Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 77: Did Israel intentionally target civilians in Gaza?

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: Did Israel intentionally target civilians in Gaza? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

The next question is a very difficult one. Not a difficult one to answer, a difficult one to answer and be heard. Did Israel intentionally target Palestinian civilians in Gaza? I know the answer. I also know all the caveats to that answer, and they're significant and painful. I also have a great deal of love and respect for soldiers who walked into fire for me and my children. And in every report that comes out of organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, when you talk to the actual writers of the report, we'll explain to you that they're out to dismantle Israel as a state.

It took Amnesty two years to publish a report on October 7, on October 7th. And so inside this maelstrom of libel, speaking into this campaign, honestly, isn't easy. I'm going to try and do it. War is terrible. War is evil. War is hell. In Gaza, we had a war fought inside a civilian population, in cities. This is the defensive part of my point.

I'll get to the place where I'm critical. We faced an enemy that had dug a tunnel system underneath a civilian population at a scale never before seen in war. This was the most comprehensive bomb shelter system ever built. 500, 600 kilometers of tunnels under a 40 kilometer territory. There wasn't a street or neighborhood that didn't have a tunnel crisscrossing it one way or another in Gaza. Part of the demolition that you see in Gaza that's resulted from the Israeli war was, A, the strategy of constant raiding, going in and leaving, going in and leaving, in part to minimize civilian harm, and in part because the Israelis didn't want to undertake a military

occupation. I don't know if that was a wise decision or a terrible decision, but that's the decision. But part of it was because they tried to get to tunnels everywhere, because every third building they encountered was booby-trapped, because tunnel entrances, thousands of tunnel shafts were booby-chrapped. It's no small thing that Hamas remains. It's no small thing that the Israeli war ended with the hostages brought home. And now there's no Israeli taste for more war. Netanyahu might embark on another war in Gaza, but the Israeli public doesn't want one. We have good polling on this. As soon as our people are back, we're done. Hamas wouldn't return the hostages for all of that time, all of those two years.

The very fact that Hamas was willing to watch Gaza's destruction, to create, to engineer Gaza's destruction, on the altar of Israel's destruction, made Hamas an undeterrable enemy, made Hamas dangerous, made it necessary to remove Hamas. The logic of strategy is sometimes paradoxical, confusing, tragic, utterly tragic. In that reality, there simply is no way for there not to be civilian dead in Gaza. And if seeing images of those civilian dead, of dead children, if those images triggered you and radicalized you, you're a decent person, well done. I'm concerned about the manipulations of the algorithm.

I'm concerned that that's the only war you will ever see. But that's secondary to the simple human fact that you saw the horrors of war, you saw the horrors of what actual civilians went through in this war. And now I'm going to come and tell you, no, it was okay, it was kosher, don't worry, we've crunched the numbers. I don't even want to say that. If your reaction, were the reaction of everybody to every war,

there would be no war. You're not the bad guy in this story. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell you what I know in the hope that it's enough, in the fairly certain knowledge that it's not. The Israelis understood that a massive civilian death toll in Gaza was a strategic boon, a strategic benefit to Hamas. The Israelis also, personally I know, Israeli officers who sat in command centers and really wanted to know for themselves, not for anyone else on their own. earth, that they're not bad guys, and consulted before every air strike with lawyers sitting there whose only expertise is international law in the case of an air strike. And the Israeli Southern Command established a unit called the Harm Mitigation Unit that made millions of phone

calls, sent millions of SMSes, created maps that subdivided Gaza into small squares, a kind of coordinate grid of Gaza, in leaflets, millions of leaflets dropped on Gaza in civilian population areas so that they could then tell Gazans, we're going to bomb in this grid. We're going to invade with the infantry in that grid. Soldiers died because there was almost no movement of soldiers anywhere into any place in Gaza that the Israelis didn't publicly, explicitly, and repeatedly telegraph ahead of time to reduce the number of civilians present in the place when they went in. Nobody's ever done that. I frankly don't know if that means the Israelis are good. Nobody's ever fought this kind of war. Nobody has.

has ever fought a war against an enemy entrenched in that tunnel system, ever, anything of even remotely that scale, in the history of war, of an enemy whose strategy was the destruction of their own polity, because they're living out a much larger religious war where the destruction of Israel is the beginning of a redemption story for all of Islam. Nobody's ever fought a war like this. The reason so much of Gaza was booby-trapped, and therefore so much of Gaza was also demolished as the Israeli army advanced to avoid those booby traps is that the Israeli is telegraphed ahead of time everything, and Hamas booby-trapped everything.

The demolition you see in Gaza is a function of the protection of civilian life. Now, I know this, and it explains the whole thing. I don't know why anybody would believe me. Certainly not if you've been radicalized on everything you read. We're never going to win the algorithm. We don't have the numbers. So I'm fighting in an ocean that's built to convince you otherwise. It is entirely legitimate to come at Israel and say, you didn't do enough.

It's not just legitimate. it. Please do. That's by the way how the laws of war came about. You can come to Israel and say, you didn't do nearly enough. Here's six things you could have done that would have saved more lives. You can come to Israel and say, here are cases of real criminality. Here are air strikes. You absolutely can't justify by any definition of the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers went into Gaza. Statistically, it is impossible for there not to have been sociopaths among them. If you tell me crimes were committed in Gaza, I will tell you. Yeah, obviously. How could there not have been. And we know there were certain deeper systemic problems. For example, prisoner abuse.

This is something we actually know a lot about. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, the Israeli forces rounded up a vast number of prisoners. On the Israeli side, by the way, of the border, people who had invaded. And there were far too many to seriously house in competent prison facilities. And so you would have a hundred in a single enclosure and three guards who were not trained properly to handle the situation. And we know there were cases of prisoner abuse. We have some detailed information. There have been arrests, indictments.

There have been convictions. Many commentators have said, look, if we have some evidence that a little bit happened, it probably was very widespread. And the Israeli government says it was very minor phenomenon, and we cracked down very stringently. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think it was probably a fairly small phenomenon,

and Israel probably could have cracked down more and should still crack down more and investigate more and indict more. But those things are not evidence of the question, which was, did the Israelis target civilians? Not did a single soldier commit a crime of murder on a battlefield. That must have happened. But it's weird that there isn't a lot of footage of it happening a lot of times, because Gaza was flooded with cameras.

We have literally tens of thousands of small videos from Gaza on social media. That's something to notice. One of the things to know about Gaza is that there are armies, armies of information warriors, combing the social media of soldiers, combing the images of Gazans, and floating to the top everything bad they could ever possibly find. Israel dropped more bombs than there are dead Gazans. Israel dropped more tons of explosives on Gaza than their civilians dead. If the explosives were targeting civilians, then the Israelis were targeting civilians, then the Israeli have very bad aim. Young men, fighting age men in Gaza, are overrepresented by two to three times their percentage in the population among the dead. So if you actually parse out the data

put out by the Gazans, by Hamas led health ministry in Gaza of the dead, and you discover that in Hamas' own numbers, fighting age men outnumber their percentage in the population threefold, that tells you who Israel was actually aiming at. Gazan civilian harm? was what was going to keep Hamas alive through the war. Ghazan civilian harm was what was going to win for Hamas the information war. There were even experts on war who wrote these things and told the Israelis, from the West, from American universities like Colombia, who wrote the Israelis, Hamas' war is premised on civilian harm,

don't fall into their trap. That's a very smart piece of advice two years ago. The Israelis went into this not knowing how to handle it and in complete shock. The commanders who led the initial response were the commanders who had collapsed and failed on October 7. And given that starting point, I am comfortable that Israel did tremendous amounts to learn to protect civilians in Gaza from harm. And I'm also absolutely sure Israel could have done more. We will be learning what happened here in detail for years and years to come. I know everybody thinks they already know. You don't know.

We'll be learning lessons, tactical and strategic and war fighting and, and cultural and moral, moral, moral, for years and years to come. But there are so many data points that tell us that, no, the Israelis were not as a policy aiming at civilians. If you're one of those people who says, I saw dead kids, therefore, this war was an unconscionable stain on the conscience of humanity,

I wish you saw that for every war, and I wish everybody did. Gaza is demolished, and that's a legitimate cause for concern, and Gaza has to be rebuilt, and I wish the Israelis were at the forefront of that. Every data point we have tells us the Israelis weren't aiming at the civilians. They were aiming at Hamas. So why are they so invested in telling you otherwise?

Why is it so important to so many powers that be, from the Muslim world, from progressive politics, to tell you that Gaza was a unique crime? Gaza's death toll is a tenth of the Syrian civil war. During the Gaza war, we had a war in Sudan with probably three times the death toll. We don't even know. And nobody talks about it and nobody cares. What is it about us?

What is it about the campaign against us that needs you to believe a lie? That there was a policy of targeting civilians in Gaza. It wasn't about Gaza. This infrastructure for the protests against the Gaza war were in place to such an extent that you could, could have mass protests about October 7, about genocide in Gaza, literally on October 8. There has never in the history of the West been a phenomenon like the great marches for Gaza, whether it's New York or London or Amsterdam, in their duration, in their regularity, in their shared vocabulary, their shared rituals, and they're identical, in their phrasing

and in their graphics. There is a coordinated campaign, an agenda that existed beforehand, which was the destruction of Israel because Israel is seen as a great crime. I have history lectures online, very popular ones, with hundreds of thousands of views that have been fact-checked a million times and you can trust them. Feed them into chat GPT to fact-check them.

That explain the extent to which the Israelis are a refugee people. The extent to which they were refugees who arrived in Israel with no other options. The extent to which that alone describes a great deal of their immunity. to terrorism, of their military prowess. So much has been thrown against them, and they somehow never fall.

This people, this refugee people, and not the great criminal regime in China, Russia's immense, immeasurable crimes, tens of thousands of children kidnapped. That doesn't draw the hundreds of thousands and millions to the streets with that regularity. The campaign to destroy Israel came before the war. And everything you've heard about the war was part of that campaign.