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One does not need to be a professional analyst to see that the way in which the IDF has been conducting itself in Gaza has been violently different from the past. Reports on the murder of civilians and on looting have been an all too frequent phenomena. This is reflected in the fact that it took the IDF’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, over four months from the start of the war to send out a detailed order calling upon his soldiers “to take care not to use force where it is not necessary, to distinguish between a terrorist and someone who is not, not to take anything that is not ours … and not to make revenge videos.” Indiscriminate killing can be seen in a recent drone strike: there are four men walking upon a dirt road in Khan Yunis when suddenly they are hit by an airstrike. Two of the men are immediately killed, two of them are wounded. Another strike erupts, and one of the wounded men is shattered to pieces. The other can be seen limping, struggling to walk before collapsing on his knees, and then seconds later he is cut to pieces by an airstrike. Israel later explained the story, claiming that a rocket had been fired by a terrorist and he was later neutralized. But this was not one man, but four, and they were apparently unarmed.
“This was a very grave incident,” a senior Israel Defense Forces officer told Haaretz. “They were unarmed, they didn’t endanger our forces in the area in which they were walking.” An intelligence officer familiar with this story told Haaretz that it is not at all known if these men were involve in the launching of the rocket, but that they were closest to the site of the launch, and that its possible that they were merely civilians searching for food. “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate,” says a reserve officer who has served in Gaza. A senior officer in Southern Command made a revealing description of the war zone in Gaza, that there aren’t even many gunmen on the streets, which means most of the people that the IDF spots are not terrorists, but civilians:
“It’s astonishing to hear the reports after every operation, regarding how many terrorists were killed … 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.”
A reserve officer explained that: “usually there is a terrorist, maybe two or three, hiding inside a building. The ones discovering them are combatants with special equipment or drones.” Once a target was struck, it was this officer’s job to report the number of terrorists killed to senior officers: “This wasn’t an official debriefing where they want you to produce all the bodies … They ask you how many and I give a number based on what we see and understand on the ground, and we move on.”
This same officer emphasizes that “it’s not that we invent bodies, but no one can determine with certainty who is a terrorist and who was hit after entering the combat zone of an IDF force.” A number of soldiers who have fought in Gaza have described how easily the label of “terrorist” is given to those killed. At times, those killed were simply people who walked into one of Israel’s “kill zones” or a closed off military zone usually around an abandoned house in which soldiers will position themselves. Anyone who walks into one of these zones is automatically seen as a terrorist and can be freely shot. “In every combat zone, commanders define such kill zones,” says the reserve officer. “This means clear red lines that no one who is not from the IDF may cross, so that our forces in the area are not hit.”
The demarcation of these kill zones are not determined beforehand, nor is their distance from the house in which the forces are posted. “As soon as people enter it, mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed,” says the reserve officer. The result of this is the slaughter of the three Israeli hostages.
Even after Israel’s Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, realizing that commanders were acting lawlessly, ordered the IDF not to kill indiscriminately, commanders were still breaking his order. A senior defense official explained to Haaretz: “the chief of staff came out in the clearest manner against the killing of anyone entering a combat zone. He talked about this in his speeches …Regrettably, there are still commanders, even senior ones, who do as they please in their conduct in the Gaza Strip.”
A reserve officer recounted a story in which a whole crowd of civilians almost became the target of an airstrike: “We identified a suspicious man who was about to enter our combat zone … We already had a drone in the air with approval to kill the suspect. Suddenly, at the last moment, we and the drone operator saw the man entering a street and a square, with dozens of people there.” These dozens of civilians were just a few yards outside the combat zone boundary, where there was a market with stalls and children riding on bikes. “We didn’t even know there were civilians there,” he says. They immediately chose to call off the strike, preventing a massacre. But these words of the reserve officer reveal a trigger happiness within the IDF: ”I have no doubt that there are other forces which would have used the drone … There is always tension between protecting our forces, which is the highest priority, and a situation in which you try to avoid unnecessary killing of civilians.”
There is a phenomena of the loss of order within the Israel military. The Israeli publication, Haaretz, published an article speaking of “video recordings capturing the troops’ actions, their calls for Jewish resettlement of the Gaza Strip (the so-called Gush Katif settlement bloc), the troops’ usage of social media to criticize the alleged “restraint” on their ability to use deadly force, their looting and much more – all these are expressions of an unremitting agitation making its way from the ground up and which the army’s leadership finds hard or is reluctant to restrain.” The article also speaks of “the high proportion of combat soldiers who identify as supporters of right-wing and religious-right parties.” Right-wing sentiment is very high within the ranks of the IDF, and if they grow disgruntled enough against the government, it would not be surprising that this would ripple into a violent division within Israel.
These soldiers, the article explains, believe that they “are saving Israel from a disaster imposed on it by past defeatist governments and worsened by the left’s contribution to the weakening of the army in its protest against the government’s judicial overhaul.” Another article, also published by Haaretz, describes how in Gaza these fanatically Jewish soldiers have done “religious ceremonies such as bringing in Torah scrolls and putting mezuzahs on Gazan houses”, which can only mean one thing and that is the expressed desire to Judaize Gaza. One strange example of this religious fanaticism was when a reservist company commander said: “Battalion 2908 has entered Beit Hanoun and done what Shimon and Levy did to Nablus.” Shimon and Levy, in the Book of Genesis, committed an atrocity by exterminating the Canaanites of Shechem even after they agreed to convert to Judaism. The fact that a commander would reference this story as something to emulate bespeaks a sinister nature. The same article speaks about “the national-religious camp and an uprising by blue-collar soldiers (following the Elor Azaria affair) against the IDF’s supposed restraint” as “an attempt to reshape the army into a pincer movement, an uprising from below backed by the right-wing leadership, and expressed, for example, by the actions taken against the IDF chief of staff when he dared suspend soldiers who desecrated a mosque in Jenin.”
Fanaticism and ultra-nationalism within the IDF marks the rise in far-right ideology in Israel to its expectedly violent denouement. There is a deep rift within Israeli society; on one side you have the more secular and politically moderate, and on the other the more religious and nationalist. The latter have much more children than the former, which means that the demographic victory is being given to the religious and nationalist. Since it is the religious who have more children, it is only natural that the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) will be called for mandatory military service, something that they have been resisting for decades as they argue that their duty is to study the Torah and Talmud and protect the nation though prayerful intercession.
But this resistance to military service has been changing within recent months. “Unusually high numbers have expressed support for or interest in military service according to polling data and military statistics,” writes Patrick Kingsley and Natan Odenheimer for the New York Times, “even as the vast majority of Haredim still hope to retain their exemption.” The Haredim make up 13% of the Israeli population. But, the Haredi Jews are dependent on government welfare and are adverse to military service, gaining them the resentment of secular Israelis who lament that they must serve in the army to defend the Haredi and work for the government funds to provide for this very large (and growing) sect of Judaism. What does the future hold for a country that has a rapidly growing population of people who don’t wish to work nor fight? This is the concern of many Israelis. “The security challenges facing us prove that everyone must bear the burden, every sector of the population,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Soldiers returning from battle in Gaza have been calling into question the absence of the ultra-orthodox on the front lines. But, as has been said already, the tide is turning within the Haredim in favor of military conscription.
Now, almost 30% of Haredi Jews support mandatory service, a 20 point increase since the beginning of the war that began on October 7th. Almost three-fourths of those polled said that their sense of shared destiny with other Israelis had intensified since the Oct. 7 attacks.
“We see some change within the Haredi community,” said Avigdor Liberman, the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, a nationalist party that has long campaigned to end Haredi privileges. “They understand it is impossible to continue without participating more in our society.”
But what would happen if the ultra-orthodox swell up in number within the ranks of the IDF? We already have an idea of what this would look like, in the Netzah Yehuda Battalion (Judah’s Victory Battalion), the strictly ultra-orthodox unit within the Israeli military. There has been extensive inquiry done in the fanaticism of this battalion, and their crimes and lawlessness will be described here.
In April of 2021, a Palestinian family was driving at night near the entrance to the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank. Soldiers of the Netzah Yehuda unit ordered the driver — the father — to pull over and they then pulled him out. A soldier from a different unit witnessed what happened next:
“They pulled him out of the car and beat him like crazy… At some point there on the road, the driver started to shake, and they saw that he was passing out.”
The Netzah Yehuda soldiers needed to come up with a cover up story to excuse their actions. So they made the claim that they stopped the car because they feared that the driver was going to ram people over. But this claim was rejected by the Shin Bet security service, the police and the army’s Central Command. Witnesses also affirmed that there was nothing suspicious about how the man was driving. “There were people there who tried to treat the Palestinian, who was in bad shape because of the beating,” the soldier from a different unit recounted. “They yelled at the Netzah Yehuda medic to come help, but he refused, claiming he was a terrorist. They even refused to provide the water they asked for to treat the Palestinian. It was an insane incident.”
After being detained for two hours, the driver and his family were released. Upon the driver being transferred to an ambulance, the family wanted to return to their car, but noticed that their keys had disappeared. They asked the ultra-orthodox soldiers, but they shrugged their shoulders and said they had no idea where the keys were. “For more than an hour they searched for the car keys,” said a person who was present at the scene. “Only an hour and a half later, when the deputy battalion commander showed up and started to search, did they find the keys at their outpost, near the rooms. For an hour and a half they lied to the entire world, and this didn’t bother them at all.”
The Netzah Yehuda Battalion does not see itself as a part of the IDF, but as its own ultra-orthodox army. As Israeli journalist Yaniv Kubovich wrote: “Officers and soldiers past and present who have served in the battalion or are familiar with it say that for years it has set its own moral and professional standards – and the top brass has turned a blind eye.” A Netzah Yehuda soldier who left the army recounted how members of the unit would throw stun grenades at homes and passing cars just for laughs, and how the unit tries its best to separate itself from the rest of the army:
“We would go out on routine operations in the villages, and suddenly one of the guys would throw a stun grenade at a home or a passing car. It’s usually just for laughs and because of stories they’ve heard about what battalion veterans have done … It’s important to someone in the battalion to constantly show that they’re a different force in the sector – that we, unlike all the brigades that are replaced every few weeks, live this sector and know what to do.”
In another incident, Netzah Yehuda soldiers smashed the windows of a home, broke inside and began threatening the family with a gun. The soldiers, according to a source at Central Command, were clarified about the rules, but this was yet another time when they were reminded about the rules they are supposed to follow, but the warnings fall on deaf ears. There has been discussion about disbanding the ultra-orthodox battalion, but this has been ruled out because it would be seen as a declaration of war by the settlers, who are now a massive population and who see the Netzah Yehuda as their battalion. A defense official said:
“We very quickly realized that dissolving Netzah Yehuda would be a declaration of war for the settler leadership… Their view on the ground is that this battalion belongs to them, that it’s a force that works for the settlement enterprise. … In routine times, the heads of the settler leadership show up at the battalion freely and talk to the soldiers… Rabbis come to the post and move around freely, give classes and talk with the soldiers about operational incidents. It’s a kind of phalange”
This defense official’s use of the word phalange when describing Netzah Yehuda is interesting in the sense that the Phalange were a Lebanese Maronite paramilitary organization that carried out the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. There is no doubt that these fanatics would do such an atrocity themselves if they could. Its not just with Palestinians that these soldiers are violent, but with other Jews who they see as traitors.
In June of 2023, fights erupted between Palestinians and settlers near the unauthorized settlement of Oz Zion. A Border Police officer came to the place of contention to separate the belligerent parties, but then Netzah Yehuda soldiers arrived to undermine the work of the police officer.
“Screw this Border Police cop now,” they shouted at the settlers, inciting them to attack the Israeli police officer. It was thus not a coincidence that just a few days later there was a clash between settlers and the police in the Shiloh Valley.
“The soldiers from Netzah Yehuda began shouting at the police and security forces, ‘Don’t incriminate fighters,’ ‘traitors’ and ‘Jews are being evicted,’” recounted a military source familiar with what happened. “One soldier spit at the forces.”
An Israeli officer in the army reserves told Haaretz that Netzah Yehuda not only partake in violence against Palestinians, but against the Israeli police as well:
“On weekends, more than once, soldiers from Netzah Yehuda showed up and took part in the violent incidents against Palestinians or security forces who came to the confrontations”
The military courts have been very light on the Netzah Yehuda soldiers. According to a 2019 indictment filed by military prosecutors, a Netzah Yehuda soldier attacked Bedouin at a gas station “without provocation, and while they were trying to call the police.” The same indictment mentions how Netzah Yehuda soldiers got off a bus “while they were carrying their weapons and for a few minutes struck people at the scene and aimed their locked and loaded weapons at them”. The soldier who launched the attack got only a month and a half in prison, while disciplinary action was done against the rest. The judges over the case spoke kindly of the soldier:
“The defendant is a soldier who joined the IDF even though he could have continued with his Torah studies … The opinions and recommendations of the defendant’s teachers and commanders show that this is an upright young man, a positive soldier who carries out his role and missions in the very best way.”
Israel is enabling the rise of a leviathan. If the massive numbers of ultra-orthodox become soldiers, then there will be an army of zealots, already hostile to both Palestinian and Jew, and they will be a potential threat to the order of Israeli society. They want Israel to become a theocracy (hence why they back the Likud’s plan to diminish the supreme court), they despise secular society, they hold animosity to the police and don’t mind doing or inciting violence against other Jews. And we have already seen examples of this from a small unit of ultra-orthodox. Imagine if they have even more thousands, or even tens of thousands of their members in the Israeli military. They already see themselves as separate from Israeli society, and their battalion already sees itself as its own military. A massive number of such soldiers would destabilize the secular state of Israel, as such soldiers would work to advance their talmudic theocratic ambition. These are the zealots who rebelled against the Romans during their war with Judea, some decades after the Sanhedrin conspired to have Christ crucified. During the Roman-Judean war, it was not just Jew and Roman fighting, but Jews killing one another. The Zealot faction wanted to control the Temple and so sent a letter to their Arab Jewish allies in Idumea, telling them that the other Jews (those following the establishment Sadducee and Pharisaical orders) were about to surrender the Temple to the Romans. The Arab Jews and Zealots committed a horrific slaughter within the Temple of their fellow Jew, as Josephus described: “the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood; and that day, as it came on, they saw eight thousand five hundred dead bodies there.” (War, 4.5) It was suicide for Israel, and with such zealots today, it will be suicide again.
And are not the Jewish fanatics in Israel fixated on building a third temple as they despise the secular state of Israel? Are there not millions of Jews desiring to build a third temple, and are they not hindered by the secular Israeli government? An influx of ultra-orthodox Jewish soldiers would lead to a leviathan that would add a major contribution to the violent rift that is deepening within Israel. There would be violence against other Jews and also Arabs, with the aim of cleansing Israel. The closet thing to a civil war that Israel has had between Jews was the Altalena Affair in 1948 in which the IDF was in street battles with the far-right Irgun paramilitary group. If the orthodox become a serious military force, it will be worse than a repeat of the Altalena Affair. What we are seeing in Israel is a cultural war that could easily shift to physical war. The ultra-orthodox want to cleanse Israel of both Jews they don’t like, and Arabs.
Hence why one Netzah Yehuda soldier said of the West Bank: “This is land of the Jewish people and it will soon return to the Jewish people.” This sentiment reflects a plan to expand the settlement movement in the West Bank and also into Gaza.
In February of 2024, Israel’s Economy Ministry sent out some news to journalists for minister Nir Barkat: a new initiative is planned to train 5,000 Israelis for the construction industry. There was a detail in the announcement that indicated the motive of the plan: the new program will be done “in cooperation with the Gush Etzion Development Company and the Israel Construction Center.” The former was founded to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank’s Etzion bloc. This is of no surprise. Under the current administration, the West Bank has seen the highest level of settlement construction since the Oslo Accords. This is part of the ongoing policy of expanding Jewish settlements, with the aim of getting rid of the “green line” or the border between the West Bank and Israel. This blurring of the border can be seen in what the government has been doing. The Knesset passed a law that allows the transfer of funds between local authorities in Israel and local authorities in the settlements. The government has also been working to give complete power to settlement representatives and to dismiss the authority of the Civil Administration which, for decades, has ruled over the West Bank and has been under the control of the military. So they want to transfer the power to King Settler. The further blurring of the green line is seen in a recently passed law which allows the Minister of the Interior to transfer money taken from property taxes from industrial areas located within Israel to settlement authorities. The law was proposed by MK Yaakov Asher of the United Torah Judaism party.
The Knesset’s Internal Affairs Committee, chaired by Asher, MKs Naama Lazimi of Labor and Naor Shiri of Yesh Atid, affirmed that the proposal would lead to the de facto annexation of the occupied territories. To this Asher replied: “De jure, de facto, de Moshe – I don’t bother with these things.”
Israel’s Justice Ministry warned that this bill may actually be a violation of international law, but it was passed anyway. Even though it was passed, its execution will be determined by the Interior Minister, but regardless of this it will likely be carried out due to future plans to build more settlement homes. In 2023, 12,000 housing units were approved for construction in the West Bank, the highest number since the Oslo Accords.
The state’s work to make the green line vanish is further seen in the recent establishment of an Israeli government arm in the West Bank called the Settlement and National Missions Ministry, the main goal of which is to serve the office of Minister Bezalel Smotrich for an immense flow of funds into the settlements. The National Missions Ministry is currently led by MK Orit Strook of the Religious Zionism Party, who does not want to stop at the West Bank, but envisages the expansion of settlements into Gaza. In March of 2023 Strook stated:
“Sadly, a return to the Gaza Strip will involve many casualties, just as the departure from the Gaza Strip came with many casualties. But ultimately it is part of the Land of Israel, and a day will come when we will return to it.”
The Israeli government heavily boosted the funding for Strook’s National Missions Ministry. Before the closing of the budget in 2023, the ministry got an additional 378 million shekels ($102 million), so that its budget jumped to 543 million shekels ($147 million) – even in the midst of the war when the budgets of all other ministries were cut.
The mission of the Israeli settlers is to push out the Palestinians from their lands and replace them with Jews. An organization that has been behind this mission is the World Zionist Organization. The Israeli government made the decision to transfer the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division to Strook’s National Missions Ministry, along with a lot of government funds. Strook has the authority to give her stamp of approval to the services provided by the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, without having to first consult the government. So a state of fanatics is being formed outside of the actual state of Israel. Are they forming a four state solution, with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, whatever remains of Gaza, Israel and now fanatic talmudic Israel? Decisions to build new settlements will be made with the approval of Strook without the need for the okay of the Construction and Housing Minister.
Strook is in cahoots with an Israeli official named Israel Malachi, a Jewish settler who works within the Finance Ministry. Malachi has caused much controversy in Israel for his allocation of state funds to the Garin Torani (Torah Nucleus) movement, which believes in advancing Judaism by moving into Jewish secular neighborhoods and doing charity work, and strengthening Jewish identity by settling in Arab Israeli areas. But this “Torah” movement is not all about charity. Behind this mask there is a thirst for blood. During the 2021 outbreak of ethnic violence in the city of Lod, members of the Garin Torani opened fire on Arab protestors, killing Moussa Hassouneh, a father of three was heading towards his home. Five suspects were detained, released within three days and eventually acquitted by the Israeli public attorney. In May 2022, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) got video footage of the police investigating the murder of Hassouna. What the video exposed was that Israeli politicians put pressure on the police to close the files against the five Jewish suspects. The atmosphere of religious zealotry fits perfectly like a glove in the drive to expand Jewish domination, like a sort of lebensraum. Reflecting this ideology is Idit Silman, the Minister of Environmental Protection, who stated in the summer of 2023: “We are bringing back former glory. The Land of Israel is ours and we will continue to expand and settle in it.”
The plan for further expansion of settlements is not limited to the West Bank, but has its eyes on Gaza. This was made clear in January of 2024 when Israeli rightists, including members of the Knesset, got together for the “Victory for Israel” conference in Jerusalem. The slogan for the assembly was “Only settlements bring security – Returning to Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria”. The conference presented the plan for new settlements, even showing where they are to be built: Yishai “will be built on the outskirts of the devastated town of Beit Hanoun,” “Maoz” on the southern Gaza coast, the “Gates of Gaza” would be in “the destroyed city of Khan Younis.” There would also be an area for Haredi settlement called “Hessed La’alafim” south of Rafah. The conference was organized by a far-right organization called “Nachala,” led by Daniella Weiss who, after the October 7th massacre, declared: “It’s the end of the presence of Arabs in Gaza. It’s the end….Instead of them, there will be many, many Jews that will return to the settlements, that will build new settlements.” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was present in the conference where he said: “We should encourage them [Gazans] to voluntarily leave from here. The mistake in our thinking cost us rape, murder, and plunder”. Ben Gvir then essentially repeated himself, but also added the Torah:
“Part of the righting of the wrong in our thinking is to go back home to Gush Katif [the pre-2005 Gaza settlements]. We need to go back home because that’s the Torah, that’s historical justice and that’s what’s right. Today everyone understands that running away [from territory] brings war. We need to go back home and control the territory.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke after Ben-Gvir and also made mention of the intention to resettle Gaza: “The resilience and determination of the homefront are the keys to victory in war. The people of Israel are at an important crossroads. We must decide whether to flee from terror or learn the lesson and settle the land all over.”
Construction Minister Goldknopf, who saw the map of the planned settlements, said: “The entire Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.”
Nachala Movement Israel chairman Daniella Weiss added: “The only true victory in this war will be to return to our forefathers’ lands.” Weiss went on further to reference Judaism:
“In historic moments like the one we are currently in, we need to ignore all the background noise and understand what we really need to do, what our vision is, and where we want to aim. The only true victory in this war will be to return to our ancestral homeland. In the city of Gaza Jewish settlement was present for most of our history since the Exodus from Egypt. We need to understand that it is in our hands, and not to surrender to dictates and pressures.”
A project of ethnic cleansing will lead to the Islamic world doing a blitzkrieg on Israel, with the most powerful of the Islamic world — Iran and Turkey — joining forces to war on Israel. When Israel began bombing Gaza back in October of 2023, Erdogan threatened Israel: “We are such a great nation and state that our strength, our problem, our struggle is not only limited to our borders. … From now on, we will continue on our path with the motto that we may suddenly knock on your door one night. Erdogan also declared before Turkish lawmakers, in regards to Israel: ‘the end is near for you.” And: “You may have as many nuclear bombs as you want. Whatever you possess, you are a goner”. So, by the looks of it, Israel will have to face Iran and Turkey, Hezbollah and Hamas, and also, Israel will have to face itself.
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