The New York Times published a report by a group of its correspondents today, Thursday, in which it said that Israel eased and facilitated restrictions and rules for pursuing Hamas fighters, after the attacks of October 7, 2023, which led to doubling the killing of civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“At 1 p.m. on October 7, the Israeli military issued an order unleashing one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern warfare,” the report says. “The order, which went into effect immediately, gave mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had not been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now go after not only senior Hamas leaders, weapons depots and rocket launchers that had been the focus of previous campaigns, but also lower-ranking fighters.” In each strike, the order says, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.
The newspaper explains that “according to the Israeli military protocol, there are four categories to avoid endangering civilians: Level zero, which prevents soldiers from endangering civilians; Level one, which allows the killing of five civilians; Level two, which allows the killing of up to 10 civilians; and Level three, which allows the killing of at least 20 civilians. The latter became the standard in effect after the attacks of October 7.”
“According to four Israeli officers involved in selecting the targets, the strikes, which put more than 100 civilians at risk, were sometimes allowed to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved,” the paper says. “Three of them said the targets were Ibrahim Bayari, a senior Hamas commander who was killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimates killed at least 125 others.”
According to the newspaper, "This matter, which has not been reported before, has never happened in the history of the Israeli army. Never before have middle-ranking officers been given such freedom to attack such a large number of targets, many of which were previously less important."
The New York Times investigation found that Israel severely weakened the system of safeguards intended to protect civilians; relied on flawed methods for finding targets and assessing the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its ranks and from senior American military officials about these failures. The New York Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets, whose combined accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel waged one of the most brutal air wars of this century.
Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on such a sensitive topic, the newspaper reported. The New York Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.
In its investigation, The Times found that:
· Israel dramatically expanded the range of military targets it sought to hit in preemptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. This led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the first seven weeks of the war, more than it fired in the next eight months combined. In addition, the military leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians its strikes could endanger each day.
· On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each put more than 100 noncombatants at risk—a threshold that would exceed an unusual threshold for a contemporary Western military.
The military struck at a pace that made it difficult to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of its prewar database of vetted targets in a matter of days and relied on an unproven system for finding new targets that made extensive use of artificial intelligence.
· The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, sometimes striking targets hours after they had been located, increasing the risk of error. The model relied primarily on estimates of cellphone usage in a broader neighborhood, rather than the intensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.
· From the first day of the war, Israel greatly reduced its use of so-called “roof knocks,” or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an impending attack. When it could have used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military objective, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs.
The air campaign was at its most intense during the first two months of the war, when more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed — or nearly a third of the total death toll, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, the newspaper reported.
The paper claims that from November 2023 onwards, amid global protests, Israel began conserving ammunition and tightening some of its rules of engagement, including halving the number of civilians who could be harmed when striking low-ranking militants who posed no imminent threat. But the rules are still more lenient than they were before the war. Since those first weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while Israel disputes the ministry’s figures, the total continues to rise.
The investigation indicates that in the first weeks of the war, more than 30,000 Palestinians were killed. While Israel disputed the figures, the death toll continued to rise.
When the newspaper presented the results of its investigation to the Israeli army, it responded with a 700-word written statement, in which it admitted that the rules of engagement had changed after October 7, but stressed that its forces had consistently used means and methods that adhered to the rules of law.
The statement added that the changes came in the context of a conflict "unprecedented and incomparable to other theaters of hostilities around the world," citing the scale of the Hamas attack, the militants' efforts to hide among civilians in Gaza, and Hamas's extensive tunnel network.
Israel, which has been accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice, claims that it takes measures before strikes, such as emptying entire cities and taking down posters. It accuses Hamas of being responsible for the bloodshed. However, the newspaper says that the rules for ensuring that the Israeli army complies with international law, which officers and lawyers participate in, were not followed after the October 7 attacks.
The danger to civilians was also increased by the Israeli military's extensive use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them US-made, which accounted for 90 percent of the munitions dropped by Israel in the first two weeks of the war.
By November, two officers said, the Air Force was dropping so many one-ton bombs that it was running short of guidance kits that convert unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions, forcing pilots to rely on less accurate bombs.
The New York Times concludes its investigation by noting that last July, Israel fired several missiles at Hamas militants, including top commander Mohammed Deif, killing at least 57 people, according to Airwars, an organization based at the University of London.
Israeli officers also acted with near-total impunity. Only two officers are known to have been fired for their role in the air campaign, after they oversaw a drone strike that killed several foreign aid workers whom the officers mistaken for militants.
The military said a committee appointed by the chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes, but no one had been charged.
