What genocide?
An abridged version of an Owen Jones substack article (part 1).
www-ynet-co-il.translate.goog
From a story in Ynet translated from Hebrew in to English:
When Herzi Halevi presented the IDF's operations to the cabinet in the first 48 hours of the war, he noted that the Air Force had attacked 1,500 targets in Gaza. This is a huge number, requiring exceptional intelligence and operational capabilities. Netanyahu erupted in anger, yelling and banging on the table. "Why not 5,000?" he scolded the Chief of Staff. "We don't have 5,000 approved targets," Halevi replied. "I'm not interested in targets," Netanyahu retorted. "Take down houses, bomb with everything you have."
As US lawyer Dylan Williams notes:
This Netanyahu quote reported by an Israeli outlet constitutes prima facie evidence of:
1. the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population; and
2. intent to kill to destroy, in part, a national or ethnic group—elements of the crime of genocide.
This itself is corroborated by what Joe Biden said when, describing his conversation with Netanyahu after the first week or so after 7th October - Biden said he warned Netanyahu to stop carpet bombing communities. But clearly there was no shift in Israeli policy so the US just facilitated that carpet bombing with a relentless supply of weapons.
As research by the NGO Airwars found, at least 5,139 Palestinians civilians were killed by the Israeli army in October 2023, which is what this article is discussing, and of those at least 1,900 were children. They concluded “It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”
They concluded that of the incidents examined in this indiscriminate destruction demanded by Netanyahu, 99.4% of incidents killed civilians, and 0.6% killed militants.
It is also worth reflecting on an article published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz in July 2024:
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www.haaretz.com
As soon as the war with Hamas began on October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered that the army's recording system be turned off in the command center at army headquarters, which is where all security cabinet meetings and other defense-related meetings were being held in those days. The army complied with this order.