USA News Hub

Another common practice is the use of a “combat zone” or “kill zone”—a deadly radius around an army unit’s dug-in position. Anything or anyone entering this zone is shot or shelled. No signposts or banners mark the outer rim, and there is no forewarning of the kind the IDF boasted about during the war’s earlier air campaign. No one truly knows how many innocents have been slaughtered in these zones; the picture is distorted by the army’s method of classifying slain civilian men as “terrorists” in after-action reports, and few soldiers are willing or able to check if the details are true. One of the rare clues as to how troops operate in these zones is found in the case of the three Israeli hostages—shirtless, speaking Hebrew, waving a white flag—who wandered unknowingly into a zone and were killed on sight. The army’s own investigation revealed that the last to die was shot by a soldier who disobeyed a direct “cease fire” order from a superior. Some units, it seems, make up their own rules. Volunteer surgeons and nurses working in the few remaining functional hospitals report a “steady stream” of children trolleyed onto wards (or straight to the morgue) with single wounds to the head and torso, often from high-caliber ammunition. They too have been shot while clutching white cloths—evidence of sharpshooters, who, by definition, work alone and far from the shackles of good conduct.

When a three-car World Central Kitchen convoy laden with food aid set out from a warehouse in Deir Al Balah on April 1, its volunteer workers went by the reasonable belief that Israeli soldiers would not “go rogue.” They did not survive long enough to mourn the futility of such an assumption. The trucks were clearly marked, and the aid team had cleared its route with the army beforehand and gained a promise they would be safe. And still the convoy was struck three different times along a 1.5-mile stretch of coastal road—all because the drone operators claimed to suspect someone with them might be armed, a person they knew never left the warehouse. Though commanders sacked the soldiers responsible, the habit of firing at anything judged to be suspicious—on a whim, on a hunch, without any kind of rubber stamp—appears to be encultured in the army, a smug belief that even if soldiers break the strictest rules, they will not face a consequence. This was true of the general who dynamited Israa University without higher approval—approval that would have been given if he asked.

It is something of a cliché to say that the nonenforcement of the law leads inevitably to impunity; punish every crime equally or, in time, no crime will be punishable. In the Israeli case, this axiom is undeniable. In 2017, the brave human rights group B’Tselem was warning against the brutal policing and settlement of the occupied West Bank, a persistent pattern of violence driven in part by the unwillingness of military police and the courts to punish transgression of the code Israel swears it lives and dies by. It would lead, B’Tselem insisted, to more brutality more often. The army’s most murderous actions, even then,