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'Killing Is Normalized': IDF Soldier Speaks Out About Orders to Shoot Civilians in Gaza
The commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die," the soldier said. "If they're inside, they're dangerous, you need to kill them. No matter who it is."
Jul 07, 2025
Another Israel Defense Forces soldier has spoken out publicly against the IDF's brutalization of civilians in Gaza.
In an interview with the British Sky News Monday, a reservist who has served three tours of duty in Gaza spoke candidly about orders he and other soldiers received to shoot any person arbitrarily who entered defined "no-go zones," regardless of whether they posed a threat.
The soldier gave his testimony anonymously for fear of being labeled a "traitor." However, he identified himself as a reservist from the 252nd Division who was stationed at the Netzarim Corridor, a road which divides North and South Gaza.
The area has been one of the most critical strategic points for Israel's occupation of Gaza, allowing control over the flow of aid and people.
The soldiers, stationed on the edge of a civilian neighborhood in the homes of displaced Palestinians, were ordered by their commanders to kill anyone who passed an "imaginary line" that marked the beginning of the military stronghold, the soldier said.
"We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die," the soldier said. "If they're inside, they're dangerous, you need to kill them. No matter who it is."
"It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle," he said.
The soldier said that the prevailing attitude among the troops was that all Palestinians were "terrorists," and that this attitude was reinforced by commanders.
"They say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn't be there, and if he still comes, it means he's a terrorist," he said. "This is what they tell you. But I don't really think it's true. It's just poor people, civilians, that don't really have too many choices."
He said that when soldiers in the corridor kill civilians, a lot of them "think that they did something good."
That sense of impunity, he said, comes from the higher-ups.
"Some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don't face the consequences of that," he said.
"You can't be in this scenario for so long and not normalize it," he said. "Killing is normalized, and you don't see the problem."
This anonymous soldier is the latest of many who have decided to speak out against atrocities their military has committed.
His testimony comes on the heels of a harrowing Haaretz expose, in which several other Israeli soldiers described being ordered to shoot Palestinian aid-seekers, turning the U.S.-Israeli administered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites into "killing fields." Others provided The Associated Press with video of soldiers bombarding civilians in an aid site with pepper spray and stun grenades.
Others have spoken out against the attacks on civilians near the Israeli stronghold at Netzarim.
In April, a report by the Israeli veterans group Breaking the Silence detailed many more accounts of brutality over the first year-and-a-half of the war. It included accounts of Israeli soldiers razing agricultural land, bulldozing entire city blocks, and designating "large swathes of the land" that "were turned into massive kill zones."
"All of them were wiped off the face of the Earth. Annihilation, expropriation, and expulsion are immoral and must never be normalized or legitimized," the report said.
The soldier who spoke to Sky News said his deployment left a similar stain on his conscience.
"I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country," he said. "I think the war is... a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over."
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In Too Much of the US, Israel's Gaza Genocide Has Been Made Invisible
With only rare exceptions, U.S. news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.
Jul 07, 2025
Whatever the outcomes of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty. That pact and its horrific consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.
Recent news reporting that President Donald Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing–not only with American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.
Under the cloaks of the Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable should be invisible.
Last year began with a United Nations statement that “Gazans now make up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s continued bombardment and siege.” The UN quoted experts who said: “Currently every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”
In late February 2024, President Joe Biden talked to journalists about prospects for a “ceasefire” (which did not take place) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before sauntering off. He spoke during a photo op at an ice cream parlor in Manhattan, while the UN was sounding an alarm that “very little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month.”
During the 16 months since then, variants of facile verbiage from top U.S. government officials have repeated endlessly, while normalizing genocide with a steep race to the ethical bottom, so that—in Orwellian terms, much like “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”—genocide is not genocide.
Refusal to acknowledge the complicity and impunity is most of all maintained by avoidance and silence. The process makes a terrible truth inadmissible rather than admittable.
All the doublethink and newspeak must detour around the reality that the U.S.-supported Israeli siege of Gaza is genocide, which the international Genocide Convention defines as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—with such actions as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly meet that definition, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have unequivocally concluded with exhaustive reports.
But under the cloaks of the Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable should be invisible.
Liberal Zionist groups in the United States are part of the process. Here’s what I wrote in an article for The Nation early this year after examining public statements by the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J Street:
Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the [temporary] ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the U.S. bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war – a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be ‘pro-peace.’ It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.
However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments. In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that ‘J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.’ Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to ‘immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah. ‘J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,’ a news release said.
Likewise, with rare exceptions, U.S. news media and members of Congress dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the events in Gaza and the evasions in the United States have been enormously instructive, shattering illusions along the way. Many Americans, especially young people, know much more about their country and its government than they did just two years ago.
What has come to light includes mass murder of certain other human beings as de facto policy and functional ideology.
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Why Mamdani and Other US Muslims Now Refuse to Play the Condemnation Game
The NYC mayoral candidate and other Muslim Americans should no longer be expected to condemn words that we have never used.
Jul 06, 2025
You must condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada."
That's the demand that some pro-Israel politicians, reporters, organizations, and activists keep making of Zohran Mamdani, New York City's presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor.
The manufactured controversy surrounding Mamdani and this phrase began days before the June 24 election, when a radio host asked Mamdani for his thoughts about unnamed pro-Palestinian activists who supposedly use such language.
For decades, Muslims in America have been held to a ridiculous, bigoted double standard which demands that we condemn violence that we had nothing to do with and renounce comments that we have never made.
Instead of outright condemning the phrase, Mamdani said, "I know people for whom those things mean very different things." He said that some who say it are trying to express a "desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” and noted that the U.S. Holocaust Museum had used the word "intifada” in Arabic-language descriptions of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi Germany.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Mamdani opponents seized on his nuanced response, embellished and exaggerated what he said, and loudly condemned him. By the time the dust settled, members of the public and even prominent politicians like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) were claiming that Mamdani himself had actually used the phrase. He hadn't.
In fact, no member of his campaign staff had ever used the phrase or even said "intifada," an Arabic word often translated as revolution or uprising that has been used to describe the largely peaceful Arab Spring protests and that was indeed used by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum until it quietly dropped the phrase.
Yet, even after Mamdani's stunning victory in the Democratic mayoral primary, reporters and some politicians keep demanding that Mamdani condemn the phrase.
During an interview with "Meet the Press” on Sunday, June 29, Mamdani was repeatedly asked why he has declined to do so.
This time, Mamdani said it was not a phrase he would use and that he understood concerns about it, but that he did not want to police speech as the mayor of New York or legitimize President Donald Trump's efforts to deport activists based solely on their pro-Palestine speech.
In other words, Mamdani doesn't want to end up as an evidentiary footnote in a Justice Department deportation filing against a student protester or set a precedent that makes him responsible for condemning every problematic chant shouted at a pro-Palestine rally over the next four years.
Fair enough. But there's another, even more important reason Mamdani shouldn't have to condemn the phrase: Put simply, no one would ask him to do so in the first place if he was not a Muslim.
Think about it. There are plenty of other politicians opposed to the genocide and critical of the Israeli government, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).
Has anyone ever asked them to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada?” Of course not. Why should they have to answer for a phrase they have never used, that none of their staffers have ever used, and that hardly anyone else ever uses?
What's the difference with Mamdani? He's a Muslim in America, and for decades, Muslims in America have been held to a ridiculous, bigoted double standard which demands that we condemn violence that we had nothing to do with and renounce comments that we have never made.
The irony is that Muslims actually have voluntarily and consistently spoken out against acts of unjust violence committed by Muslim extremists so that Americans unfamiliar with Islam understand that such violence does not represent the faith. However, speaking out voluntarily is different from being forced to do so as a condition for participation in American public life.
Only Muslims face this heightened double standard. When's the last time someone asked Sen. Gillibrand—a steadfast supporter of the Israeli government who has voted to fund its genocide—what she thinks of the pro-Israel protesters who recently chanted racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slogans while chasing a woman they misidentified as a Palestinian down the streets of New York City
Better yet, when's the last time someone asked former Gov. Cuomo—who literally joined the defense team of indicted war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—whether he condemns the various racist, genocidal statements that Netanyahu and his hand-picked government ministers have made?
To be clear, there are plenty of reasons why most pro-Palestine activists would not use the phrase "globalize the intifada.” The phrase can signify peaceful civil disobedience to one group of people and violent uprising to another group of people. The debate about the phrase distracts from the struggle against the genocide. Most importantly, there is no pressing need to use such a phrase. That's why, again, no prominent leaders in the Palestinian freedom movement have ever said it.
The only people who should have to answer for the phrase "globalize the intifada" are the people who supposedly use it, whoever they are. Mamdani and other Muslim Americans should no longer be expected to condemn words that we have never used, especially while politicians critical of him can vote to fund the Israeli government's genocide without being forced to constantly answer for its crimes.
When he was first asked about "globalize the intifada," Zohran Mamdani could have done what many other Muslim Americans have done over the past 25 years: condemn something he never said, and then move on.
By refusing to play the condemnation game this time and still winning the Democratic primary, he may have helped free Muslims in political life from a double standard that has haunted them for decades.
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