The myth of Israel’s ‘killing fields’

You do not need to invent facts to spread propaganda. You only need to stretch them.

Haaretz’s latest ‘exposé’ on Israeli military conduct in Gaza is a prime case in point. This week, the Jewish State’s oldest daily newspaper reported that soldiers belonging to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had ‘deliberately fired’ at Palestinians as they tried to access aid-distribution centres. Since May, these distribution centres have been operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a private, American-run organisation that is supported by the IDF. Haaretz’s reporting has been repeated, without question, by an almost ubiquitously anti-Israel media.

It is a grim, morally explosive accusation. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz say it is ‘malicious’ and ‘designed to defame’. The IDF says it is investigating the allegation, but rejects any claims soldiers were instructed to fire at Palestinians accessing aid.

While the facts aren’t always easy to discern in the fog of war, there are a number of problems with the Haaretz report. The most significant is that the original Hebrew version of the article says something quite different to the widely reported English version. It reports that soldiers were ordered to fire toward crowds, not at them. This is not a subtle difference. ‘Toward’ is what soldiers call warning shots. It is a common practice for militaries, and one the British Army frequently used in Afghanistan. ‘At’ is to fire at a crowd or an individual – in other words, ‘at’ is the preposition you would use if you wanted to accuse the IDF of war crimes, instead of employing a common tactic.

The report has other flaws – flaws that should not be hard to pick up on, even for the untrained eye. The anonymous soldier quoted by Haaretz claims that the IDF has used machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars on unarmed crowds queuing for aid. Yet, according to the source, this ‘killing field’, in which soldiers use ‘everything imaginable’, results in around ‘one [to] five’ deaths a day. One to five deaths a day, in the middle of a war zone, involving thousands of people and countless flashpoints, from the heaviest weapon systems any infantry can bring to bear? That is not a ‘killing field’, unless the IDF are the worst shots in military history. This is clearly not the number of deaths you would expect to see if one of the world’s most advanced militaries had been instructed to target crowds of unarmed civilians with ‘everything imaginable’, as the source does.

The report is also suspicious by virtue of what it ignores. Gaza remains the scene of an asymmetrical urban war. It is also a war in which IDF soldiers are confronted by an enemy – Hamas – that is known to use civilians as fodder for its aims. Infamously, it uses hospitals and humanitarian centres as military bases. Yet the Haaretz report, like much of the Western media reporting, treats the IDF as if it is policing a football match in Manchester, rather than navigating the frontline of a war in which soldiers’ lives are constantly at risk.

As someone with firsthand experience of operating firearms and firing warning shots in high-pressure environments, I can tell you what ‘firing toward’ looks like. It is shooting in the air, or far short of a crowd, or well off to the side. It is done to send a warning, not to take a life. Put bluntly, it is crowd control by intimidation. It is not an ideal tactic, and it would not be used if there were better options available. It also has plenty of scope for tragic error. Could a soldier mess it up? Yes, and when this happens, it should be investigated – as the IDF is now doing. That is not the same thing as an order to ‘open fire on civilians’.

What we have here, then, appears to be another one-sided and simplistic report. It has erased all context and difficult but critical details. It is written as though Hamas – the terror group that murdered, raped and kidnapped 1,200 innocent citizens just 20 months ago – does not exist. Nothing, it seems, is allowed to interfere, or complicate, the established narrative that Israel is the source of all evil and suffering in Gaza.

Haaretz is not speaking truth to power. It’s using lazy journalism to land cheap blows against an army doing an incredibly difficult job. It appears to be misleading the public rather than trying to inform it.

Truth is always the first casualty of war. On this front, Israel appears to be facing yet another heavy defeat.

Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, specialising in defence and the Middle East.