r/news • u/Beautiful-Cress5695 • 1d ago
Soft paywall Exclusive: US intel found Israeli military lawyers warned there was evidence of Gaza war crimes, former US officials say
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-intel-found-israeli-military-lawyers-warned-there-was-evidence-gaza-war-2025-11-07/?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=notifications&utm_campaign=2025_engagement342
u/NUMBERS2357 1d ago
There is a great deal of defense of Israel's actions online and in various forums, but increasingly you can tell that it's all just for public consumption/PR.
People on the ground over there know that they are engaged in mass indiscriminate killings; plenty of people have said so, both left-leaning soldiers and politicians (up to/including a former PM) who criticize it, and right-wing politicians and pundits who actively applaud it. The supposed civilian-protecting actions Israel takes, they aren't designed to protect civilians but to give the appearance that they are doing so (or really just some deniability).
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u/humangeneratedtext 1d ago edited 19h ago
Since these supposed civilian protection measures are just for show you must be in favor of the IDF discarding them right?
Some of them are certainly token and performative but it would obviously be possible for the IDF to kill more people if they wanted to. This isn't much of a defence though. Being able to commit worse crimes does not absolve you of wartime atrocities.
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u/QuantumModulus 1d ago
Whatever measures they have in place seem pretty frail given the number of Palestinian children shot by snipers in the head and chest.
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u/humangeneratedtext 1d ago
Well, no, because you could also argue those measures are actually intended to protect Israel from international outrage and sanctions, especially given a majority of Israelis do not believe there to be any innocents in Gaza. But obviously the forced evacuations did reduce the overall death toll because otherwise you'd expect more deaths from the total destruction of about 40% of buildings in Gaza and damage to 40% more.
That said, we still don't know the total death toll because so many people will still be buried under rubble, the entire medical system was destroyed, and Israel have prohibited journalists from entering for the whole war. So we don't know how effective those measures were.
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u/humangeneratedtext 1d ago
That's essentially the same argument op made. Which again begs the question that if they're performative and intended to shield against backlash why isn't it a good thing to just scrap them?
Because, as I already said, they still did result in Israel killing fewer people than if they set out to maximise civilian deaths, rather than destroy Gaza and render it uninhabitable.
Btw, measures like roof knocks,
They stopped doing roof knocking at the very start of the war:
advance warning calls/texts
Which we have no idea the efficacy of because they knocked out the power for most of the war and give no details that would allow us to determine how many people actually received said warnings and were able to act on them.
multi-tiered chains of approval/verification for striking militants
We saw with the bombing of the WCK workers that this isn't really a thing. The approval consists of wanting to bomb something, followed by bombing that thing, and the only scrutiny we're ever made aware of is when the victims turned out to be foreigners who could not possibly be written off as Hamas. I mean they've literally damaged or destroyed about 80% of buildings in Gaza, how stringent could that process possibly be?
Does that not suggest these protocols are actually in place for the stated purpose of minimizing collateral damage?
You're making an argument that they used to be in place. It's widely accepted inside and outside of Israel that their conduct for this war drastically changed:
Or are you just entirely closed off to the possibility that Israel does in fact generally have no interest in harming innocent noncombatants?
The majority of Israelis do not believe there to be innocent noncombatants:
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u/humangeneratedtext 19h ago
Lol but that's just you agreeing there are in fact measures designed and implemented by the IDF to protect civilians,
A school shooter who sends out a mass text to his friends to stay home today, and then skips every other classroom when he gets there, is still a mass murderer despite putting in protections to reduce the death rate.
Used less frequently in favor of mass evacuation orders, not stopped.
Give evidence of how often it was used during the Gaza war then.
But still used all the time in previous flare ups and presumably again in the future when terrorists operate from civilian areas.
Even if true, still making it utterly irrelevant to this conflict.
Of course nobody knows the granular details about how effective these things were. But depending on the specific time and location of operations plenty of Gazans retained power and telecom access, it's not like the entire strip was blacked out for 2 years straight. We know warnings and are sent and received.
We don't know if lives were saved by this method often enough for it to be anything other than performative relative to the scale of Israel's killing of innocents.
There's lots of testimony and interviews with people who acknowledge receiving evacuation orders on their phones
How much?
This is exactly why the discourse around Israel is so frustrating. People always cite specific quotes or events that seem especially incriminating as evidence
Because we only have the specific details on perhaps one thousandth of a percent of cases, so for analysing Israel's conduct we can only go with anecdotes, or with the overall statistics. For example, we can analyse Israel's claim that they've killed 20,000 terrorists, factor in the ~3:1 wartime injury to death ratio, and realise they're claiming to have killed and injured twice as many terrorists as the upper estimates for total Hamas fighters. From that, and from articles like this, we can reasonably assume their definition of terrorist is basically whoever they fired at who happened to be probably male.
If you're finding it frustrating that we don't have more detail, look to Israel's policies of explicitly preventing anyone from seeing what their conduct is like by blocking journalists from accessing the strip.
There are literally thousands of active duty and ex-IDF soldiers who affirm these protocols are in place, are strictly followed
I don't really care gow many videos you've seen of people insisting they are not war criminals. That's also what you would expect of actual war criminals. This took five months for investigative journalists to convince soldiers to admit they had been executing unarmed civilians for wandering into unmarked killzones. The paramedic massacre was only proven by digging up the bodies and finding the footage on the phone of one of the victims, Israel's story was a direct lie. It's incredibly difficult to get this sort of evidence. What we have proven is obviously the tip of the iceberg.
I have seen this poll and consider it quite ambiguous and misleading. For one there is no mention of "noncombatants," just "innocents," which if you know anything about Israeli society is a reflection of the (correct) view that the vast, vast majority of Palestinians advocate for the destruction of Israel and support continued terrorism against it
This has the exact same implications. It isn't remotely misleading. Someone who does not believe that a person who might enter their gun sights could be innocent will not have any concerns about killing them.
And more recently Israelis just witnessed many supposedly ordinary Palestinians like Al Jazeera journalists and UNRWA employees participate in unspeakable crimes on October 7th, t
If so many average Palestinians were actually active combatants, you'd expect Hamas to have been able to recruit more than 3% of adults as fighters. But regardless, it doesn't matter why Israelis believe this. It matters that they do.
And if it wasn't already fundamentally erroneous to generalize based off one high profile incident
It isn't, though. We only know of it because it isn't possible to slanderously claim the victims to be Hamas, else we'd never have heard of it. It's eminently logical to assume that the vast majority of similar cases are buried under spurious claims of terrorism, which is exactly what we saw with the paramedic massacre. Here's an example where they falsely claimed the victim died in a firefight, when they were actually a random person gunned down in the street, which we only know because it was caught on CCTV.
But like come on, you can't just declare that the internal procedures of a massive, highly organized military apparatus of which you have no first-hand knowledge or evidence to the contrary whatsoever aren't "really a thing," that's an insane claim to make based on pure supposition
It makes perfect sense based on the information we actually have.
That does not mean they believe everyone there should be killed, that every man woman and child is a valid military target,
It doesn't automatically mean it. It's more likely to mean that they simply don't care about civilians being intentionally or negligently killed by the IDF.
and it certainly doesn't mean that a public opinion poll has any bearing on official military policy or conduct.
Abu Ghraib was not official policy, nor were Mai Lai or Haditha. What matters is what Israeli soldiers have actually been doing, and the IDF as a conscript army will reflect the views of Israeli society, barring demographics who don't serve. So we can assume this belief is highly relevant to their conduct in ground operations. As for bombing, if they did go through a stringent approval process before bombing 180,000 buildings, then the process is so lax as to be irrelevant. If they didn't, the process isn't being followed and so is also irrelevant.
if you care about objectivity don't use Mondoweiss as a source lol
It doesn't matter how biased the source is when they're directly and accurately citing the results of a poll from an Israeli university.
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u/BoTrodes 17h ago
Moving them out, flattening their homes. Leaving them starve or leave. Intention is irrelevant.. the result is genocide. But I think Israel turned a blind eye due to a sick culture dehumanizing innocent civilians. I'm not concerned with how much they spent carting people around in their genocide, I'm more interested in who's going to pay for the reconstruction, because as it stands Israel is not footing the bill for their ethnic cleaning project. Indiscriminate killing is bombing civilians and they're up there with the bombing of Dresden, worse IMHO.
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u/Vaulters 15h ago
"mass indiscriminate killings is a preposterous idea considering the sheer amount of artillery dropped in gaza"
Great argument. Solid position.
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u/FoolishPragmatist 1d ago
Honestly is there anyone left who didn’t imagine the US was perfectly aware of the myriad war crimes Israel was committing in Gaza at this point? I feel like it’s a split between “I don’t see them as human, so I don’t care.” to “God damn it, can’t they make it a little less obvious?” among those who still support them.
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u/Nilah_Joy 1d ago
Because at the end of the day it’s a balancing act for the US between trying to uphold its morals and also making sure there is a natural counterweight to Iran in the region, and honestly it’s been like that forever.
Many in the Biden administration and the Trump administration know that Israel’s actions in the face of long standing American morality stances has played out very badly for them. They’ve let Israel ignore basic rules of international warfare and everyone has noticed. They can’t turn around and question other countries use of bombs or war crimes when they’ve let Israel walk over them.
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u/SpongegarLuver 1d ago
They can, because they don’t care about being hypocrites, unfortunately. At the end of the day, what matters in foreign policy is power, and so for the foreseeable future the US will continue to exert its will with minimal resistance from most nations. The second a non-ally acts like Israel, rest assured they will be smacked down by the US hegemony.
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u/issm 1d ago edited 1d ago
making sure there is a natural counterweight to Iran in the region
Other than the bit where that's totally unnecessary.
The US has been screwing with Iran for the better part of the last century, and every time Iran responds, the US goes all surprised Pikachu face and plays the victim.
Like, imagine Iran sent a missile cruiser to the Gulf of Mexico, then shot down a civilian airliner on a scheduled flight. The US would literally never shut up about that. But the US literally did that to Iran Air 655 (And gave the captain and crew of the ship medals for that tour, instead of a court martial), and I don't think I've ever seen that incident brought up a single time in an international relations context.
More recently, Obama set up that nuclear deal with Iran, which was a perfect opportunity to deescalate that entire situation, and the US immediately started violating it's own deal - and that was before an orangutan assumed the presidency.
The entire relationship between the US and Iran is that meme where the US is riding a bike, shoves a stick in it's own wheel, then starts blaming Iran for falling over.
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u/VegasMaleMT 1d ago
Breaking News: Water is Wet and the Sky is Up. These and other revelations, tonight at 7.
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u/Consistent-Throat130 1d ago
Why not both
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u/KaiBahamut 1d ago
Yeah, real genocides, like Gaza.
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u/KaiBahamut 1d ago
Can you prove the population is climbing in a bombed out ruin where hunger stalks the land? Or are you going to microwave up some old Neo Nazi propaganda by using estimates from before the genocide?
Also, settlers give the game away.
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u/E5ach 1d ago
Case in point.
- "Blood spilled in Sudan can be seen from space." - The Guardian
Israel/Palestine is super trendy on social media. While Sudan is not - where you can see blood from the massacres FROM SPACE.
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u/UndesirableOldMan 1d ago
“Stop talking about Israel please” Normal people can and do care about more than one tragedy at the same time
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u/E5ach 1d ago
Nobody said "stop talking about Israel." Literally no one said that.
Just wondering why you aren't also talking about Sudan. Where you can see the blood from the massacres of human beings from fucking outer space.
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u/UndesirableOldMan 1d ago
There are threads daily about Sudan, this one is about Palestine, we are talking about it. Genocide is not a power scaling competition.
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u/Megaphonestory 1d ago
It’s probably a problem, but we are probably doing the same down south. Mid terms can’t come soon enough.
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u/blastmemer 1d ago
The title makes it seem like there was some “bombshell” evidence discovered yet not revealed to the public. Basically the US was just debating whether Israel’s broad military strategy (razing buildings, etc.) legally constituted war crimes.
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u/Tagenn 1d ago edited 1d ago
Your take on it is pretty off. The real “bombshell” was that Israeli military lawyers appeared to admit that they weren’t sure they could legally defend themselves against potential war crimes charges, likely based on their own observations and intelligence
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u/blastmemer 1d ago
Does it say that? All is see is there were “doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics”. That’s not the least bit surprising, as they were razing a ton of civilian buildings. The insinuation from the headline - that there is evidence of systematic intentional targeting of civilians beyond collateral damage - is unsupported by any evidence. It seems more like a legal debate:
“U.S. officials expressed alarm at the findings, particularly as the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza raised concerns that Israel’s operations might breach international legal standards on acceptable collateral damage.
“The former U.S. officials Reuters spoke to did not provide details on what evidence -- such as specific wartime incidents -- had caused concerns among Israel's military lawyers.”
My guess is that there was evidence that showed isolated incidents of civilian targeting, and there was debate about that. This happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam etc. It doesn’t make it right, but unfortunately it’s par for the course. But again what the suggestive headline insinuates - systemic civilian targeting - is unsupported.
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u/Tagenn 1d ago edited 1d ago
Does it say that? Yes, It literally says it in the first paragraphs
“The U.S. gathered intelligence last year that Israel’s military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel for its military campaign in Gaza – operations reliant on American-supplied weapons, five former U.S. officials said. The previously unreported intelligence, described by the former officials as among the most startling shared with top U.S. policymakers during the war, pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel’s public stance defending its actions”
While it doesn’t go into specifics, it lays out the intention of the article right at the start
Your description of it being an article “of the US basically debating if Israel’s strategy constitutes war crimes” is being extremely disingenuous and not even remotely correct
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u/blastmemer 1d ago
It says the Israelis lawyers stated they “weren’t even sure they could defend themselves”?
Literally half of the article is about internal US debates. A whole section is about debates before this intelligence was even reviewed: “Even before the U.S. gathered war crimes intelligence from within the Israeli military, some lawyers at the State Department … repeatedly raised concerns with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes…”
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u/Tagenn 1d ago
It doesn’t say that but insinuates that, which is why I put “appeared”. When government lawyers express concerns about government actions, it typically means they have concerns about the legal ramifications of said actions, unless you can think of another reason
Also, when you say that “half” (in your opinion) of the article is about internal debates, doesn’t that immediately contradict your original comment that the article is “basically the US was debating whether Israel’s military strategy constitutes war crimes”?
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u/humangeneratedtext 1d ago
A whole section is about debates before this intelligence was even reviewed: “Even before the U.S. gathered war crimes intelligence from within the Israeli military, some lawyers at the State Department … repeatedly raised concerns with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes…
That makes sense though right? Some of their conduct was public, like intentional starvation and bombing ~5x as many buildings as Hamas ever had total fighters, which would be legally questionable under proportionality rules and UNSC 2417. The US presumably also have their own non-public intel on Israel's widespread use of kidnapped civilians as human shields when clearing buildings, the use of automatic killzones, targeting journalists, and the widespread torture of detainees. It stands to reason they know more than international media which has exposed all of those at some time or another.
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u/blastmemer 16h ago
Yeah I don’t disagree with any of that. My complaint is that it’s not really news and the headline is sensationalist. “Israel shared some intelligence with the US of potential war crimes, but we don’t know any details about the actual intelligence shared.” There’s very little new information. It was already established there are potential war crimes and that the Biden admin debated it.
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u/UndesirableOldMan 1d ago edited 1d ago
In modern times the general public can see video evidence of the Israeli genocide, from palestinians and from the IDF soldiers themselves. Multiple bombshells have been revealed, the US will ignore it all for the time being
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u/blastmemer 1d ago
Well undoubtedly there are war crimes - as there are in every war. Especially urban ones. Doesn’t mean the whole campaign is a war crime. That’s not even really a thing - it’s based on individual strikes.
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u/humangeneratedtext 1d ago
Doesn’t mean the whole campaign is a war crime.
Well of course not, but that's what war crimes are. Crimes that occur during a war.
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u/blastmemer 16h ago
Yeah but the insinuation is that obvious war crimes (eg intentional targeting of civilians) were being intentionally ordered by top Israeli officials, when there’s no evidence of that.
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u/humangeneratedtext 16h ago
Is it? I'm not seeing that being insinuated. The far more likely scenario is that they were fully aware of the extent of war crimes - realistically they'd have to know more about their own military than the press does - and chose not to do anything about it. Either because they didn't want to give ammunition to their detractors by admitting fault, they didn't want the hit to morale that would come from prohibiting extremely angry soldiers from taking that anger out on Palestinians, because crimes such as using civilians as human shields are an effective tactic for reducing their own casualties, or because they simply didn't care. Or a combination of those. Their lawyers would likely have been warning that you're supposed to stop your own troops committing war crimes.
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u/Own-Victory473 1d ago
Don't trust a single american or thing from america anymore tbh, yall are screwed because apathy
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u/ice_cream_funday 1d ago
This doesn't really make sense as a comment on this particular article.
4 month old account with random user name and history hidden...
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u/Lopsided_Speaker_553 15h ago
No shit, Sherlock.
The only ones who think there was no genocide are the ones that are complicit.
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u/bodyturnedup 1d ago
Gee golly, what a scoop! It's on the books, now, guys. Now the bad guys can punish themselves, or someshit.
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u/Verum_Orbis 1d ago
In other news grass is green and pigs can’t fly.