''We're targeting civilian– military targets...'' - Netanyahu
Israeli military doctrine
Dahiya doctrine - It is official Israeli policy to target civilians. Because Israelis can't actually fight, when they lost the Lebanon War in 2006, just before leaving, they obliterated the suburb of Dahiya out of petty spite, birthing the Dahiya doctrine, which they immediately subjected Gaza to in Operation Cast Lead to vent frustration. The Dahiya doctrine is state sanctioned military doctrine which advocates for the use of disproportionate, overwhelming force and destruction of civilian infrastructure. It involves targeting economic interests and civilian power centers in the hopes of forcing the population to turn on its military.
Habsora AI (Infrastructure) - The IDF uses an AI called Habsora, which generates targets to be bombed, while calculating and displaying how many civilian causalities will be killed. One case describes Israeli military command knowingly approving the killing of hundreds of civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single Hamas commander: “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage... Nothing happens by accident... When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
"It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low," said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. "I nicknamed those targets 'garbage targets.' Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bomb just for deterrence — high rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction."
Since Oct. 7 the number of civilians allowed to be killed per strike was raised from 5 to 20.
Power targets - The IDF refers to high-rises and residential buildings as "power targets". According to three intelligence sources, the purpose of targeting high-rises is to harm Palestinian civil society in order to exert “civil pressure” and ''lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas in accordance with the Dahiya doctrine.''
The IDF also targets what they categorize as “family homes,” in order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a Hamas or other resistance operative.
Abandonment of roof knocking - According to Air Force Chief of Staff, Omer Tishler, since Oct. 7, Israel abandoned the practice of roof knocking (initial strike warning civilians to leave a building) in areas with resistance fighters.
There are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing... We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas... Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us. If they would tell the whole world that the offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it...”
Lavender AI (Civilians - Lavender is an AI targeting program developed by Unit 8200, and introduced in 2021 during Operation Guardian of the Walls. Unlike Hasbora, which targets buildings, Lavander focuses on people. The algorithm reportedly carries a known 10% mis-identification rate, and in its use, the army permits 15 to 20 civilian deaths for low-ranking targets, and over 100 civilian deaths for high-ranking operatives.
Along with including simple junior officers who were to be killed in their homes with their families, the list also at times reportedly included children: ''Normally, operatives are over the age of 17, but that was not a condition."
Where's Daddy? - Intelligence officer to 972 and Local Call on AI-assisted tracking program, Where's Daddy, which hacks into phones to bomb targets when they return home to their families, so the IDF can kill the family as well: ''We're not interested in killing Hamas operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation as a first option. It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations... The marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside. Let's say you calculate that there is one Hamas operative plus 10 civilians in the house. Usually these 10 will be women and children.''
The number of targets feverishly generated by officers seeking to pad their kill lists grew to as many as 37,000.
Zvika Fogel testimony - In an interview, Brigadier-General Zvika Fogel confirmed that when snipers stationed along Israel’s boundary with Gaza shoot at children, they are doing so deliberately, under clear and specific orders. He described how a sniper identifies the “small body” of a child and is given authorization to shoot.
Daniel Raab - Daniel Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, showed no hesitation as he watched footage of unarmed 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a street in northern Gaza.
“That was my first elimination,” he said. Raab concedes he knew that the boy wasn't armed and says he shot him simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his older brother, Mohammed: “It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me. I mean, what was so important about that corpse?” “They’re thinking, ‘Oh I don’t think [I’ll get shot] because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong... That’s what you have snipers for.”
After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, rushed to the site to collect his sons’ bodies, before also being shot dead. Raab says that: ''women and children are a whole debate with command''.
Anthony Aguilar - Anthony Aguilar is a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and former Green Beret. While working as a security contractor for a firm operating under the US-Israeli backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, he testifies witnessing both contractors and the IDF fatally shooting civilians trying to get aid.
By: Otto Heckel
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