An Israeli sniper from the IDF’s Nahal Brigade detailed in comments to Haaretz the killing of unarmed Palestinians, including children, who were attempting to get aid in Gaza.
“It started about two months ago,” the soldier, who went by the pseudonym Benny, told the Israeli paper as part of a story focusing on the mental toll on IDF soldiers in Gaza. “Every day we have the same mission: to secure the humanitarian aid in the northern Gaza Strip.”
The report said that Benny and his fellow soldiers began their day at 3:30 am when they set up sniper positions near where aid trucks arrive to unload their contents. He said that Gaza residents try to move forward to get a good spot in line, but often cross an invisible line set by the IDF.
“A line that if they cross it, I can shoot them,” Benny said. “It’s like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different direction every time, and I’m there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are yelling at me, ‘Take him down, take him down.’ I fire 50-60 bullets every day, I’ve stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I’ve killed, a lot. Children.”
Since the end of May, Gaza’s Health Ministry has recorded the killing of 2,497 aid seekers, which includes Palestinians killed near sites run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and people killed while attempting to reach aid trucks operated by the UN or other organizations. Another 18,294 Palestinians have been wounded while attempting to get food.
Haaretz previously reported that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians attempting to reach GHF distribution sites to drive them away or disperse them, even though they posed no threat. Benny told Haaretz that if he didn’t want to shoot Palestinian civilians waiting for aid, he was forced to by commanders, and sometimes threatened.
“The battalion commander would yell over the radio, ‘Why aren’t you taking them down. They are heading our way. This is dangerous,'” Benny said. “The sense is that we are being positioned in an impossible situation, and no one had prepared us for this. The officers do not care if children die, they also do not care what it does to my soul. To them, I am just another tool.”
Another soldier, who went by the name Yoni, shared a story about killing two children in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, after one soldier shouted that “terrorists” were approaching. “We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake,” Yoni said.
“I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea. There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn’t a human being, ‘They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like,'” he added.
Other Israeli soldiers have detailed killing unarmed Palestinian civilians without expressing any remorse. Israeli media outlets have reported extensively on the existence of kill zones in Gaza, where any Palestinian who crosses a line set by the IDF is deemed a “terrorist.”
