New Israeli +972 Magazine Report Exposes Spokesperson Mark Regev's Lies
New Israeli +972 Magazine Report Exposes Spokesperson Mark Regev's Lies
Israel is Deliberately targeting high-rise buildings with little military value, just for "Shock Value"
Israel’s PR is Gaslighting Us.
A recent article in the Israeli +972 magazine provides the type of specificity to demonstrate that Israeli spokespeople are engaged in an atrocious gaslighting when they claim:
Israel is doing everything they can to protect civilians and
civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure is not intentional, but merely the unfortunate result of Hamas using "human shields."1
".. [T]he IDF really has done everything that is humanly possible to try to safeguard innocent civilians."
“Unbearable” Civilian Suffering is Israel’s Goal.
On the contrary, the new Israeli +972 magazine article2 describes how the IDF destroys multistory residential towers with minor military value, primarily for the symbolic psychological "shock” value.
The Dahiya doctrine
The +972 magazine article is the most in-depth account of how Israel has gone further in disproportionately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure in accordance with the Dahiya military doctrine, which calls for:
using disproportionate force to destroy civilian infrastructure of regimes deemed to be hostile as a measure calculated to create "unbearable" civilian suffering.
This "unbearable" civilian suffering, it was claimed, will pressure the population to turn against the militants and demand an end to the conflict, effectively achieving Israeli objectives without involving a protracted guerilla warfare.
The Israeli government’s actions and policy are so different from what their public relations staff have been putting out that Israeli PR staff can only hope that people are too busy to read the reports:
Excerpts: +927 Magazine
Targets: having Non-military value
Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).
4 Categories of Targets
The targets in Gaza that have been struck by Israeli aircraft can be divided roughly into four categories.
1) The first is “tactical targets,” which include standard military targets such as armed militant cells, weapon warehouses, rocket launchers, anti-tank missile launchers, launch pits, mortar bombs, military headquarters, observation posts, and so on.
2) The second is “underground targets” — mainly tunnels that Hamas has dug under Gaza’s neighborhoods, including under civilian homes. Aerial strikes on these targets could lead to the collapse of the homes above or near the tunnels.
Reference Photo from 2021 (2 years ago) 4
3) The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.
4) The final category consists of “family homes” or “operatives’ homes.” The stated purpose of these attacks is to destroy private residences in order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative. However, in the current war, Palestinian testimonies assert that some of the families that were killed did not include any operatives from these organizations.
In the early stages of the current war, the Israeli army appears to have given particular attention to the third and fourth categories of targets. According to statements on Oct. 11 by the IDF Spokesperson, during the first five days of fighting, half of the targets bombed — 1,329 out of a total 2,687 — were deemed power targets.
Intent: “Shock” Value to “harm civil society”
The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.
.. During the 2021 assault, Israel struck nine targets that were defined as power targets — all of them high-rise buildings. “The goal was to collapse the high-rises in order to put pressure on Hamas, and also so that the [Israeli] public would see a victory image,” one security source told +972 and Local Call.
As someone who has followed Hamas, I heard firsthand how much they did not care about the civilians and the buildings that were taken down. Sometimes the army found something in a high-rise building that was related to Hamas, but it was also possible to hit that specific target with more accurate weaponry. The bottom line is that they knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise.”
High Rises: Evacuation not Required
.. Not only has the current war seen Israel attack an unprecedented number of power targets, it has also seen the army abandon prior policies that aimed at avoiding harm to civilians. Whereas previously the army’s official procedure was that it was possible to attack power targets only after all civilians had been evacuated from them, testimonies from Palestinian residents in Gaza indicate that, since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.
Such attacks very often result in the killing of entire families, as experienced in previous offensives; according to an investigation by AP conducted after the 2014 war, about 89 percent of those killed in the aerial bombings of family homes were unarmed residents, and most of them were children and women.
Roof Knocking: No longer in use
Tishler, the air force chief of staff, confirmed a shift in policy, telling reporters that the army’s “roof knocking” policy — whereby it would fire a small initial strike on the roof of a building to warn residents that it is about to be struck — is no longer in use “where there is an enemy.” Roof knocking, Tishler said, is “a term that is relevant to rounds [of fighting] and not to war.”
attacking power targets was originally intended to “shock” Gaza but not necessarily to kill large numbers of civilians. “The targets were designed with the assumption that high-rises would be evacuated of people, so when we were working on [compiling the targets], there was no concern whatsoever regarding how many civilians would be harmed; the assumption was that the number would always be zero,” said one source with deep knowledge of the tactic.
No Longer Minimizing Civilian harm because they say: fighting “animals”
Fifteen years after insisting that the army was taking pains to minimize civilian harm, Gallant, now Defense Minister, has clearly changed his tune. “We are fighting human animals5 and we act accordingly,” he said after October 7.
The Intent is to Scare/Terrorize Civilians
“The perception is that it really hurts Hamas when high-rise buildings are taken down, because it creates a public reaction in the Gaza Strip and scares the population,” (Edit: terrorize civilians?) said one of the sources. “They wanted to give the citizens of Gaza the feeling that Hamas is not in control of the situation. Sometimes they toppled buildings and sometimes postal service and government buildings.”
.. Over 300 families have lost 10 or more family members in Israeli bombings in the past two months — a number that is 15 times higher than the figure from what was previously Israel’s deadliest war on Gaza, in 2014
The IDF Failed, and is Trying to Salvage Reputation
“All of this is happening contrary to the protocol used by the IDF in the past,” a source explained. “There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7, and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.”
Massive Destruction was without Military Justification (2014)
The security establishment explained at the time that the attacks were intended to convey to the Palestinians of Gaza that “nothing is immune anymore,” and to put pressure on Hamas to agree to a ceasefire. “The evidence we collected shows that the massive destruction [of the buildings] was carried out deliberately, and without any military justification,” stated an Amnesty report in late 2014.
AI Used to Generate More Targets
.. In 2019, the Israeli army created a new center aimed at using AI to accelerate target generation. “The Targets Administrative Division is a unit that includes hundreds of officers and soldiers, and is based on AI capabilities,” said former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi in an in-depth interview with Ynet earlier this year.
“This is a machine that, with the help of AI, processes a lot of data better and faster than any human, and translates it into targets for attack,” Kochavi went on. “The result was that in Operation Guardian of the Walls [in 2021], from the moment this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day. You see, in the past there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year. And here the machine produced 100 targets in one day.”
AI Generated Targets is the Realization of Dahiya Doctrine
.. A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks. Another source said the drive to automatically generate large numbers of targets is a realization of the Dahiya Doctrine.
Israel Attacks Private Residences with no Military Target (such as Journalists)
However, in many cases, and especially during the current attacks on Gaza, the Israeli army has carried out attacks that struck private residences even when there is no known or clear military target. For example, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by Nov. 29, Israel had killed 50 Palestinian journalists in Gaza (now much higher), some of them in their homes with their families.
The Strategy is Not Effective Militarily
Israeli analysts have admitted that the military effectiveness of these kinds of disproportionate aerial attacks is limited. Two weeks after the start of the bombings in Gaza (and before the ground invasion) — after the bodies of 1,903 children, approximately 1,000 women, and 187 elderly men were counted in the Gaza Strip — Israeli commentator Avi Issacharoff tweeted: “As hard as it is to hear, on the 14th day of fighting, it does not appear that the military arm of Hamas has been significantly harmed. The most significant damage to the military leadership is the assassination of [Hamas commander] Ayman Nofal.”
Israel killed 286 babies (under 1 year) (a month ago)
In 2014, 93 babies were killed as a result of Israeli bombings of family homes, of which 13 were under 1 year old.
A month ago, 286 babies aged 1 or under were already identified as having been killed in Gaza, according to a detailed ID list with the ages of victims published by the Gaza Health Ministry on Oct. 26. The number has since likely doubled or tripled.
Genocidal Language: “We are fighting human animals”
This deadly policy continues today — thanks in part to the use of destructive weaponry and sophisticated technology like Habsora (AI), but also to a political and security establishment that has loosened the reins on Israel’s military machinery. Fifteen years after insisting that the army was taking pains to minimize civilian harm, Gallant, now Defense Minister, has clearly changed his tune. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” he said after October 7.
» READ MORE: FULL ARTICLE: +972 Magazine
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Permissive airstrikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza, a +972 and Local Call investigation reveals.
Other Sources:
Washington Post Quotes:
"Rather, the goal should be to inflict lasting damage, no matter the civilian consequences, as a future deterrent."
A 2014 UN report found that "Israel's campaign was "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."
"Let us be frank: this is actually less of a strategic doctrine than it is an explicit outline of collective punishment and probable war crimes." (Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi)
The Guardian
Israel’s use of disproportionate force is a long-established tactic – with a clear aim
How to make sense of the sheer intensity of Israel’s war in Gaza? One understanding is that it is the result of the enduring shock of the 7 October massacre combined with a far-right government that includes extreme elements. Yet this ignores another element: a specific Israeli approach to war known as the Dahiya doctrine. It’s also one reason why the “pause” was never going to last for very long. (Read more)
Footnotes
Attacks on “Power” targets is often blamed on Hamas using “human shields”, when attacks against Gaza infrastructure is actually the result of a deliberate strategy to “shock” (terrorize?) civilians.
972 is the phone area code in Israel.
972 magazine is an Israeli publication. The US media shields Americans from the type of discussions going on in the Israeli press.
The 11-story al-Jalaa high-rise building in Gaza City where the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera were based was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes May 15, 2021. (2 years prior to 10/7)
I don't have a photo of a "Power Target" being destroyed since 10/7, so I substituted this video from May 15, 2021.
(The concept of "Power Targets" predates 10/7)
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_al-Jalaa_Building
In this instance in 2021, the residents were given 1 hour to evacuate.
+972 magazine reports that since 10/7, residents of "Power Targets" no longer need to be warned before the building is bombed.
Israel alleged that Hamas was developing a system to "jam" the Iron Dome anti-missle system, using the 11-story al-Jalaa.
This dehumanizing “animal” rhetoric is a sign that genocidal rhetoric.