think I’ll go.”  

Another IDF veteran said the fact that anyone entering a “kill-zone” area was treated as a terrorist, with “no exceptions”, had “deeply troubled me. Did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?”

There speaks the “delicate flower” of military morale to which Lt. Gen. Fry refers.   When soldiers abandon their humanity, it “hollows out the moral core” of a fighting force.

The same IDF veteran said dozens of bullets had been fired at someone who turned out to be “just a boy, maybe 16”. Some soldiers “were shooting and laughing.” Later, the battalion commander praised the killing and said he “hoped we’d kill ten more tomorrow.” 

When a soldier pointed out the boy was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. 

The IDF claim to have killed some 17,000 Hamas terrorists. Should that claim come with a health warning? According to Haaretz , a 252nd Division officer described an incident in which, out of 200 bodies whose identities were later checked, “only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives”.

A reservist with another Division that replaced 252 told Haaretz how he’d watched a drone feed showing “an adult with two children crossing the forbidden line.” They were walking unarmed, seemingly searching for something. “We had them under complete surveillance with the drone and weapons aimed at them – they couldn’t do anything,” he says. “Suddenly we heard a massive explosion. A combat helicopter had fired a missile at them. Who thinks it’s legitimate to fire a missile at children? And with a helicopter? This is pure evil.”

Haaretz also quotes officers saying that Vach sought to “flatten” as much of Gaza as possible. He’s alleged to have told them “I brought my brothers; you bring yours”, referring to the fact that his brother Golan, a reserve Colonel, brought a heavy engineering force of soldiers and civilians who looked “like hilltop youths” to “flatten every building” in the Netzarim corridor.

On humanitarian aid, Vach is said to have told his subordinates that “in his opinion, not one truck should enter. That we needed to make things hard on the convoys that entered and harass them.”

None of what has been alleged here is proof against Vach. Rather it is what Haaretz reports many of his soldiers have told their military correspondent. It seems reasonable to assume that the military correspondent of an Israeli national newspaper – even one hostile to Netanyahu – is faithfully reporting what the soldiers have told him, so these soldiers are either making it up, or they are telling the truth. So far as the IDF spokesperson’s office is concerned, it seems to be the former. They denied that Vach made the statements his soldiers attributed to him and said that the demolition group commanded by Vach’s brother was an “authorised military force”. They also said Vach’s decisions were “professional and purposeful, in full coordination with all the commanders.”

Poor IDF discipline

Whatever the truth about Brig. Gen. Vach, what has become clear in the course of this war is that some IDF units have had a military discipline problem. It may be a minority of soldiers, but there have been too many questionable incidents to suggest it’s a tiny minority. Some of the evidence comes from soldiers themselves with their widespread use of social media in Gaza. Poor discipline may be one of the inevitable perils of the IDF being at heart, a citizen’s army. Whilst at an elite full time professional level there is high regard amongst NATO armies for the IDF, 73% of the entire force are reservists.

Many examples of poor discipline are contained in the database I referred to earlier, compiled by Lee Mordechai. Here’s a sample in which soldiers are seen to be:

• Gleefully damaging or destroying houses  
• Looting personal belongings, 
• Destroying private property,
• Burning books in libraries, 
• Gratuitously destroying Islamic symbols 
• Burning Qurans 
• Turning mosques into dining spaces
• Forcing a bus load of blindfolded prisoners to send regards to a soldier’s family to say they want to be the family’s slaves by doing “sewage and gardening” work. 
• Seizing money from Gazan homes. 
• Destroying piles of food packages from a humanitarian-aid agency. 
• Modelling looted women’s underwear.   

Of course, soldiers need to let off steam, especially in war, but Israel’s enemies have lapped up dozens of clips like these as evidence of pervasive ill-discipline. Mobile phones in combat zones are prohibited because they can reveal the location of soldiers. It’s a puzzle why the IDF has failed to grip this,   despite attempts by the IDF high command to do so. Condemning the kind of behaviour I’ve listed as “deplorable”, the Chief of Staff Major General Herzi Halevi felt compelled to issue a communiqué to his soldiers telling them “not to use force where it’s not required, to take anything that isn’t ours, or to film revenge videos.”

The IDF is using human shields.

Last August, Haaretz revealed that some IDF units were using “random” Palestinian civilians as human shields to comb through potentially booby-trapped buildings before IDF soldiers enter. Known as the “mosquito protocol”, the practice has been independently confirmed by CNN. “If there are any booby traps, they will explode, not us”, a soldier told the broadcaster. These human shields are known as Shawishim, an Arabic word for servant or subordinate.   The task could be performed by dogs, as is standard British army practice. The IDF told Haaretz that it has been made clear to soldiers that running a Shawish was forbidden. However, last week, Haaretz revealed the practice continues, as evidenced by a conversation between a reporter and a friend whose son’s unit was using a Shawish in combat in Gaza.  

The Future

Beyond the anticipated imminent release of hostages, what of the future?

Militarily, this war was always likely to be unwinnable, at least to the decisive extent that both Netanyahu and his defence minister Israel Katz committed themselves.

Last month Katz confidently asserted that the IDF would entirely “destroy Hamas’ military and administrative power in Gaza.”

Yet he and Netanyahu pledged the IDF to destroying an entity that is physically indestructible. Hamas doesn’t just exist in a material form. It may be misogynistic, homophobic, unspeakably cruel and oppressive, and recognised by the EU, UK and US for the terrorist entity that it manifestly is. But to millions of Palestinians and Muslims around the world, it is an inspiring spiritual, intellectual and ideological force.

The only way Hamas will ultimately be marginalised is through a workable political solution, however elusive this may be.

Yet neither the Netanyahu government nor Israel’s main opposition appear to have any vision for the future of Gaza beyond a version of Area A in the West Bank, with the IDF having “full freedom to act, just as in Judea and Samaria.”

Half a century of West Bank occupation suggests how this will end: more Palestinian bloodshed, more oppression of Palestinians and for Israel, also more bloodshed, perhaps more hostages, and certainly ever greater “Pariah” status globally.

For the Jewish diaspora here in Britain, Europe and the US, there is already resurgent antisemitism, with cities and university campuses regularly disfigured by rolling Kaifiya-clad demonstrators lip-smacking at the prospect of what they foresee as Israel’s inexorable disintegration. Expect even more of this.

Anything short of a road map to Palestinian self-determination is unlikely to get the support of signatories to the Abraham Accords and also of Saudi Arabia, without which the rebuilding of Gaza must be in doubt. 

Nor will a West Bank version of Gaza get the support of Israel’s allies, never mind the Palestinians. 

Like most Israeli Jews today, Netanyahu argues that a two-state solution is no longer possible. And they are right. It’s just that everything else is even more impossible.  

The only lasting benefit of this horrifically costly war will be if Israelis and Palestinians somehow return to understanding – and believing in — the two-state solution. 

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