A senior Israeli officer said Sunday that the four youths targeted by an Israeli march in Khan Yunis were unarmed and did not endanger Israeli forces in the area where they were walking, Haaretz reported.
This comes after Al Jazeera broadcast footage obtained from an Israeli march showing the targeting of Palestinian civilians in the Sikka area in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip in early February.
The Israeli officer described this incident as very serious, and did not rule out that the youths were looking for food, and the officer also acknowledged that the Israeli occupation army has established execution zones in Gaza, and anyone who crosses them is shot.
A group of reserve Israeli army commanders and Israeli commanders who spoke to Haaretz questioned the claim that all of the Palestinians shot in the ‘kill zones’ were armed. They said that it is highly likely that Palestinians who have never carried a weapon in their lives were included in this designation after their death.
“It’s amazing to hear reports after every operation about how many militants have been killed,” says an Israeli reserve officer who served in Gaza, explaining, “You don’t need to be a genius to realize that you don’t have hundreds or dozens of armed men running through the area” in the streets of Khan Yunis and Jabalia, fighting the Israeli army.
So what does the battles in Gaza really look like? According to a reserve officer there was “usually a gunman, two or three, hiding inside the building, and the ones who detect them are fighters with special equipment or drones.”
One of the roles of this officer was to inform the upper echelons of how many militants had been killed in the area where he and his men were fighting: “This was not a formal interrogation, they don’t ask for bodies, they just ask for a number of how many were killed. We give them a number … and we move forward.”
Haaretz gathered testimonies from officers and soldiers who fought in Gaza, quoting them as saying that the army classified about 9,000 of the 32,782 Palestinians who have been killed since October 7th as ‘terrorists’, but the soldiers admitted that “in fact the majority of them are civilians, and they posed no threat.”
Exclusive footage broadcast by Al Jazeera shows the targeting of an Israeli drone of Palestinian civilian youths in the city, after the Israeli military pursued the young men and targeted them with several rockets, where two of them were killed with the first rocket, then the third and then the fourth were killed by two other rockets.
These soldiers added that the crime of these victims was to cross an imaginary line drawn by the Israeli army, which, if crossed, would give the troops permission to shoot at them.
One soldier told the newspaper: “For our commanders, if we identify someone in our area of operations who was not part of our forces, we are asked to shoot to kill. “We were explicitly told that even if a suspect enters a building with people, we should shoot at the building and kill him, even if other people are injured.”
The US State Department said that Israel bears the responsibility to investigate violations of the laws of war, commenting on the Israeli occupation army’s targeting and killing of 4 Palestinian civilians after tracking them by a drone.
In addition to that incident, the American network “CNN” quoted a statement by the Israeli occupation forces in which they confessed to killing two Palestinians and burying their bodies with a bulldozer, after Al Jazeera published a video clip showing the details of the killing.
In their statement, the occupying forces claimed that the killing of the Palestinians took place after they approached what they called the central Gaza area of operations in a manner they described as suspicious, “and did not respond to warning shots”.
