Massive Database of Evidence Compiled by Historian Documents Israel's War Crimes in Gaza (Haaretz)

Nir HASSON

Woman with child shot dead as she waves white flag | Starving girls crushed to death in line for bread | Handcuffed 62-year-old man crushed, apparently by tank | Airstrike targets people trying to help wounded boy | Database of thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documents Israel’s horrors in Gaza.

Footnote 379 of historian Lee Mordechai’s extensive and comprehensive document contains a link to a video clip. It shows a large dog gnawing at something in the bushes. ‘Wai, wai, he’s got the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses of the word,’ says the soldier who filmed the dog eating a corpse. After a few seconds, the soldier raises the camera and adds: ‘But what a beautiful view, what a beautiful sunset!’ A red sun sets over the Gaza Strip. A beautiful sunset, indeed.

The report that Dr. Mordechai has compiled online – 'Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War' – is the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of Israel's war crimes in the Gaza Strip. It is a shocking indictment consisting of thousands of entries relating to the war, the actions of the government, the media, the IDF and Israeli society in general. The English translation of the seventh version of the text, the most recent to date, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigative documents, articles and photographs.

For example, there are links to texts and other types of testimonies describing acts attributed to IDF soldiers who were seen 'shooting at civilians waving white flags, mistreating individuals, captives and corpses, gleefully damaging or destroying homes, various structures and institutions, religious sites and looting personal property, as well as firing indiscriminately with their weapons, shooting local animals, destroying private property, burning books in libraries, defacing Palestinian and Islamic symbols (including burning Qurans and turning mosques into dining areas)'.

One link is to a video of a Gaza soldier holding up a large placard taken in a barber shop in the central Israeli city of Yehud, with bodies strewn around him. Other links are to footage of soldiers deployed to Gaza reading the Book of Esther, as is customary during the Purim holiday, but whenever the name of the evil Haman is mentioned, they fire a mortar shell instead of just waving the traditional noisemakers. A soldier is seen forcing bound and blindfolded prisoners to send greetings to his family and say they want to be his slaves. Soldiers are pictured holding piles of money they have looted from Gaza homes. An IDF bulldozer is seen destroying a large pile of food packages from an aid agency. A soldier sings the children’s song ‘Next year we’ll burn the school’, as a school is seen burning in the background. And there are numerous sequences of soldiers showing off women’s underwear that they have looted.

Footnote 379 appears in a subsection entitled ‘Dehumanization in the Israeli Defense Forces’ that is included in the chapter entitled ‘Israeli Discourse and the Dehumanization of Palestinians’. It contains hundreds of examples of the cruel behavior of Israeli society and state institutions toward the suffering Gazans – from a prime minister who speaks of Amalek, to the 18,000 calls from Israelis on social media to raze the Strip, to Israeli doctors who support the bombing of Gaza hospitals, to the comedian who jokes that Palestinians are not the only ones suffering. It also includes a children’s choir softly singing, “In a year, we will annihilate everyone and then we will return to plow our fields,” to the tune of the iconic War of Independence-era song, “Shir Hare’ut” (Song of Comradeship).

The links in ‘Witnessing the Israel-Gaza War’ also lead to graphic images of bodies strewn about in every possible condition, people crushed under rubble, pools of blood and the screams of people who lost their entire families in an instant. There is evidence of the murder of disabled people, humiliation and sexual assault, the burning of homes, forced starvation, random shooting, looting, abuse of corpses and much more.

While not all of the testimonies can be corroborated, the picture that emerges is of an army that, at best, has lost control of many units, whose soldiers have done as they please, and at worst, allows its personnel to commit the most heinous war crimes imaginable.

Mordechai cites examples of the horrific hardships the war has imposed on Gazans. A doctor amputating his niece’s leg on a kitchen table, without anesthesia, using a kitchen knife. People eating horse flesh and grass, or drinking seawater to stave off hunger. Women forced to give birth in a crowded classroom. Doctors watching helplessly as wounded people die because there is no way to help them. Starving women pushed into a chaotic line outside a bakery; according to the report, two girls aged 13 and 17 and a 50-year-old woman were crushed to death in the incident.

In the DP camps in the Gaza Strip in January, according to ’Bearing Witness’, there was on average one toilet for every 220 people and one shower for every 4,500 people. A number of doctors and health organizations have reported that infectious diseases and skin conditions are spreading among large numbers of Gazans.

More and more children

Lee Mordechai, 42, a former IDF combat engineer officer, is currently a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he specializes in human and natural disasters of the ancient and medieval periods. He has written about the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century and the volcanic winter that struck the northern hemisphere in 536 CE. He approached the Gaza catastrophe in an academic and historical manner, with dry prose and few adjectives, using the widest possible variety of primary sources; his writings are devoid of interpretation and open to scrutiny and revision. This is precisely why the faces reflected in his text are so horrifying.

“I felt like I couldn’t continue to live in my bubble, that we were talking about capital crimes and that what was happening was just too big and contradicted the values ​​that I was raised with here,” Mordechai says. “I’m not trying to confront people or be controversial. I wrote this document so that it would be known to everyone. So that in six months, a year, five years, ten years, a hundred years, people will be able to look back and see that this is what was known, what was possible to know, as early as last January or March, and that those of us who didn’t know chose not to know.

“My role as a historian,” he continues, “is to give voice to those who cannot speak, whether they are eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza. I deliberately try not to appeal to people’s emotions and I don’t use words that might be controversial or obscure. I don’t talk about terrorists, Zionism, or anti-Semitism. I try to use language that is as cold and dry as possible and to stick to the facts as I understand them.

Mordechai was on sabbatical at Princeton when the war broke out. When he woke up on October 7, it was already afternoon in Israel. Within hours, he understood that there was a disparity between what the Israeli public saw and the reality. This understanding came from an alternative system of receiving information that he had created for himself nine years earlier.

‘In 2024, during Operation Protective Edge [in Gaza], I returned from my doctoral studies in the United States and my research in the Balkans. I had the impression that there was no open discourse in Israel; everyone was saying the same thing. So I made a conscious effort to access other sources of information – [based on] foreign media, blogs, social media. This is also similar to my work as a historian, which is to seek out primary sources. So I created a kind of personal system for understanding what was happening in the world. On October 7, I activated the system and quickly realized that the public in Israel was a few hours behind – Ynet had published a bulletin about the possibility of hostages being taken, but I had already seen clips of kidnappings. This creates a dissonance between what is being said about the reality of the situation and the actual reality, and this feeling is intensifying.’

The report contains more than 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources. It details instances where Israeli troops fired on civilians waving white flags, mistreated individuals, captives and corpses, fired their weapons indiscriminately, gleefully destroyed homes, burned books and defaced Islamic symbols.

Indeed, the disparity between what Mordechai found and the reports in Israeli and foreign media only grew. ‘At the beginning of the war, the most striking story was that of the 40 Israeli infants who were beheaded on October 7. This story made international headlines, but when you compare it to the [official National Insurance] list of those killed, you quickly realize that it did not happen.’

Mordechai began following the news coming out of Gaza on social media and in the international media. 'From the beginning, I received a flood of images of destruction and suffering, and I understood that there were two separate worlds that did not speak to each other. It took me a few months to understand what my role was here. In December, South Africa presented its official claim of genocide against Israel in 84 detailed pages with multiple references to sources that could be cross-checked.

“I don’t think everything should be accepted as evidence,” he adds, “but you have to grapple with it, see what it’s based on, examine its implications. At the beginning of the war, I wanted to go back to Israel to volunteer for a civil society organization, but for family reasons I couldn’t do that. I decided to use the free time I had during my sabbatical at Princeton to try to enlighten the Israeli public, which only consumes local media.”

He published the first version of “Bearing Witness,” just eight pages long, on January 9. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, officially known as the Palestinian Ministry of Health – Gaza, the number of people killed in the Gaza Strip was 23,210. “I do not believe that what is written here will lead to a change in policy or convince many people,” he writes at the beginning of the document. “Rather, I am writing this publicly, as a historian and an Israeli citizen, to make known my personal position regarding the current horrific situation in Gaza, as events unfold. I am writing as an individual, in part because of the disappointing general silence on this subject from many local academic institutions, especially those well-placed to comment on it, even though some of my colleagues have courageously spoken out.”

Since then, Mordechai has spent several hundred hours gathering information and writing, continuing to update the document that appears on the website he created. Since he began this project, he has improved his way of working: he meticulously compiles reports from different sources on an Excel spreadsheet, from which he selects, after careful examination, the elements that will be mentioned in the text. He uses a wide variety of sources: footage filmed by civilians, press articles, reports from the United Nations and other international organizations, social media, blogs, etc.

While he acknowledges that some of his sources do not meet journalistic or ethical standards, Mordechai stands by the credibility of his documentation. “It’s not like I copy and paste everything that someone else finds. On the other hand, it is clear that there is a gap between what exists and what we would like to see: We would like every incident in the Gaza Strip to be properly investigated by two independent and non-independent international organizations, but that is not going to happen.

'So I look at who is reporting the information, whether they have been caught lying, whether an association or a blogger has passed on information that I can prove is incorrect - and if so, I stop using it and delete it. I give more weight to neutral sources, such as human rights organizations and the United Nations, and I do a kind of synthesis between the sources to see if they [the information] are consistent. I also work very openly and invite anyone who wants to check me. I would be very happy to see that I was wrong in what I wrote, but that is not the case. So far, I have had to make very few corrections.

Reading Mordechai's report helps to clear up the fog that has shrouded the Israelis since the beginning of the war. The death toll is a good example: The October 7 war is the first war in which Israel has made no effort to count the number of deaths on the other side. In the absence of any other source, many people around the world - foreign governments, media outlets, international organizations - rely on the reports of the Palestinian Ministry of Health - Gaza, which are considered entirely credible. Israel goes to great lengths to deny the ministry's figures. Local media outlets generally indicate that the source of these data is the 'Hamas Ministry of Health'.

However, few Israelis know that not only do the IDF and the Israeli government not have their own figures on the number of dead, but that senior Israeli sources, having no other data, end up confirming those published by the ministry in Gaza. At what level?

Benjamin Netanyahu himself. On March 10, for example, the prime minister said in an interview that Israel had killed 13,000 armed Hamas militants and estimated that for each of them, 1.5 civilians had been killed. In other words, up to that date, between 26,000 and 32,500 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip. That day, the Palestinian ministry published a figure of 31,112 dead in Gaza, within the range cited by Mr. Netanyahu. At the end of the month, Mr. Netanyahu spoke of 28,000 dead, about 4,600 fewer than the official Palestinian figure. In late April, the Wall Street Journal cited an estimate by senior IDF officers that put the death toll at about 36,000, more than the figure released by the Palestinian ministry at the time.

Mordechai: “It seems that on the Israeli side, they choose not to deal with the numbers, although Israel ostensibly can do so—the technology exists, and Israel controls the Palestinian population registry. The defense establishment also has facial images; they could cross-reference them and see if a person who is declared dead has passed through a checkpoint. Come on, show me! Give me proof and I will change my approach. It will make my life harder, but I will be much less upset.”

I think we need to ask ourselves what 'bar' of evidence is needed for us to change our minds about the number of Palestinians who have been killed. This is a question that each of us needs to ask ourselves - perhaps for you the evidence I cite is not enough - because there has to be some kind of realistic stage in the accumulation of evidence at which we will accept the figures as reliable.

'For me,' he explains, 'that moment has long since arrived. Once the dirty work has been done and the figures are understood a little better, the question is no longer how many Palestinians have died, but why and how the Israeli public continues to doubt these figures after more than a year of hostilities and in spite of all the evidence.'

In his report, he cites figures from the Palestinian ministry that list among those killed since the beginning of the war until last June: 273 UN and humanitarian workers, 100 teachers, 243 athletes, 489 health workers (including 55 specialist doctors), 710 children under one year old and four premature babies who died after the IDF forced the nurse caring for them to leave the hospital. The nurse was caring for five premature babies and decided to save the one who seemed to have the best chance of survival. The decomposing bodies of the other four were found in incubators two weeks later.

The footnote in Mordechai’s piece about the infants refers not to a tweet from a Gaza resident or a pro-Palestinian blog, but to a Washington Post investigation. Israelis who question “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War” because it relies on social media or unverified reports should know that it also relies on dozens of investigations by nearly every reputable Western media outlet. Many outlets have examined the incidents in Gaza with rigorous journalistic standards and found evidence of atrocities.

A CNN investigation corroborated the Palestinian claim about the “flour massacre,” in which about 150 Palestinians who came to collect food from an aid convoy on March 1 were killed. The IDF claimed that it was the crowds and the stampede of Gazans themselves that killed them, not the warning shots fired by soldiers in the area. Ultimately, CNN’s investigation, based on a careful analysis of documentation and 22 interviews with eyewitnesses, found that most of the fatalities were indeed killed by warning shots.

Asked about the image that had most impacted him, Mordechai pointed to a photo of the body of Jamal Hamdi Hassan Ashour, 62, who had allegedly been crushed by a tank and whose body had been mutilated beyond recognition. The image was posted on an Israeli Telegram channel with the caption: “You’re going to love this!”

The New York Times, ABC, CNN, the BBC, international organizations and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have published the results of their own investigations into torture, beatings, rapes and other atrocities against Palestinian detainees at the IDF’s Sde Teiman base in the Negev and other facilities. Amnesty International has examined four incidents in which there was no military target or justification for the attack and in which Israeli forces killed a total of 95 civilians.

A late March investigation by Yaniv Kubovich in Haaretz showed that the IDF created “killing zones” in which scores of civilians were shot after crossing an imaginary line marked by a field commander; the victims were categorized as terrorists after their deaths.

The BBC has questioned the IDF’s estimates of the number of terrorists its forces have killed overall; CNN reported in detail on an incident in which an entire family was wiped out; NBC investigated an attack on civilians in so-called humanitarian areas; the Wall Street Journal verified that the IDF was relying on reports of deaths in Gaza published by the Palestinian Health Ministry; AP claimed in a detailed report that the IDF had presented only one piece of reliable evidence that Hamas was operating on hospital grounds – the tunnel discovered in the courtyard of Shifa Hospital; The New Yorker and The Telegraph have published the results of extensive investigations into cases of children who had limbs amputated, and much more – all mentioned in ‘Bearing Witness.’

Not included in the report is the report released this week by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, which states that since October 7, 1,140 families have been completely wiped off the register of the local population, likely victims of aerial bombardment.

Mordechai cites numerous elements of the IDF’s lax rules of engagement in the Gaza Strip. One clip shows a group of refugees with a woman at the front, holding her son in one hand and a white flag in the other; she is shot, presumably by a sniper, and collapses as the child lets go of her hand and runs for his life. Another incident, widely reported in late October, shows 13-year-old Mohammed Salem calling for help after being injured in an air force attack.

As they approach to offer help, they are targeted by another such attack. Salem and another youth are killed, and more than 20 people are injured.

Mordechai admits that watching the visual evidence of the war has hardened his heart – today, he can watch even the most horrific scenes. ‘When the ISIS videos were released [years ago], I didn’t watch them. But now I felt like it was my obligation, because it’s done in my name, so I have to watch them to convey what I’ve seen. What’s important is the quantity; it’s children, and more children, and more children.

When asked which of the thousands of images, whether videos or photos, of dead, wounded or suffering people had the most impact on him, Mordechai ponders and mentions the photo of the body of a man who was later identified as Jamal Hamdi Hassan Ashour. Ashour, 62, was reportedly crushed by a tank in March, his body mutilated beyond recognition. A ligature on one of his hands indicates that he had been detained before, according to Palestinian sources.

The image was posted on an Israeli Telegram channel with the caption, “You’ll love this!”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Mordechai tells Haaretz. “But the worst part is that the image was shared by soldiers in an Israeli Telegram group and it got very positive reactions.”

In addition to the information about Ashour, 'Bearing Witness' provides links to images of a number of other bodies whose condition suggests they were crushed by armoured vehicles. In one case, according to a Palestinian report, the victims were a mother and son.

A case mentioned only in a footnote speaks to the questions surrounding Mordechai's methods and the dilemmas he faced. In late March, Al Jazeera aired an interview with a woman who had arrived at Gaza's Shifa hospital and said that IDF soldiers had raped women. Shortly afterward, the woman's family denied her allegations and Al Jazeera removed the report, but many people still had doubts.

'According to my methodology, after Al Jazeera was removed, it's not credible and it didn't happen,' Mordechai says. 'But I also ask myself: Am I participating in the silencing of this woman?' And it is not to honor the truth that this woman is silenced, but for the sake of her honor and that of her family. Is it perfect? ​​It is not perfect, but at the end of the day, I am a human being and it is up to me to decide. So I explained in a footnote that this was a woman’s allegation and added [that it was] ‘almost certainly false’ to express my reservations.

‘I do not guarantee that every testimony is completely reliable. In fact, no one knows exactly what is happening in Gaza – not the international media, not the Israelis, not even the Israeli Defense Forces.

In ‘Bearing Witness’, I argue that silencing voices from Gaza – restricting the information that comes out of it – is part of the working method that makes war possible. I stand by the synthesis I use and I would like to be proven wrong. But on the Israeli side, there is nothing. I am talking about evidence – bring me evidence!

One of the cases described in the document, although many Israelis will find it hard to believe, concerns the IDF’s use of a drone that emitted the sound of a baby crying in order to determine the whereabouts of civilians and perhaps to get them out of their shelters. In the video referenced by the link given by Mordechai, we can hear crying and see the lights of a drone.

“We know that there are drones with loudspeakers, maybe a soldier who is bored decides to do it as a joke and it is perceived by the Palestinians as a horror,” he explains. “But is it so far-fetched that a soldier, instead of being filmed in panties and bras or dedicating the explosion of a street to his wife, would do something like this?” It may be a fabrication, but it’s consistent with what I see.’ This week, Al Jazeera ran an investigative report on ‘crying drones’ and claimed that their use had been confirmed by a number of eyewitnesses who all told the same story.

‘We can always challenge such anecdotal evidence, but it’s harder to do so in the face of mountains of more substantiated evidence,’ Mordechai notes. ‘For example, dozens of American doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported seeing children who had been shot in the head almost every day. Do we even try to explain or deal with that?’

More children were killed in Gaza than in all the world’s wars in the three years before October 7. In the first month of the war, the number of children killed was ten times higher than the number killed in the Ukraine war in one year.

One of the peaks of Israeli military brutality in Gaza came in the second major raid on Shifa hospital in mid-March, the historian adds; he devotes a separate chapter to it. The IDF claimed that the hospital was a center of Hamas activity at the time and that there was an exchange of fire during the raid, resulting in the arrest of 90 Hamas members, some of them high-ranking.

However, the IDF occupation of Shifa continued for about two weeks. During this period, according to Palestinian sources, the hospital became a zone of killings and torture.

Apparently, 240 patients and medical staff were locked up in one of the buildings for a week, without access to food. Doctors on the scene reported that at least 22 patients had died. A number of eyewitnesses, including staff members, described executions. A video filmed by a soldier shows detainees tied up and blindfolded, sitting in a corridor, facing a wall. According to the sources, after the IDF withdrew from the hospital, dozens of bodies were discovered in the courtyard. A number of clips document the collection of the bodies, some mutilated, others buried under rubble or lying in large pools of coagulated blood. A rope is tied around the arm of one of the dead men, which could indicate that he was tied up before being killed.

Further heights of brutality have been reached in the past two months in the ongoing military operation in the northern Gaza Strip. The operation began on October 5. The IDF cut off Jabalya, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun from Gaza City, and residents were ordered to leave.

Many did so, but several thousand remained in the besieged area.

At that point, the army began what former IDF Chief of Staff and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon this week called “ethnic cleansing” of the area: Aid groups were barred from entering, the last flour depot was set on fire and the last two bakeries were closed, and even the activities of civil defense teams evacuating the wounded were prohibited. Water supplies were cut off, ambulances were disabled and hospitals were attacked.

But the army’s main effort has been focused on airstrikes. Almost every day, Palestinians report dozens of deaths in the bombing of apartment buildings and schools that have become displacement camps. Mordechai’s report cites dozens of well-documented accounts of the bombing campaigns: families picking up the bodies of their loved ones from the rubble, funerals in huge mass graves, the wounded covered in dust, adults and children in shock, people crying with body parts scattered around them, and so on.

In a video clip from October 20, two children are seen being pulled out of the rubble. The first looks dazed, his eyes bulging and completely covered in blood and dust. Next to him, a lifeless body, apparently that of a girl, is being pulled out.

For its part, Haaretz has sent questions to the Israeli military’s spokesperson’s unit over the past two weeks regarding some 30 incidents, most of them in Gaza, in which many civilians have been killed. The unit responded that it had classified most of them as unusual events and that they had been referred to the General Staff for further investigation.

Mordechai dismisses out of hand the claim commonly heard by Israelis that what is happening in Gaza is not so terrible compared to other wars. 'Bearing Witness' shows, for example, that more children were killed in Gaza than all the children killed in all the world's wars in the three years before the October 7 war. In the first month of the war, the number of children killed was 10 times higher than the number killed in the Ukraine war in one year.

More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the entire Second World War. According to an investigation published by Yuval Avraham on the Sicha Mekomit (Local Call) website, regarding the artificial intelligence systems used in the IDF's bombing campaigns in Gaza, authorization was given to kill up to 300 civilians in order to assassinate senior Hamas figures. By comparison, documents reveal that for the US armed forces, the figure was one-tenth that number – 30 civilians – in the case of a murderer of greater magnitude than Yahya Sinwar: Osama bin Laden.

There need not be death camps for genocide to be considered. It all comes down to the commission of acts and intent, and both must be established.
       Lee Mordechai

A Wall Street Journal investigative report claims that Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza in the first three months of the war than the US dropped on Iraq in six years. Forty-eight prisoners have died in Israeli detention centers in the past year, compared with nine at Guantanamo in its 20-year existence. The numbers are also telling when it comes to data on deaths in wars waged by other countries: In Iraq, coalition forces killed 11,516 civilians in five years, and 46,319 civilians were killed in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. According to the most lenient estimates, some 30,000 [latest figure: more than 45,000] civilians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.

Mordechai’s report reflects not only the horrors taking place in Gaza, but also Israel’s indifference to them. “At first, there was an attempt to justify the invasion of Shifa Hospital; today, there is not even that pretense – you attack hospitals and there is no public discussion. We do not face the implications of these operations in any way. You open social media and you are overwhelmed by dehumanization. What does that do to us? I grew up in a society with totally different ethics. There were always bad apples, but look at the Bus No. 300 case [an event in 1984, in which Shin Bet agents on the ground executed two Arabs who had hijacked a bus] and see where we are today. It’s important for me to hold up a mirror, it’s important for me that these things are known. That’s my form of resistance.

A Dark Secret

In the most recent versions of “Bearing Witness,” Mordechai has added an appendix explaining why he believes Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, a topic he elaborated on during our conversation. “We need to disconnect our idea of ​​genocide as Israelis—the gas chambers, the death camps, and World War II—from the model that is set out in the [1948] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” he explains. “There don’t have to be death camps for it to be considered genocide. It all comes down to the commission of acts and the intent, and both of those elements have to be established.” As for the commission of acts, it is about murders, but not only – [there are] also injuries, child abductions and even simple attempts to prevent births within a particular group of people. All these acts have in common the deliberate destruction of a group.

'The people I talk to usually don't discuss the actions taken, they discuss the intention. They will say that there is no document showing that Netanyahu or [IDF Chief of Staff] Herzl Halevi ordered genocide. But there are statements and testimonies. There are many, many. South Africa submitted a 120-page document that contains a large number of testimonies proving the intention. Journalist Yunes Tirawi collected statements about genocide and ethnic cleansing on social media from more than 100 people with ties to the IDF – apparently many reserve officers. 'What do we do with all this? In my view, the facts speak for themselves. I see a direct line between these statements, the lack of any attempt to counter these statements, and the reality on the ground that matches these statements.'

The English version of 'Bearing Witness' refers to articles by six leading Israeli authorities who have already stated that in their view Israel is committing genocide: Omer Bartov, a Holocaust and genocide scholar; Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher (who has written that what Israel is doing in Gaza falls somewhere between ethnic cleansing and genocide); historian Amos Goldberg; Holocaust scholar Raz Segal; Itamar Mann, an expert on international law; and historian Adam Raz.

'The definition is less important,' Mordechai says. 'What matters is the actions.' Let’s say the International Court of Justice in The Hague declares in a few years that this is not genocide but near genocide. Does that constitute a moral victory for Israel? Do I want to live in a place that perpetuates ‘near genocide’? The debate over the term gets attention, but things happen one way or another, whether they meet the bar or not. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves how to stop this and how we will answer our children when they ask us what we did during the war. We have to act.

But the definition is important. You say to the Israelis, ‘Look, you’re living in Berlin in 1941.’ What is the moral imperative for people who lived in Berlin at the time? What is a citizen supposed to do when their state commits genocide?

‘A moral position always has a price. If there is no price, it is simply an accepted normative position. The value of something for a person is expressed by the price he is willing to pay to obtain it. On the other hand, I am aware that people also have other considerations and other needs - bringing food home, preserving ties with their family - each must make their own decisions. From my point of view, what I do is speak and continue speaking, whether people listen to me or not. It takes a lot of time and mental strength, but I have come to the conclusion that it is the most useful thing I can do.

After we parted, Mordechai sent me one last link. This one was not to a testimony about the atrocities in Gaza, but to a short story by the late American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The story is about the city of Omelas, where the people are beautiful and happy, and their lives are interesting and joyful. But as adults, the citizens of Omelas gradually learn the dark secret of their city: their happiness depends on the suffering of a child who is forced to stay in a filthy room underground, and they are not allowed to comfort or help him. “It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of his existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the depth of their science.” It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children,’ Le Guin writes.

Most of the people of Omelas continue to live with this knowledge, but every now and then one of them visits the child and does not return, but keeps walking and abandons the town. The story ends: ‘They go on in the darkness and do not return. The place they are heading for is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the City of Happiness. I cannot possibly describe it. It may not exist. But they seem to know where they are going.’

The IDF Spokesperson’s Office responded that the IDF ‘operates only against military targets and takes a variety of precautions to avoid harming noncombatants, including issuing warnings to citizens. As for arrests, any suspicion of violation of orders or international law is investigated and dealt with. Typically, if a soldier is suspected of misbehaving and committing a criminal act, an investigation is opened by the military police’s criminal investigation division.’

Nir Hasson

Translation “plus la courage de re-read encore une fois” by Viktor Dedaj with probably all the usual mistakes and typos

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TRANSLATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR

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