Israel Creates ‘Kill Zones’ in Gaza Where Anyone Who Enters Gets Shot

Anyone who Israel kills in the zones is considered a 'terrorist' whether or not they are armed

Israel has been creating “kill zones” in the Gaza Strip in areas where the Israeli military is operating, and anyone who enters will get shot even if they’re unarmed civilians, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

The report said anyone killed in a designated kill zone is labeled a “terrorist” even if they “never held a gun in their lives,” and they are “often civilians whose only crime was to cross an invisible line drawn by the IDF.”

One Israeli reservist who was recently in north Gaza said the “feeling we had was that there weren’t really rules of engagement there.”

Other sources in the IDF told Haaretz that Israel’s claim that 9,000 out of the 32,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are “terrorists” is not valid. “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate,” an Israeli reserve officer said.

A senior officer in Israel’s Southern Command said it was “astonishing to hear the reports after every operation regarding how many terrorists were killed.” He added that Hamas fighters don’t operate in large groups, saying, “You don’t need to be a genius to realize that you don’t have hundreds or dozens of armed men running through the streets of Khan Yunis or Jabaliya, fighting the IDF.”

Another reserve officer who spoke with Haaretz said he was tasked with telling senior IDF officers how many “terrorists” were killed in operations his men carried out and said no one “can determine with certainty who is a terrorist and who was hit after entering the combat zone of an IDF force.”

The world got a glimpse of the indiscriminate policy when Al Jazeera published a video of an Israeli drone killing four unarmed men. The video shows the men walking in an open area of Khan Younis when a drone strike hits them. Two of the men instantly died, and the other two were finished off with a third and fourth missile strike. The last man who was killed was limping, then crawling away in a desperate attempt to flee.

A senior IDF officer confirmed to Haaretz that the four men were “unarmed” and that they “didn’t endanger our forces in the area in which they were walking.”

The Haaretz report said that the December incident where three Israeli hostages were killed by IDF troops in northern Gaza while waving a white flag was also the result of the kill zone policy.

Author: Dave DeCamp

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.