Reading by Progress Center for Policies –
On the evening of April 3, Israeli right-wing Channel 14 aired a video showing a lieutenant colonel, referred to as “D.”, instructing his soldiers in Gaza with the following combat doctrine:
“This is an operation to recover the hostages and requires maximum pressure. In it, you kill many enemies and take control of wide areas… Anyone you encounter is an enemy. If you see a person, shoot, eliminate him, and move on.”
This video was released following the bombing of a school and the massacre of all its residents, mostly displaced persons—women and children.
Analysis:
What was stated by the battalion commander, Lt. Col. D., reflects the standard operating doctrine in the army and has been actively implemented since October 7, 2023. Throughout the months of war, the Israeli leadership has collectively deemed Palestinians in Gaza as subhuman “monsters”, and genocidal rhetoric promoting starvation, thirst, denial of medical care, total destruction, and the annihilation of all means of life has dominated the daily conduct of the war. The clear message has been: Gaza will never return to what it once was.
For comparison: the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, founder of Hamas’s military wing, on July 23, 2002—by targeting his home and surrounding buildings with an F-16 strike—was a foundational moment in the debate over civilian casualties. That airstrike killed 18 people, including eight children. Lawsuits were filed in international courts against involved military and political leaders. At the time, Israel defended itself by claiming it had procedures to cancel any operation if there was a risk of civilian casualties—except in the case of what it called “ticking bombs.”
Previously, instructions prohibited targeting civilians, and the army boasted that it and the Shin Bet (Shabak) had cancelled operations at the last minute upon realizing the potential civilian toll. If a “ticking bomb” target might result in civilian casualties, the decision was referred to top military command. After October 7, however, these protocols were abandoned. Authority to target civilians was delegated to mid-ranking officers. The new policy became: target civilians and the entire population.
A major shift occurred in targeting policy: it became acceptable to kill up to 20 civilians when targeting any Hamas member, and up to 100 civilians if targeting a senior Hamas figure. The daily civilian casualty ceiling approved on October 9, 2023, was 500 people.
This loose threshold lasted only two days before the numbers were left unrestricted, and authority to approve such attacks was spread across both senior and junior officers, without oversight. Thousands of targets in Gaza were attacked, including lower-ranking Hamas members who previously would not have been prioritized.
An investigation by The New York Times, republished by Ynet, revealed that in dismantling Hamas’s capabilities in Gaza, Israel substantially weakened the oversight systems meant to prevent civilian harm, employed extreme methods for target selection, and ignored warnings from military officers who feared legal accountability before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for premeditated war crimes.
The investigation reviewed dozens of military documents and included interviews with over 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 who were directly involved in approving attacks. The findings show that in order to drastically expand the list of attackable targets, the threshold for acceptable civilian casualties was also raised.
In the first seven weeks of the war, the Israeli army dropped nearly 30,000 bombs and munitions on Gaza. Initial orders allowed operations that risked the lives of up to 500 civilians daily. That cap was lifted after just two days, enabling officers to approve strikes on civilians with no restrictions, provided they deemed the operation “legal”—and they did so without concern.
The army relied on an oversimplified statistical model to assess civilian risk, based largely on mobile phone usage data in broad areas around a target site—not on precise intelligence surveillance, as had been standard in past operations. In practice, there were no longer any constraints on targeting civilians, and killing civilians became as important a goal as killing Hamas combatants.
In the current and most lethal phase of the war, which began after Israel halted the hostage deal and adopted a strategy of “negotiating through intensified bombing,” the unrestricted targeting of civilians became even more pronounced. The school massacre, in which children were torn to pieces, as well as the targeting and execution of medics, whose hands were bound before they were buried in mass graves to conceal the crime, became routine events—met with official and public indifference in Israel. This reflects a continuation of the genocidal policy, echoing the orders given by Lt. Col. D.
Netanyahu’s official visit to Hungary takes place in the context of undermining the ICC, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. The warm reception by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán serves to undermine the European position and sabotage EU principles, thwarting international accountability. Neither Orbán nor Netanyahu, who is the accused, could manage this alone—they are backed by the Trump administration, which has declared war on the ICC in an effort to abolish it. The visit also sends a message to Israeli soldiers, affirming the ethos of Lt. Col. D.
The hostage families movement accuses Netanyahu of sentencing their loved ones to death by adhering to this policy. Meanwhile, reservist soldiers are increasingly voicing their refusal to return to service in what they view as a purely political war—a war they believe will expose them to future prosecution at the ICC, and one in which they do not trust the government to defend them. Although both protest movements call for halting the war and returning to a hostage deal, they are indifferent to the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Conclusion:
What Lt. Col. D. told his battalion reflects the dominant ethos within the Israeli military and political leadership: every Palestinian is an enemy, and this belief is not limited to Gaza.
The goal is no longer just revenge; it is the elimination of the entire Palestinian existence. This mindset now dominates all branches of the Israeli state.
There is no political or popular force in Israel resisting this mentality. Instead, there is a compartmentalization between genocidal policies and the pragmatic utility of securing hostage deals.
On the Palestinian and Arab side, the prevailing sense of helplessness only reinforces the genocidal and ethnic-cleansing mindset aimed at the eradication of the Palestinian people.
