Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 25: What is happening in Gaza?

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

A bombshell Haaretz report last Friday concluded that IDF soldiers were responsible for a great many of the deaths of Gazan civilians outside aid distribution centers in Gaza.What should we make of the report? How reliable is it? And what does it tell us about the army's handling of Gaza and the progress of the war?This episode was sponsored by an anonymous donor in memory of the seven IDF soldiers who were killed on June 24, 2025, during fighting in the southern Gaza Strip. Their names were: Lt. Matan Shai Yashinovski, Staff Sgt. Ronel Ben-Moshe, Sgt. Ronen Shapiro, Sgt. Maayan Baruch Pearlstein, Staff Sgt. Niv Radia, Sgt. Shahar Manoav, and Staff Sgt. Alon Davidov. May their memory be a blessing.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. On June 27, the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aritz published a bombshell news report that argued that that Israeli soldiers were shooting and killing deliberately. The word was in the headline, aiming at targeting, shooting and killing, Gaza and civilians coming to four aid distribution centers in southern Gaza, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, for food, and they were being used. shot by Israeli soldiers guarding outside of those distribution centers. The report, of course, when instantly exploded internationally,

there have been reports for two months since the opening of the centers of shootings at people coming to get those aid boxes. Tens of millions of meals have been given out, but these reports keep filtering out of of Gaza in the proximity of these distribution centers. It has not been clear exactly what was happening. And what I mean by that is we know for a fact that Hamas opened fire on people going to these distribution centers because Hamas is desperate to avoid the distribution of aid that isn't in a method in a way that Hamas can take over.

In other words, that Hamas can have its gunmen climb on top of the trucks, as we've seen hundreds of times already over the last 21 months. and grab the aid and then essentially use the aid, sell him on the black market, and use the aid to finance its war effort. And Hamas has also massacred employees, Palestinian employees who work alongside with American contractors in the distribution centers where Israeli soldiers are not allowed to go. And so was it Hamas? Some of the Palestinian security at these distribution centers is essentially a militia called Abu Shabab, belonging to, a clan based in southern Gaza that has been armed by the Israelis. They're not controlled by the Israelis. They have their own. They've been fighting Hamas. They've been opposed to Hamas. They've been a power center of their own for quite a while. But they're being armed by the Israelis on the

theory that they are willing to face down Hamas, to hold territory in Gaza. The Hamas is not allowed to enter. And that makes them very useful to a war effort to remove Hamas from Gaza. And so Abu Shabab is standing in these distribution centers near around with assault rifles and was it them. And then we know that some of them were Israeli IDF soldiers, but we didn't know if it was a few, if it was occasional, if the soldiers were threatened. Over the last two weeks, something like 11 and 12 soldiers have been killed in Gaza, soldiers report from the distribution centers that they have had children come up to them with an empty pot so that pictures could be taken. and for propaganda purposes, and their fear was not that somebody was going to use their picture in a TikTok video. The fear was that these were Hamas testing how close they could bring the civilian population up to the soldiers while Hamas fighters had infiltrated that civilian population to carry out an attack. The goal being to make soldiers feel threatened and vulnerable outside these distribution centers and therefore to make them more likely to open fire,

anyone gets close and therefore to cause these kinds of shooting incidents. Some of the reporting by Palestinians in Gaza has turned out to be correct over the last 21 months. And some significant portion of the reporting has turned out to be complete fiction, just complete lies. You remember the Alachli Hospital, which the first report, and there were dozens of eyewitnesses, and all the authorities said the same thing, and it was very clear, and you got to trust the Gaza Health Ministry. There were 500 dead from an Israeli airstrike on a hospital that then became 300 dead and then 100 dead and then 24 dead. And the 24 weren't killed by an Israeli airstrike.

They were killed by an errant Islamic Jihad missile and, you know, fired nearby that never took off but blew up in the parking lot and the hospital was still standing and in one piece. And so just the entirety of the report, almost every word of the report, after having traveled the world virally and been on the front pages of every newspaper, turned out to simply be a fiction. Simply be a fiction produced by a fast-moving online pro-hamas operation that needed to fill in any gaps and needed to cover for essentially a launch accident of a rocket

meant to hit Israelis that accidentally landed in Gaza and hit Gazans. That's the kind of event and dozens of events like it. And UN reports about starvation that turned out to just be bad math. And just thing after thing after thing that has led a lot of the Israeli public to deeply distrust a lot of the news around Gaza. And a lot of people didn't know what to make of it. simply did not know what to make of these reports. We try not to deal with news. The major dramatic exception was the Iran War, the 12 days with Iran, which were very, very dramatic and upended all our lives for a brief period and changed the Middle East in some fundamental ways. But this is a

podcast about deep context. It's a podcast that says, here's the war with, you know, I don't know what, Hamas, where does Hamas come from ideologically? What 150-year lineage of theological debate within Sunni Islam produces a Hamas? That's the kind of podcast this is and strives to be. But we have a Patreon. We have a Patreon community. This report by Ha'Aritz about Israeli soldiers being the predominant story of those deaths, of hundreds of deaths around these A distribution centers of people desperately trying to. to get aid boxes and just encountering live fire from IDF soldiers. This story went around like wildfire. Never mind the anti-Israel crowds, never mind the genocide crowds. They're going to be there.

They're going to do their thing. Jews, Israelis, pro-Israel people are saying, wait a second, really? Really this happened? What does this mean? And because so many of our community asked, I'm going to tackle it. And I'm going to try and tackle it in a way that is useful. And in a way that really lays out the complexity and the problems of what happened. I want to say one caveat about Haarets.

It's important to say it because it's important for you to understand the lens through which Israelis have been reading these reports. And I'll say it and then I'll leave it alone because some of what Ha'Aritz wrote, I think, is just completely ridiculous ideological capture, partisan framing that is about an addiction to appealing to international progressive politics. and so much else is true and important that nevertheless I'm going to set all of that aside and I'm going to focus on what's true and important because we need it. And that's true of Ha'aritz often. Ha'arit sets itself up as an iconoclastic,

elite kind of cultural institution in a country that it perceives as not elite enough, sometimes that means not Ashkenazi enough, far too Middle Eastern, and not liberal enough, and not democratic enough, and not literate enough, and therefore it's going to be the moral conscience of a country too ignorant and backward to have the kind of moral conscience that good, well-spoken, and well-read Ashkenazim have. That is a powerful cultural element driving a lot of what happens at Ha'aritz. And when you know the people and I know the people and when you talk to them, you hear it and it's there and it's powerful. And they feel it and they say, but it's true,

but it's true. We actually are a liberal, Western, well-read, scholarly, thoughtful elite, which is, of course, why we're very left-wing. Ha'arets has, therefore, a duality. It is both, it both has some of the most indispensable journalists in Israeli journalism because they are iconoclass, because they are opposed to the mainstream as their sort of vision of themselves, they are willing, in fact, they're driven to, in fact, they get their validation from, turning over the rocks and finding the dark places and finding the things that other journalists are uncomfortable looking at or literally would never think of looking at. For example, about 15 years ago, my wife and I were involved in volunteering for an organization in Southern

Tel Aviv, funded and run mostly out of the municipality. We were involved in some fundraising for it. and some volunteering for it, that had taken on this enormous project of taking the children of foreign workers, I mean, asylum-seeking workers, people who had snuck in through the Sinai from wars in Africa like Sudan or Eritrea, and were living without any kind of status in Israel, and there was a whole public debate for 10 years about how to handle it and what to do with them, and the border today is closed between Israel and Sinai. There's a huge border fence, but at the time it wasn't, it was open. And this was a very large population of tens of thousands of people,

which for the city of Tel Aviv is a large population. And because they were not known, often literally not registered, and they were having kids, obviously, tens of thousands of people living together over time, they're having kids. And those kids sometimes were literally not just simply registered in any government agency. The parents sometimes were afraid of the authorities, didn't know if registering a kid meant they would get booted out of the country. It was the kind of asylum-seeking illegal immigration story

that many, many countries deal with. Israel dealt with it relatively at a small phenomenon, but nevertheless it happened, and it wasn't small for the people involved in it. And so these kids did not have access to kindergartens and preschools. And the parents, in order to be able to go to work, established amongst themselves, through their own paltry sums of money that they could spare,

pirate kindergartens and preschools. And these little preschools were just random backyards of apartments in the poorest slums of Tel Aviv, sometimes with exposed electrical wiring, bad, you know, water that wasn't flowing properly, rusty pipes, just where whatever spaces could be spared by a community that didn't have money to pay Tel Aviv rent or build a place or, you know, buy supplies. And so there were efforts by volunteers. and some of it was funded by the Tel Aviv municipality to send social workers and early childhood educators to literally go to these pirate kindergartens and preschools and touch them up, make sure that they're safe, you know, fix the broken things in the walls, create a space. And it couldn't be the state. It couldn't be the government because then there would be enforcement issues coming to play. And so they would hide and they would not allow you in or they would, you know, close up for the day if they saw you coming. if this was social workers in the state with the police.

So it had to all be on a volunteer basis just to keep the kids safe. And again, my wife and I were involved in this. Now, that we first learned of this, and that story broke in the Israeli public understanding. It got onto the Israeli public consciousness from an Haaret's welfare reporter called Uttisinae who would go into these spaces

with these communities that are marginalized that other people didn't want to write about. There's a lot of political anger about them being there. They arrive and there are street fights between various factions of Eritreans in Israel because they're on different sides of the Eritrean civil war. And they bring that violence that is sometimes murderous violence into southern Tel Aviv. And the neighborhoods in that area are very misrahy, very angry at Ashkenazi elites, including, for example, at Ha Arez, who they think ignore them and ignore their suffering. That none of the, you famously, if you're part of that group and the activists against these asylum seekers, you would famously say, you know, if you're so keen on them being here, take them to your wealthy neighborhoods in northern Tel Aviv. But you only want to dump them on us where there's tremendous spike in crime where women can't walk in the streets safely in the dark.

and those used to be very safe neighborhoods, all of these kinds of complaints. Again, if you're hearing echoes from literally every Western country dealing with asylum seekers, you should be. It's a very similar phenomenon. But those kids and those pirate preschools

needed to be taken care of. The country could take 15 years to figure out the grand policy on immigration. The kids in the preschools with the exposed electrical wiring needed to be taken care of. And how it's put that on the agenda. Nobody else would have.

At the same thing, time, what we have today is a classic example of every pitfall of Haarets and its culture. We have a report that describes in detail from soldiers. I believe the testimonies of those soldiers in that report. And the Hebrew, by the way, is more serious and less fancifully moralizing than the English. And the headline of the English, the headline of the English begins with, it's a killing field. IDF soldiers ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid. The standing orders are not to shoot to kill in a situation where you're not immediately threatened.

The actual article describes the fear that IDF soldiers have, the lack of training, the lack of proper equipment for crowd control. The only thing those soldiers have on them is deadly weapons. And from within those crowds, soldiers say in the original Hararets article, not just a follow-up articles in Israeli media where other soldiers say other things. In that original article, say that Hamas has used crowds to attack soldiers. And soldiers are scared of that and right to be worried about it and jittery because of it. And it begins with it's a killing field. Now, a killing field is a term that came out of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge genocide of the Pulpat regime in Cambodia killed two million people,

a quarter of the population of the country. And it had killing fields where human beings were mowed down like animals in vast, vast numbers systematically. And it's meant to play into the genocide discourse. It's an addiction to the appeal

to the international progressive discourse. The problem with it isn't that Haare's editors, especially in the English, editors have left Ha' Aare's English and we've seen them leave the country and become campaigners for the dissolution of Israel from overseas. There's an ideological tilt there that expresses itself constantly in this

ideological framing of news. And every once in a while, it really important moments and important stories, they deliver the indispensable work because they're looking for it. And so my relationship with Haaretz is my view of Haaretz is complicated Anyone who tries to close them down I will defend them to the death And every other day up to that moment I will criticize them

Because they make their own work less Useful Less able to be seen by Israelis Ordinary Israelis Because they frame it in ways That are not actually what they reported I think the article is a is a decent journalistic article.

It's a first draft. It's a first article to put it squarely on the agenda. As the journalist himself, Neil Hasson, explained on Twitter when sharing the article, we went to Israeli soldiers or they came to us and we finally have an answer to the question, who's doing all these shootings? And the answer is IDF soldiers. And I read through the article looking for the percentages. In other words, did you actually figure out if, is it 20% IDF soldiers?

Which is disastrous. It's horrible. That has to be fixed immediately. or is it 80% IDF soldiers and almost entirely IDF soldiers? And the only thing they say is a kind of sort of throwaway comment in the article is the IDF doesn't allow armed people uncoordinated into the compounds, which is the implicit suggestion that no one could have done this shooting except IDF soldiers. But of course, there are many coordinated armed people in the compounds from American contractors to the Abu Shababab militia. and Hamas isn't allowed to be anywhere by IDF rules in Gaza

and yet they're gunmen of Hamas coming up to IDF soldiers and managing to kill him in this guerrilla war and so the idea that that answers the question it doesn't answer the question and yet reading these soldiers' testimonies Haritz told us a lot and when Wynette went looking why not found the same thing it found what those soldiers were actually telling not how the English edition framed the headline to appeal to certain international audiences. They found the actual claims of the actual soldiers in the story elsewhere.

That is, we now know what is happening because the Irish forced it onto the agenda. Before we go any further, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by an anonymous donor, who very appropriately asked that we dedicate it to seven soldiers who were killed over the past week in the Southern Gund Zsa Strip after an explosive device was thrown at their armed personnel carrier in Han Yunus on Tuesday. It was one of the deadliest incidents for the IDF soldiers in Gaza in many months, and the soldiers were all age 19 to 21 from all over Israel. Lieutenant Matan Shah Yoshinovsky, 21 from Kvaryana, Staff Sergeant Ronel

Ben Moshe, 20 from Rechovot. Staff Sergeant Niv Radia, 20 from Eliechin. Sergeant Ronan Shapiro, 19 from Maskeret Batya. Sergeant Shachar Manoav, 21 from Ashkilon. Sergeant Mayayan, Baruch, Perlstein.

20 from Ishchar, and Staff Sergeant Alon Davido, 21 from Kiriatiam. They all served in the 605th Combat Engineering Battalion and their death raised the death toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza over the last 21 months to 440. I have to say, I know the 605th Combat Engineering Battalion.

25 years ago, I went to the medics course, which is a four-month trauma medicine course for combat medics. And most of the course was the 605th Combat Engineers. and they were wonderful young men, salt of the earth from every part of Israeli society, Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and secular, and we remember them in their sacrifice today. It's appropriate that we remember soldiers killed because it explains something important about what is actually happening at the distribution center. And I want to lay that out. Here's what we know.

There are four aid distribution sites. They were established in May. They've been running for about two months. Inside the sites are American contractors and Palestinian security and Palestinian employees. IDF soldiers are not allowed into the sites. Around the sites, there's a perimeter, a few hundred meters from the sites in most cases, in the paths leading to the sites. And they're meant to protect the sites.

They're also meant to protect the aid distribution sites from Hamas infiltration and stealing of aid. That is the major part of the IDF operation around these sites. And they treat people approaching the sites as potential Hamas because that is the framing of their mission. The whole purpose of this other system built out with the Gaza humanitarian foundation, this joint American-Israeli effort. Basically, it's a joint American-Israeli effort. The whole purpose is to deny Hamas aid. In that whole aid system, Hamas starve Gazans eat.

That's the concept. And so the IDF's purpose is to protect these sites from Hamas being able to get to them. But IDF soldiers in Gaza can't always tell the difference, can almost never tell the difference between a Hamas person walking into an aid center and a non-Chamass person walking into an aid center because no Hamas fighter has ever worn a uniform in Gaza except in a ceremony. And so the soldiers are there trying to do a job that by definition brings them into friction with the civilian population seeking to get the aid. Soldiers are also jittery and worried about the fact that the civilian populations have been used

to mask Hamas approaching the soldiers, and there have been attacks, and soldiers have been wounded and even have been killed, including over the last two weeks alone, as we have seen. Crowds aren't allowed anywhere near the soldiers, and by anywhere near the soldiers, I mean soldiers usually try to keep them at a distance that would make gunfire impractical, hundreds of meters in many places. And they open fire in the sky at a sand dune nearby in order to prevent the crowds from getting close. And it is in those incidents that people have been hit. And the great question is, how widespread is it?

Is it criminal? For example, one of the soldiers interviewed by Haritz, in the original? Howitz report said that there was one point in his position. They opened fire on people sneaking up on them out of a fog. And that turned out to be civilians coming for aid in the early morning and there was a fog. But to these soldiers expecting attacks and not able to distinguish between the potential civilian population and the potential combatant population, that felt like imminent danger. And it was a mistake, the soldier says. And that's in the original high our rights report. No interaction is allowed between the soldiers and the civilians because that puts

the soldiers in more danger. And the soldiers have, you know, as I said, told other media outlets including Wynets, Yov Zaytun and others, that they're constantly facing certain parts of the civilian population that comes up to them and tries to test them and tries to check how close they can come to them. None of what I'm saying is meant to justify. The point is, because justifying is just not an important activity. The point here is to explain what soldiers think is happening to them when you talk to them, and I have spent the last three, four days trying to figure out if this is true.

And the best that I have been able to conclude is that the basic things that the soldiers are quoted as telling, Ha'aritz, are correct. And that, to me, is not justifying. It's the opposite. This is a catastrophic failure. It isn't the grand moral narratives of the West that is where it failed. This is an enormous failure of competence. It's an enormous failure of strategy.

Because consider what we are learning. The companies that are guarding these aid distribution centers are told to be standing primed ready, alert for Hamas, including in the civilian population coming for the aid. That means they have to stay very far from the soldiers. The soldiers themselves are hundreds of meters away from the distribution centers, but controlling the approach to the distribution centers. That means that the soldiers do interact, do have friction with the population,

but from very far away. The soldiers are brought to the distribution centers from other parts of Gaza, from other parts of urban warfare in Gaza. They're running gun battles right now in northern Gaza, in Jabalya and other places. Soldiers who know that you demolish the building next door because there will be a sniper. Two soldiers are wounded earlier this week from an RPG fire at them in Khan Yunus.

Soldiers who know that there's a sniper, there's an RPGist sitting in a building waiting for them to turn the corner and fire at them will demolish that building before they turn that corner. They will keep everyone very far from them. They will shoot in the air and they will shoot at the ground near the people approaching.

And if the people approach even slightly more because it is an urban battlefield, because they're in uniform, because everybody understands what's happening, they will shoot to kill. If you bring that mindset to the aid distribution center, even if it's a valid mindset

in that kind of urban warfare setting with the kind of enemy that is deeply embedded in the civilian population as Hamas, and you bring that to the aid distribution center, how is this not going to be the result? The maneuvering around the aid distribution is intense. This is potentially for Hamas

a disaster. This is the failure. This is the fall. And so they're pulling every stop. And so the Israelis have to be prepared to make sure that the civilians don't die at Israeli hands, even if the soldiers are jittery, even if they've just come from a battlefield where shooting at someone who's continuing to approach is reasonable because they've been Hamas again and again and again and again. And there's nine soldiers killed and wounded just in the last five days. Even if all of that is true, you don't then without any retraining and any reconsideration.

the Army has also responded to the Haaret's article in recent days. It rejected basically the part that I rejected, the argument that there's a deliberate policy of shooting. There isn't a deliberate policy of shooting civilians. It never has been, and there isn't. And to say that in a headline is a useless distraction. And the reason it's a useless distraction is that it gives the Army cover for the actual disaster.

The actual disaster, the Army, the army confirmed in everything it said. There weren't signs. The infrastructure wasn't there properly. Family members would come to get the box, the aid box for their family, and they would come for, you know, two weeks straight. And then someone else from the family would switch them off. And that person didn't know the way.

Didn't understand where you go left or where you go right. There isn't signage. The actual places to approach are not demarcated. people aren't allowed to come when it's not open. Why? Crowd control. Why? So the protest doesn't develop. So stampede doesn't develop. All kinds of very reasonable things for some junior officer to think up. But the net result is that you have people not necessarily knowing the landscape. And if they take a left instead of a right, they can get shot. Signs. Crowd control. The most basic things, the army admitted by saying we have now begun to do this. The facility at TEDxed, Sultan is the facility where a lot of these shootings have happened, and the army announced shortly before I recorded this that it would shut it down and rebuild it in ways that will handle that exact problem. Ha'aritz estimates that there have been 19 shooting incidents, and it estimates that most of them

have been IDF. I have no evidence to say that that's mistaken. One of the most damning things in the Ha'ahatt's report was the claim that sometime in the last 10 days when it became clear this was a serious problem that was recurring. It wasn't a one-off incident and who knows. It was a serious problem that was recurring. It was systemic. There was a meeting at the Southern Command with the top brass in which Southern Command senior officers discovered in that meeting that soldiers sometimes on occasion, I don't know if it's two times or 40 times, but on occasion had used artillery shells as warning shots to keep civilians away. Artillery shells are long

distance. Artillery shells are broad area explosives. Artillery shells are a tragic disaster in a situation like this. It serves no purpose. If you need an explosion to catch people's attention because it's turning into a stampede, there are small grenades that have almost no explosive, they have no shrapnel, they just made a galaoud bang. and every infantry platoon in the IDF infantry has them. You don't need an artillery shell. The problem wasn't just the bad decision. The problem wasn't that that decision may be criminal.

I don't know. We know that there are investigations opened by the military advocate general into some of these incidents. We don't know exactly how many, but that is something that the army has said and the Haaret's also reported. And others have reported as well in Israeli media. But the fact that they didn't even know,

there was no clarity among the top. high top brass of the Southern Command. What's actually happening at these centers? That's the damning thing. Because here's the thing. We already know that our infantry can take the ground. We already know that we can demolish anything we need to demolish to hunt for those tunnels. There are thousands of tunnel entrances. There might be more demolishing to do, even though so much of Gaza has already demolished, that tunnel system cannot survive. You could be very, very hawkish on this. and we know that we have brigade, a brigade of combat engineers who know how to run through tunnels in running gun battles.

Tunnels used to be a death trap for IDF soldiers. They're more likely today to be a death trap for the Hamas guys because the IDF will hit them in the tunnel running through the tunnel before they can lay their traps. We know how to do that part. It took 21 months, but the IDF learned. But the war will be won if the final thing that props up the Hamas war effort,

the ability to use aid to fund everything, to pay 15-year-olds to join the war effort and rebuild the ranks in some of the northern battalions, the war will be won or lost on that question, on denying Hamas that supply. In other words, this is foundational to the strategy. Every soldier dying in Gaza for the defeat of Hamas and a safer tomorrow,

and a new day for a Gaza that is de-radicalized, Every soldier dying in Gaza is betrayed by the incompetence and lack of focus and total inattention to the fact that getting the aid right is the critical thing. I wrote a tweet two months ago in which I said, dear Israel, this is how we defeat them. Don't screw this up. What I learned from Ha'arets and from all the follow-up reporting since, what I learned is that the IDF was screwing this up. Since this report, the Southern Command has cracked down. We've heard from soldiers in Gaza. Orders have changed.

Getting this right has become the priority, not just keeping Hamas out when Hamas looks an awful lot like everybody else. Not having this fail has now become the priority. That's good. It's a shame it took two months of people dying, of soldiers standing jittery and afraid of a civilian population, they were supposed to keep safe on top of all of the other missions they had in that space for the strategy, if not for the morality.

We know that for most of the soldiers there, defeat of Hamas is the priority. We also know that for many of them, the morality is not a small thing. An army that kills civilians unnecessarily. beyond the legal problem and the moral problem, is an undisciplined army that's going to have a much harder time getting the mission done. It's long past time that got fixed, and I'm glad it's getting fixed, and the army has put out a lot of statements about fixing it, and soldiers are telling us the orders have changed just in the last three days,

but they weren't paying attention. They weren't noticing. Haritz quoted an officer saying, there were also fatalities and injuries among IDF soldiers in these incidents. that's in the Hararets report. A combat brigade, the officer said, doesn't have the tools to handle a civilian population in a war zone. Firing mortars to keep hungry people away is not humane,

but it's also not professional. This is an officer who should be in charge. I know there are Hamas operatives among them, but there are also people who simply need to want to receive aid. As a country, we have a responsibility to ensure that that happens safely. The text inside the article is not ideological capture, and it's not appealing to any foreigner. It's the most basic problem and the most fundamental strategic element that has to go right if Hamas is to be routed in Gaza. This kind of chaos is inevitable in war.

It's literally a constant in all the annals of war, you know, with very limited exceptions of extremely elite, well-planned and short operations like Iran. Gaza is the opposite of Iran. Those soldiers are right to be afraid. It's a fear rooted in Hamas' own foundational strategy that they've been experiencing and countering, fighting against for 20 months. From those civilians, they will get shot at. They already have gotten shot at. And on the battlefield, that fear is useful.

That fear has created a culture among ID of soldiers of initiative taking. If you're moving forward, they're not laying traps. That's the fundamental strategy in the tunnels. It's the fundamental strategy on the ground. It's great when you face an enemy that plots and maneuvers in the shadows, and it's an extremely predictable disaster in the face of civilians looking for aid. The most battle tents, the most powerful actors in Gaza, IDF ground troops, should not be the perimeter around the aid without even any training or any change in the weapons they carry

from deadly weapons of the battlefield to crowd dispersal, at least some weapons being crowd dispersal. The moral point is enormous. Everyone has said it. But it's a collapse of strategy. And that matters because people have died to get this done. And there's no future for Gaza until he gets done. The aid distribution was the crown jewel,

the thing that was going to bring the collapse, the starvation of Hamas. Literally those fighters would have to come out because they had nothing to eat. at no point was that understanding sufficiently built into the military command structure that anyone with a strategic eye was present on the ground at these incidents lieutenant-general ayal zamil the chief of staff of the idf has told the government repeatedly and publicly that soldiers can't handle aid if soldiers handle aid they will be killed that that is a level of friction with the society with the civilian population that would be terribly dangerous for the soldiers and once it's terribly dangerous for the soldiers, also terribly dangerous for the civilians. It was a recipe for disaster. And so he stood vehemently opposed to the idea of distributing aid.

But if then the army has to protect aid and you just laid out all those problems, why aren't those problems front and center for the protection mission? Why isn't that clear, especially after the first attack? And how soldiers were responding as if they faced combatants. Millions of meals were distributed while these incest. took place. That's true. Are some of the deaths not carried out by Israel but by Hamas and Abu Shabab? Yes. Are we talking about fewer actual death at IDF hands than the Palestinian numbers say, either because the numbers themselves are inflated in various times, or because

some of the deaths literally aren't by IDF soldiers? Yes. Is it a Raha'arets report that begins with killing fields evoking Cambodia and talks about deliberately? When that's whole article is about a systemic failure rather than the soldiers' own just bloodlust? Yes. None of that changes the basic moral problem and the basic institutional and organizational problem of firing a mortar shell in a civilian space. This is how the war will be lost.

After all the sacrifices, Gazan civilians endured. Our own dead and wounded soldiers. Their families. All of it. people I know this incompetence this failure to understand that war is not

always won in the gunfight it's one in the politics and it's one in the organization and in the rebuilding and in the aid distribution and the denial of the other side's narrative that misunderstanding is going to lose the contest of aid to

Hamas and possibly lose Gaza to Hamas ultimately it's a squandering of sacrifices through sharing competence. And the army knows all this. In its responses, as I said, it explicitly admitted there was a breakdown. In its response in the article, the original article, the army said, Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that starves the Gaza population and endangers them to maintain its rule in the Gaza Strip. Hamas does everything in its power to prevent the successful distribution of food in Gaza and to disrupt humanitarian aid.

Dear IDF, I agree. That's a reason to succeed with the aid. That's a reason to have top brass make sure the aid is going well all the time. The Army's statement continues. As part of their operational conduct in the vicinity of the main access roads to the distribution centers, IDF forces are conducting systematic learning processes to improve their operational response in the area and minimize as much as possible potential friction between the population and IDF forces. recently forces worked to reorganize the area by placing new fences, signage, opening additional routes to the distribution center, and more.

Following incidents where there were reports of harm to civilians arriving at distribution centers, in-depth investigations were conducted and instructions were given to forces on the ground based on lessons learned. These incidents were referred for examination by the general staff's debriefing mechanism, including, for example, potentially examining whether there were war crimes. or to translate from military bureaucracy ease. It's true. The problems are real. It happened.

But we're on it. The Army strongly rejected the accusation raised in the article that there was an instruction to forces to deliberately shoot at civilians. The IDF directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians. And the Army said that any allegation of a deviation from the law or IDF directives will be thoroughly exempt. and further action will be taken as necessary. That's a statement about the ideological framing how a in English gave it, because Ha'arits'an Ha'arits.

Folks, this is important. The army can't control civilians. Now we know it can't even protect aid compounds. And that means failure looms. And we've seen it. Trucks have never stopped coming through the old mechanism, even though the prime minister and the finance minister, Bitzalus Smuthrich of the Fligazianism Party,

who has said, you know, he's resigning for, government if aid flows to Hamas, well, we have video from the last week of trots being taken over by Hamas coming in through the old mechanisms. But the army has no choice. 800,000 gauzens have returned to the north, and they have to be fed, and there are no aid distribution centers in the north. So either the army gets serious about this aid distribution system everywhere it can. Either the army gets serious about finding ways to keep civilians in place because they actually have what they need in those places, and then having the rest of gaza to fight in.

Or it's going to have to feed everybody everywhere because the IDF can't starve a population, despite what the UN has repeatedly said and turned out to be untrue time and time again. Hamas delighted to starve the population. All the costs are on Israel. But the IDF can't, and so the IDF has now allowed this week 400 trucks into northern Gaza. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has pretended to be shocked and demanded within 48 hours a solution from the army. In a sense, this problem, this crisis, is a micro-concrast.

is a microcosm of the war as a whole. What's the grand strategy to take a thousand little battles over 21 months and turn them into a great and significant win? And nobody has articulated one in public or anywhere. It's a microcosm of the confusion and the misapprehension of the priorities of this war and how you are going to win this war

that we've seen from day one. I suggested something silly about 15, 16, 17 months ago. I suggested that we build a refugee camp inside Israel, move the Gaza civilian population there, keep them there, fed, taken care of, medical care, huge volunteer reservoir in the Arab population of Israel, who are also Palestinians and no Arabic and no Hebrew. We get that done. We have all the intelligence and all the AI cameras to suss out the Hamas fighters. Fine.

But people eat. People live. and then Gaza is free to destroy every tunnel, to reset, to get rid of every Hamas infrastructure and every Hamas fighter. Now, was that naive? If we do that, will the world tell us it's a concentration camp? Sure, but it's saying it anyway.

They're going to call it, whatever they call it, for their own political validation. Gazans would have eaten, Hamas would have died. i don't know if that's a solution i'm not a general i never ran a battlefield i certainly never ran a battlefield as complex and totally innovative in terms of the scale of the problem in the military challenge as gaza nobody's ever done this before but there hasn't been any kind of innovative thought from anyone else either it turns out at the strategic level in gaza conclusion the shootings are real tragic preventable they're not a killing field they're not a purposeful massacre but they're nevertheless a human moral failing, and an organizational and tactical and even grand strategic failing. And they reveal how little, real, deep thought has gone into the Gaza war. And they're a betrayal of the soldiers. The system created the deaths. You cycle out the soldiers that happened to be there, and you bring in

Ha'aritz reading, Ha'aritz writing progressive soldiers of the most progressive type, that platoon will also open fire. The problem is the system. it wasn't built right, it wasn't planned right, even the criminal process. Some soldiers may have committed outright crimes, not mistakes, crimes. They should be prosecuted. But that's also not going to solve the problem because the failure, they're still positioned in a place where that crash into each other of these populations in that way is inevitable. The point of being a hawk, and I consider myself a hawk,

hawk when it comes to war is to make war a real threat, to make it dangerous, to make it the sort of threat that incentivizes peace. No Iranian ever believed Obama when he said every option is on the table. Or Biden. Every Iranian going forward is going to believe that the Israelis actually are going to destroy things that come to destroy them. We are more likely to have peace now, not war. You need to be the sort of threat that incentivizes peace. And then if war comes, you need to be ready for that war to make sure it's conducted competently, decisively, quickly with the lowest cost possible. I'm a hawk. Iran and Chazbalah were good wars against genocidal foes. The wars were prepared well, they were executed flawlessly, they were overwhelming, they were short, and they were

relatively low cost for everyone but the military enemy. I've wanted to be able to be able to belled. I've wanted those two wars. I've called for them. I'm sick of living under the shadow of these genocidal threats. I knew we were ready, although I never imagined just how profoundly ready and deadly and competent we actually were when it came to Chisbalah and the regime in Iran. And I'm proud of my country for the exact kind of war that should be a model of moral war, necessary, competent, quick, and with low civilian death tolls. It won't be a model because too much of Western discourse is shallow and silly and moralizing, and everybody's involved in this attention economy devoid of any real wisdom or experience, where most pundits organs of analysis have

atrophied from disuse. But it should be. What we saw at the aid distribution centers has been rank incompetence. It has been driven by an inattention that itself is rooted in Netanyahu's coalition needs and the government's refusal to lay out a clear strategy where some political people don't agree with other political people in the cabinet. And that prevents real planning and a drive toward an endgame that might be politically unpalatable to the most extreme right-wing factions of Israel. There literally are no more right-wing factions in Israel, but which is the path to victory, the actual victory we actually need.

Even now, even as we talk about a disciplinary breakdown, a tactical breakdown that resulted in the deaths of Gaza's civilians over the past two months, Even now the greatest disservice, morally a great crime, actually, even if not legally a crime, that Israel could now inflict on Gazans after all that's happened, all their suffering, would be leaving Hamas intact and in power and able to get back to bending all of Gaza's resources and civilian population and future prospects to its holy war. If that happens, Gaza won't be rebuilt, life won't get better. That would be a crueler outcome than finishing this and letting the rebuilding begin.

It's time to be hawks. Decisive and courageous and bold and thinking out of the box and understanding that a political victory is part of a military victory, you can't win the war and lose the politics or you have lost the war. Be decisive, be courageous, be bold, and not confused and desultry and incompetent that we've seen until now in Gaza. Gaza can't afford it.

Neither can Israel. Thank you for joining me.