The Sentence That Came Before the Rubble: "Everyone has to be killed ... there are no innocents in Gaza"

A war does not begin only with the first missile. It begins with a sentence repeated often enough that killing becomes administratively simple. In Gaza, that sentence was spoken in plain language: there are no innocents.

In a recent interview, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described meeting young Israeli soldiers who told him that “everyone has to be killed” and that “there are no innocents” in Gaza. When he asked whether that included babies, he said, the answer came back: babies too, because eventually they would grow up and become terrorists. Lapid’s discomfort was real, but his conclusion was limited: force was still necessary, he said; Israel must simply avoid becoming like Hamas. Yet the moral boundary he invoked had already been crossed in the grammar of the war. Once a population is defined as future combatants, every crib becomes a potential target and every hospital a suspected headquarters.

The soldiers’ alleged words did not emerge from a vacuum. NBC News has reported that official Israeli government social-media accounts promoted material expressing the view that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. A 2025 survey by the aChord Center at Hebrew University found that 64 percent of Israeli respondents agreed that “there are no innocent people in Gaza,” with agreement higher still among Jewish Israelis. B’Tselem has argued that dehumanizing language by public officials shaped conduct on the ground, contributing to permissive rules of engagement in certain areas. The Israeli documentary NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, featured intelligence and military personnel describing how the belief that no one was innocent influenced AI-assisted targeting and casualty thresholds.

The rhetoric at the top was even starker. On October 9, 2023, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The next day, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, head of COGAT, addressed Gazans directly: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told Sky News that he was “puzzled by the constant concern” shown for Palestinians, whom he called “horrible, inhuman animals.”

Whatever the legal label ultimately attached to the war, this language matters because law and politics follow perception. A state cannot bomb a densely populated territory into near-total ruin, kill and wound tens of thousands of children, and then claim the outcome was incidental unless it also insists that the people were never fully civilian to begin with. The narrative did not merely accompany the destruction; it explained it, normalized it, and made accountability seem unreasonable.

The scale is now documented beyond dispute. Tracking compiled by the European External Action Service and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, drawing on Gaza health-ministry data, records at least 21,280 Palestinian children killed since October 7, 2023. A Commission of Inquiry report covering the first two years of the war verified at least 20,179 children killed and more than 44,143 injured as a direct result of hostilities. Identity-based monitoring indicates that at least 1,000 of the dead were babies and toddlers under two. Aid groups estimate that roughly 4,000 to 5,160 children remain buried or missing beneath destroyed buildings; using the child share of overall casualties, they infer that thousands more may still be under the rubble. In August and September 2026, Palestinian Civil Defence crews were still recovering remains from buildings flattened years earlier; in one Gaza City funeral, 70 children were buried together after their bodies were finally retrieved.

The physical destruction matches the demographic catastrophe. Updated satellite imagery visible on Google Earth and Google Maps corresponds with UN Satellite Centre assessments: about 82 percent of structures in Gaza—more than 201,000 buildings—have been damaged, and roughly two-thirds of those, over 134,400, have been destroyed or leveled. More than 90 percent of housing units have been damaged or obliterated, leaving nearly all of Gaza’s 2.2 million people structurally homeless. This is not the footprint of a campaign confined to tunnels and command posts. It is the remaking of a society into ruin.

That is why access has become the central scandal. The casualty figures are serious, cross-checked, and consistent with satellite damage assessments, but they remain, in the strictest evidentiary sense, incomplete. International forensic teams and UN investigators are not being allowed into Gaza to verify mass graves, preserve ballistic and biological evidence, identify bodies, interview survivors under protection, and establish chains of responsibility. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk and other senior officials have repeatedly demanded unrestricted access for independent investigators as local crews unearth hundreds of bodies from collapsed buildings and mass graves. Every delay degrades the evidence. Every refusal deepens the suspicion that the facts are being managed rather than examined.

Israel and its defenders are entitled to contest interpretations, challenge sourcing, and argue that the war was forced upon it by Hamas’s October 7 massacre and hostage-taking. They are not entitled to permanent exemption from verification. If the numbers are inflated, independent experts can say so. If individual incidents were lawful, field investigators can document the context. If the “human animals” language was aberrant rather than operational, command records and rules of engagement can prove it. The fastest way to discredit the accusation is to open the door.

Instead, the world has been asked to accept a paradox: Israel says the facts are wrong while blocking the very inspections that could settle the matter; Western governments demand humanitarian principles while continuing to arm and shield the campaign; international institutions issue reports without being allowed to stand where the bodies were found. The failure is therefore not only Israeli. It is the failure of a global order that has separated condemnation from consequence.

The narrative that enabled this war was not shouted by mobs alone. It was formalized by ministers, amplified by state media, echoed in polls, and translated into targeting logic. Its result is a strip of land where the dead include infants weeks old, where thousands of children may never be recovered, where most buildings are damaged and most homes are gone, and where the principle that civilians must be protected has been replaced by the proposition that innocence expires at birth.

If that proposition is false, let the United Nations in. Let forensic pathologists, weapons inspectors, child-protection specialists, and war-crimes investigators enter Gaza, work freely, and publish what they find. Until then, the absence of access is not a neutral bureaucratic fact. It is part of the crime scene.

Video of Israeli prime minister supervising operations that turned cities into rubble:

Google Earth Revealing the level of destruction of gaza:

Gaza Now