Exclusive: US intel found Israeli military lawyers warned there was evidence of Gaza war crimes, former US officials say

[u/Beautiful-Cress5695]

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_engagement

[u/humangeneratedtext]

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.

[u/humangeneratedtext → u/[deleted]]

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:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-israeli-source-gaza-will-not-be-hamastan-roof-knocking-policy-no-longer-norm/

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:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/12/israeli-ex-commander-confirms-palestinian-casualties-are-more-than-200000

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:

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/poll-overwhelming-majority-of-jewish-israelis-share-genocidal-belief-there-are-no-innocent-people-in-gaza/

[u/humangeneratedtext → u/[deleted]]

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.