![\"A](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/picphp.jpeg\" "\\"picphp\\"")
A Palestinian man cries over the body of his son following an Israeli air strike in Gaza December 27, 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n
The sordid details concerning the Gaza massacres\u00a0are slowly emerging via soldiers & officers of the Israeli army and excellent investigative reporting by concerned Israelis.\u00a0\u00a0You can find detailed accounts in Haaretz<\/a> and an piece by Gideon Levy reprinted in Tikkun<\/a>. Below, an extract from the testimony of one Israeli soldier from last Friday\u2019s Haaretz account.<\/p>\n Aviv: \u201cI am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn\u2019t really like they say it is. It\u2019s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.<\/p>\n \u201cToward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn\u2019t get hurt and they wouldn\u2019t fire on us.<\/p>\n \u201cAt first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then \u2026 I call this murder \u2026 in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified \u2013 we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?<\/p>\n \u201cFrom above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn\u2019t fled. I didn\u2019t really understand: On the one hand they don\u2019t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they\u2019re telling us they hadn\u2019t fled so it\u2019s their fault \u2026 This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: \u2018Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn\u2019t get out gets killed.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cI went to our soldiers and said, \u2018The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out \u2026 This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, \u2018Why?\u2019 I said, \u2018What isn\u2019t clear? We don\u2019t want to kill innocent civilians.\u2019 He goes, \u2018Yeah? Anyone who\u2019s in there is a terrorist, that\u2019s a known fact.\u2019 I said, \u2018Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.\u2019 He says, \u2018That\u2019s clear,\u2019 and then his buddies join in: \u2018We need to murder any person who\u2019s in there. Yeah, any person who\u2019s in Gaza is a terrorist,\u2019 and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we\u2019ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor \u2013 something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn\u2019t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it\u2019s cool.<\/p>\n \u201cYou do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won\u2019t say anything. To write \u2018death to the Arabs\u2019 on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It\u2019s what I\u2019ll remember the most.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious \u2013 I don\u2019t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The sordid details concerning the Gaza massacres\u00a0are slowly emerging via soldiers & officers of the Israeli army and excellent investigative reporting by concerned Israelis.\u00a0\u00a0You can find detailed accounts in Haaretz and an piece by...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[341,352,372],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine","tag-gaza","tag-gideon-levy","tag-haaretz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n