Leaders of Israel, again, call people in Gaza "human animals", justifying the war crimes against Palestinians

News media reports have shed new light on the persistent supremacist belief held by Israeli leaders that allowed them to cut off access to basic necessities of life to all Gazans. This week, Aljazeera reported that Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Galant, threatened, again, what he called "human animals" in Gaza. The news outlet added that Galant’s soldiers' actions and “testimonies reveal horrific violations in Gaza.” A summary of the outlet's coverage of this story follows.

Galant said that the Israeli security establishment is determined to hold accountable those he called "human animals" who worked against the Israelis, while a number of occupation soldiers confessed to horrifying details about the army's violations in different areas in the Gaza Strip.

Galant threatened during a session in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, "Anyone who worked against the citizens of Israel will face either prison or a graveyard," and promised to punish them, according to his expression.

The Israeli Defense Minister claimed that the Israeli forces killed 60% of the Hamas fighters, and that his army dismantled most of the movement's military battalions, noting that "dangers threaten all parts of Israel, whether from the West Bank, the north, or the Gaza border."

Galant admitted that there was a failure in what happened on the Gaza border, noting that the decision to release Palestinian prisoners recently "was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that this was a big mistake."

Killing Orders

On the other hand, the Israeli website "Siha Mekomit" published testimonies of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, in which they gave horrifying details about the violations committed in different areas of the Strip.

Six soldiers told the Israeli website in their testimonies the details of the orders given to them to open fire without limits and without differentiating between civilians and others, and that they saw many bodies of Palestinians lying in the open, but the army did not work to evacuate them.

The soldier, who was called "B", confirmed in his testimony that the army gave soldiers absolute freedom of action and the authority to open fire merely on suspicion of danger without demanding any justification, saying that it is permissible to shoot at anyone, whether a child or an old person. We often heard phrases such as: There are no innocents, why didn't they flee the battlefield?

These soldiers testified that they fired randomly, burned houses, and left bodies in the streets, only picking them up in one case: before the international relief teams entered, and that “every man between the ages of 16 and 50 is suspected of terrorism” in the eyes of the Israeli army.

Some of these testimonies refer to shooting at Palestinians at the entrance to a school in the Zeitoun neighborhood, which was a shelter for displaced persons, and that even after the army “accidentally” killed 3 Israeli prisoners in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, no one spoke to the soldiers or changed the shooting orders.

These testimonies intersect with the statement of the soldier “S.” that “the shooting was without justification other than to prove the presence, and it made no difference whether the target was a human or not, and sometimes we fired just to make sure whether the target was a dog or a human.”

An Israeli officer also said, “I know of some situations in which Palestinian civilians who entered areas under the control of the army were shot at, because the approach was to shoot at anyone who approached, there should be no civilians here, we see someone coming, we shoot, and then he is killed.”

Another soldier, who served in an area where this humanitarian path was established, confirmed that orders were to target anyone who approached them, even displaced civilians who were searching for “leftovers of food.”

For his part, soldier “D” said that his army did not care about a school, a place of worship, a hospital, or buildings of international organizations at all times, and that orders not to shoot were rare and did not exceed the number of fingers on two hands, in an approach that denies what Israeli political and military leaders promote about the claim that it is “the most moral army in the world.”

The newspaper “Haaretz” revealed in early March that the Israeli army admitted to killing the unarmed elderly man whose execution was published by Al Jazeera in a video clip in a house west of Gaza, saying that the army claims that its forces were operating in a complex combat zone when they killed the unarmed elderly man.

In late March, Al Jazeera broadcast exclusive footage taken from an Israeli drone that was shot down in Khan Yunis in early February. The footage shows an Israeli drone chasing four unarmed Palestinian youths and targeting them with several missiles. Two of them were killed by the first missile, then the third and fourth were killed by two more missiles.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor previously documented the Israeli army's execution of 13 children by direct fire towards Palestinian children in and around Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza.

The monitor described these executions as a "flagrant violation" of the rules of international law, including international humanitarian law, constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the context of the violations committed by Israel and the "genocide that the Palestinian people have been subjected to in the Strip for about 6 months."

This comes in light of the occupation forces' continued, since October 7, their devastating war on Gaza, leaving more than 125,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine in the besieged Strip that has claimed the lives of dozens of children.

Galant made similar statements during the start of the war

In his instruction to his troops, Galant used the same description of Palestinians as human animals and order a complete and total blockade: no food, no water, no electricity, no medicine, nothing... And his troops delivering, denying all the people of Gaza access to all necessities to live.