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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Maybe this is why history class happened.

"Multiple soldiers testified that the permissive shooting policy has enabled Israeli units to kill Palestinian civilians even when they are identified as such beforehand. D., a reservist, said that his brigade was stationed next to two so-called 'humanitarian' travel corridors, one for aid organizations and one for civilians fleeing from the north to the south of the Strip. Within his brigade’s area of operation, they instituted a 'red line, green line' policy, delineating zones where it was forbidden for civilians to enter.

According to D., aid organizations were permitted to travel into these zones with prior coordination (our interview was conducted before a series of Israeli precision strikes killed seven World Central Kitchen employees), but for Palestinians it was different. 'Anyone who crossed into the green area would become a potential target,' D. said, claiming that these areas were signposted to civilians. 'If they cross the red line, you report it on the radio and you don’t need to wait for permission, you can shoot.'

Yet D. said that civilians often came into areas where aid convoys passed through in order to look for scraps that might fall from the trucks; nonetheless, the policy was to shoot anyone who tried to enter. 'The civilians are clearly refugees, they are desperate, they have nothing,' he said. Yet in the early months of the war, 'every day there were two or three incidents with innocent people or [people] who were suspected of being sent by Hamas as spotters,' whom soldiers in his battalion shot.

The soldiers testified that throughout Gaza, corpses of Palestinians in civilian clothes remained scattered along roads and open ground. “The whole area was full of bodies,” said S., a reservist. 'There are also dogs, cows, and horses that survived the bombings and have nowhere to go. We can’t feed them, and we don’t want them to get too close either. So, you occasionally see dogs walking around with rotting body parts. There is a horrific smell of death.'"

~ Oren Ziv

"'I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza

Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission."

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-soldiers-gaza-firing-regulations/

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