More shocking than we could ever have thought possible”: the Gaza war
Journalist David Keys reveals newly emerging and horrific information about the Gaza War
byDavid Keys
01-05-2024
Photo by Yairfridman2003 licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Trigger warning: war images and descriptions
Over the past six months, we’ve seen the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza unfolding on our TV screens. The news reports tell us of the rising death toll, the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, the destruction of hospitals and the relentless aerial bombardment. But the full truth about what Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is only now beginning to emerge – and it is even more shocking than we could ever have thought possible.
Mounting horrific evidence now strongly suggests that some Israeli military units have been carrying out mass executions of prisoners and systematic murders on a very substantial scale.
There is also mounting evidence suggesting that some sections of the Israeli army released prisoners – but then shot them as they walked away, potentially because of chaotic military internal communications or conceivably so that senior officers could be told that they had been shot while trying to escape. Certainly such excuses for murder were used to camouflage de facto executions in several past conflicts in both Europe and the Americas.
Large numbers of unarmed civilians also appear to have been systematically murdered by Israeli snipers and quadcopter drones.
So far, using open source material, I’ve been able to identify at least six major incidents in which a total of at least a hundred Palestinian prisoners appear to have been executed – possibly many more.
During my open source research, it’s become disturbingly apparent that at least some Israeli army units seem to have been using up to three different methods of execution – execution by bullet, execution by suffocation (by being buried alive) and execution by crushing (by being deliberately crushed by tank or bulldozer tracks).
The six major execution events appear to have taken place in the following locations:
Near a school in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza almost certainly in early or mid December last year. 30-50 people appear to have been executed. Here is a video account describing what seems to have occurred:
In the Annan building, in Al Remal, Gaza City on 19 December: 19 men are believed to have been executed.
In the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in Late February. At least 392 bodies were buried in mass graves and Investigators now suspect that at least 20 civilians were buried alive.
In Al-Zaytoun, Gaza City on 29 February. A prisoner is believed to have been executed by being crushed by a bulldozer.
Near Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza at some stage between late February and very early April. At least ten people appear to have been executed.
At or near al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City in March 2024, dozens of people appear to have been executed.
As far as the murder/execution of released prisoners is concerned, I’ve so far located two incidents in which a total of around 40 people were killed by small arms fire or by quadcopter drones immediately after release. Those atrocities took place in the following two places:
Near the Holy Family School, Al Rimal, Gaza City in or around December, 2023. Dozens of released prisoners appear to have been systematically executed by remotely controlled drones.
At or near al-Shifa Hospital in March. Eight released prisoners appear to have been executed by snipers.
But by far the largest number of murder incidents, that I’ve identified so far, have been killings of unarmed civilians, including women, children and the elderly, usually picked off one by one in the street by snipers. Indeed doctors at a Gaza hospital, having examined children’s head and chest bullet wounds have expressed their deep concern that numerous children appear to have been deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers:
So far I’ve been able to identify 25 separate incidents in which at least sixty men, women and children have been systematically murdered. However I’ve also found evidence suggesting that those 60 simply represent the tip of a horrific mass murder iceberg.
There are almost certainly three mechanisms responsible for the murder of such civilians.
Individual discretion
Firstly, in practice, individual soldiers, military unit commanders and indeed snipers have large degrees of individual discretion as to who they decide to kill and who they don’t, and when they decide to pull the trigger and when they don’t. It’s clearly a profession that can easily be exploited by psychopaths or hate-filled ideologues. Indeed one senior Israeli defence establishment official told an Israeli newspaper (Haaretz) that “It appears that many combat forces are writing their own rules of engagement.”
Here are three videos which shows how snipers can target anyone they wish to shoot – even children or an unarmed elderly woman holding a white flag:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
In other cases, entire groups of people appear to have been systematically murdered. Here is a video account of what seems to have happened to nine Palestinians in northern Gaza:
Kill zones
Secondly, the Israeli army has introduced an official mass slaughter system known unofficially as ‘Kill Zones’.
These zones (otherwise known as ‘Combat Zones’) are sometimes reasonably substantial areas, designated by local unit commanders around their respective military unit operational bases. Anybody entering these unannounced zones, even if they are clearly unarmed, is then shot by snipers.
If you want to know more about Israel’s ‘Kill Zones’ system, here is a very informative article on the subject which appeared in the much-respected Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz.
Lavender and Gospel
And thirdly, the Israeli army operates one of the most horrifying mass murder systems ever devised – an artificial intelligence algorithmic slaughter apparatus disarmingly called ‘Lavender’. But instead of smelling as sweet as perfume, it annihilates countless thousands of human beings – without any Israeli soldier being individually and exclusively responsible. Here’s how this Israeli Armageddon mass murder machine works:
Lavender is a huge database of around 37,000 Palestinians, deemed by AI assessments to be associated in some way with Hamas’ military wing. The system can be set up to target those individuals in their homes and depending on their importance or lack of importance, different levels of collateral damage can also be set as acceptable. For instance, at some stages during the current war, the system was set to allow very junior fighters to be killed, even if it meant slaughtering 20 innocent civilians. Likewise, at some stages in the war, Lavender was set up so that it would allow the killing of up to 100 innocent civilians in order to kill a single more senior Hamas officer.
Lavender derives much of its data from another Israeli military AI system known, again somewhat disarmingly, as “Gospel’. This latter system uses drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and movement and behaviour pattern data to categorise individuals, condemn them and target the densely inhabited apartment blocks in which they live. These AI systems have allowed a 7000-fold increase in the number of targets that Israeli military intelligence can generate.
If you want to know further information about Lavender, here is a link to two detailed articles on the subject – and one on Gospel:Lavender 1
Lavender 2
Gospel
But Lavender and Gospel’s main role is to determine which individual apartment blocks, packed with civilians, gets hit by missiles or bombs. Indeed these AI systems have been Israel’s Angels of Death which have ended the lives of many or even most of the well over 34,000 Palestinians who have died so far – and which have also maimed and seriously injured over 77,000 others.
Number of Palestinians killed in Gaza
Excluding those killed by disease or malnutrition, the actual number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is almost certainly now between 42,000 and 50,000 (ie., 34,500 recovered bodies and at least 8000 bodies which are still buried under collapsed buildings – plus significant numbers whose deaths have not been recorded because Gaza’s health system (and thus its deaths recording system) has been largely destroyed by the war. (Indeed 72% of hospitals are out of action, due to ultra-destructive Israeli attacks).
Photo by Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif Fars Media Corporation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
It’s currently thought that only 5000 to 8000 of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s 40,000 Gaza fighters have been killed. That would therefore suggest that between 80 and 85% of Palestinians killed by the Israelis have been civilians. That’s one of the highest civilian death rates in the whole of military history.
It’s also a much higher civilian death rate (and a much higher ratio between military and civilian deaths) than in any previous Israeli war.
That in turn reveals that, in this war, the Israeli military (and therefore presumably the Israeli government) quite consciously changed their rules of engagement and their killing strategy in ways that would deliberately or inevitably result in unusually high civilian death rates.
But why did they do that? Sadly, the answer is disturbingly clear: The evidence strongly suggests that there are elements within political and military circles in Israel that did not want a conventional war – but did want a genocidal one. That is not to say that genocide has already been committed – but it does suggest that some powerful elements within Israel had and have genocidal aspirations and that some steps on the road towards genocide have already been taken.
Clearly Hamas’ military wing’s murderous invasion of southern Israel in early October last year created a thirst for revenge which played directly into the hands of Israel’s extreme right.
And, without doubt, the rhetoric of some Israeli politicians and some media and religious figures did incite and encourage genocidal attitudes within some sections of the military and some sections of the general population.
Some Israeli politicians, generals and other opinion formers have characterised Gazans as ”animals” and advocated that the Gaza Strip should become a place where “no human can exist” and that Gaza’s civilians should be forced to live in the Sinai desert.
Even the Israeli president suggested that the Palestinian people as a whole (not just Hamas) was responsible for Hamas’ military wing’s horrific attack on Israel on 7 October last year. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,“ he said.
If you want to listen to a wider selection of other relevant incendiary quotes, I have included them in a podcast that I produced earlier this year:
The Amalek story
But perhaps most appallingly some politicians evoked a late Iron Age biblical advocation of genocide which seems to have then been embraced by some elements in the army.
The notorious biblical passage (in the Bible’s first book of the prophet Samuel) claims that God ordered the Israelites to commit an act of genocide – namely to “attack [the tribe of] Amalek [which had just attacked the Israelites], and utterly destroy everything that they have, and spare them not; but kill the men and the women, the infants and the sucklings, the oxen and sheep, the camels and donkeys”.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible,” Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, said in late October.
And in a 3 November letter to all of Israel’s soldiers he said “The current fight against the murderers of ‘Hamas’ is another chapter in the generations-long story of our national resilience. ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.'”
Indeed, according to a leading and much respected Israeli newspaper, one Israeli rabbi went even further and told the public: “The Arabs of Gaza have the legal status of Amalek and we are obliged to execute our obligation to wipe out Amalek in relationship to them.”
Disturbing visual and sound evidence of how the use of the biblical Amalek story appears to have helped incite genocidal sentiments in sections of the Israeli military can be seen and heard in this alarming video:
Video 2
Video 3
In other cases, entire groups of people appear to have been systematically murdered. Here is a video account of what seems to have happened to nine Palestinians in northern Gaza:
Kill zones
Secondly, the Israeli army has introduced an official mass slaughter system known unofficially as ‘Kill Zones’.
These zones (otherwise known as ‘Combat Zones’) are sometimes reasonably substantial areas, designated by local unit commanders around their respective military unit operational bases. Anybody entering these unannounced zones, even if they are clearly unarmed, is then shot by snipers.
If you want to know more about Israel’s ‘Kill Zones’ system, here is a very informative article on the subject which appeared in the much-respected Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz.
Lavender and Gospel
And thirdly, the Israeli army operates one of the most horrifying mass murder systems ever devised – an artificial intelligence algorithmic slaughter apparatus disarmingly called ‘Lavender’. But instead of smelling as sweet as perfume, it annihilates countless thousands of human beings – without any Israeli soldier being individually and exclusively responsible. Here’s how this Israeli Armageddon mass murder machine works:
Lavender is a huge database of around 37,000 Palestinians, deemed by AI assessments to be associated in some way with Hamas’ military wing. The system can be set up to target those individuals in their homes and depending on their importance or lack of importance, different levels of collateral damage can also be set as acceptable. For instance, at some stages during the current war, the system was set to allow very junior fighters to be killed, even if it meant slaughtering 20 innocent civilians. Likewise, at some stages in the war, Lavender was set up so that it would allow the killing of up to 100 innocent civilians in order to kill a single more senior Hamas officer.
Lavender derives much of its data from another Israeli military AI system known, again somewhat disarmingly, as “Gospel’. This latter system uses drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and movement and behaviour pattern data to categorise individuals, condemn them and target the densely inhabited apartment blocks in which they live. These AI systems have allowed a 7000-fold increase in the number of targets that Israeli military intelligence can generate.
If you want to know further information about Lavender, here is a link to two detailed articles on the subject – and one on Gospel:Lavender 1
Lavender 2
Gospel
But Lavender and Gospel’s main role is to determine which individual apartment blocks, packed with civilians, gets hit by missiles or bombs. Indeed these AI systems have been Israel’s Angels of Death which have ended the lives of many or even most of the well over 34,000 Palestinians who have died so far – and which have also maimed and seriously injured over 77,000 others.
Number of Palestinians killed in Gaza
Excluding those killed by disease or malnutrition, the actual number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is almost certainly now between 42,000 and 50,000 (ie., 34,500 recovered bodies and at least 8000 bodies which are still buried under collapsed buildings – plus significant numbers whose deaths have not been recorded because Gaza’s health system (and thus its deaths recording system) has been largely destroyed by the war. (Indeed 72% of hospitals are out of action, due to ultra-destructive Israeli attacks).
Photo by Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif Fars Media Corporation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.It’s currently thought that only 5000 to 8000 of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s 40,000 Gaza fighters have been killed. That would therefore suggest that between 80 and 85% of Palestinians killed by the Israelis have been civilians. That’s one of the highest civilian death rates in the whole of military history.
It’s also a much higher civilian death rate (and a much higher ratio between military and civilian deaths) than in any previous Israeli war.
That in turn reveals that, in this war, the Israeli military (and therefore presumably the Israeli government) quite consciously changed their rules of engagement and their killing strategy in ways that would deliberately or inevitably result in unusually high civilian death rates.
But why did they do that? Sadly, the answer is disturbingly clear: The evidence strongly suggests that there are elements within political and military circles in Israel that did not want a conventional war – but did want a genocidal one. That is not to say that genocide has already been committed – but it does suggest that some powerful elements within Israel had and have genocidal aspirations and that some steps on the road towards genocide have already been taken.
Clearly Hamas’ military wing’s murderous invasion of southern Israel in early October last year created a thirst for revenge which played directly into the hands of Israel’s extreme right.
And, without doubt, the rhetoric of some Israeli politicians and some media and religious figures did incite and encourage genocidal attitudes within some sections of the military and some sections of the general population.
Some Israeli politicians, generals and other opinion formers have characterised Gazans as ”animals” and advocated that the Gaza Strip should become a place where “no human can exist” and that Gaza’s civilians should be forced to live in the Sinai desert.
Even the Israeli president suggested that the Palestinian people as a whole (not just Hamas) was responsible for Hamas’ military wing’s horrific attack on Israel on 7 October last year. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,“ he said.
If you want to listen to a wider selection of other relevant incendiary quotes, I have included them in a podcast that I produced earlier this year:
The Amalek story
But perhaps most appallingly some politicians evoked a late Iron Age biblical advocation of genocide which seems to have then been embraced by some elements in the army.
The notorious biblical passage (in the Bible’s first book of the prophet Samuel) claims that God ordered the Israelites to commit an act of genocide – namely to “attack [the tribe of] Amalek [which had just attacked the Israelites], and utterly destroy everything that they have, and spare them not; but kill the men and the women, the infants and the sucklings, the oxen and sheep, the camels and donkeys”.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible,” Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, said in late October.
And in a 3 November letter to all of Israel’s soldiers he said “The current fight against the murderers of ‘Hamas’ is another chapter in the generations-long story of our national resilience. ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.'”
Indeed, according to a leading and much respected Israeli newspaper, one Israeli rabbi went even further and told the public: “The Arabs of Gaza have the legal status of Amalek and we are obliged to execute our obligation to wipe out Amalek in relationship to them.”
Disturbing visual and sound evidence of how the use of the biblical Amalek story appears to have helped incite genocidal sentiments in sections of the Israeli military can be seen and heard in this alarming video:
This terrible war (and the murderous Hamas attack which triggered it) is simply the latest appalling episode in an horrific history of suffering, oppression and violence which has disfigured Israel and Palestine for many many decades.
Early this year I produced a series of six podcasts on the historical and political background to the current Gaza war. In case you want to listen, here are the details and links
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