An investigation by The New York Times, based on dozens of interviews with Israeli and U.S. soldiers and officials, reveals that in the early months of its assault on Gaza, the Israeli military significantly loosened its rules of engagement, resulting in massive civilian casualties.
The investigation, published on Friday, confirms the existence of an order issued to Israeli officers that allowed their troops to kill up to 20 civilians when targeting a single Hamas fighter.
“In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians,” the investigation said.
“Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.”
The military could target rank-and-file fighters as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.
On Oct. 7, the Israeli military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat, a senior military officer who answered questions about the order on the condition of anonymity claimed. The order had no precedent in Israeli military history, according to the Times.
The investigation found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.
The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an “unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century.”
Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.
In its investigation, The Times found that:
Israel vastly expanded the set of military targets it sought to hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. That led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined. In addition, the military leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.
On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.
The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.
From the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack. And when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs.
The Times said five senior officers used the same phrase to describe the prevalent mood inside the military: “harbu darbu.”
It is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.
Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world since it was founded a decade ago.
Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection. Three of them said those targeted included Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimated killed at least 125 others.
Another order, issued by the military high command at 10:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, provides a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable. Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.
The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war. By November, two officers said, the air force had dropped so many one-ton bombs that it was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions.
The air force used the one-ton bomb to destroy whole office towers, two senior Israeli military officials said, even when a target could have been killed by a smaller munition.
The Times report comes months after the first report on the subject by +972 magazine in April, which revealed the existence of the order allowing officers to kill up to 20 civilians. The magazine also revealed the existence of the Lavender target selection programme, and the heavy reliance of the Israeli military on artificial intelligence to identify people to attack.
Sources also told +972 that, in the event that a target was a suspected senior Hamas official, the Israeli army on several occasions authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians “in the assassination of a single commander” according to the Quds News Network.
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