‘Even the lowest-ranking target justified civilian casualties’: Israeli intelligence soldiers detail Gaza policy shift
Yaniv Kubovich reports in Haaretz on 12 October 2026:
In the first days after the October 7 massacre, Israeli military intelligence personnel were tasked with rebuilding their picture of the enemy’s ground forces, on which, according to their accounts, almost no intelligence had been gathered for months.
Nearly a year before the war, the Military Intelligence Directorate had instructed its personnel to stop monitoring operational commanders below brigade level. Senior commanders believed the underground barrier and new border fence had ruled out a large-scale raid. Intelligence gathering on lower-ranking Hamas members stopped: what they did, what roles they held, how they earned a living, whom they spoke to and so on.
“The directive was: ‘Forget everyone on the ground, the battalion commanders, company commanders, fighters. Forget the Nukhba forces. Only brigade commanders and above, and only the rocket units,'” says A., an intelligence soldier responsible for Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. “We knew nothing about Hamas and its military wing at ground level. On October 7, we started almost from scratch, tracking down their people and their operatives.”
After the attack, that intelligence vacuum, compounded by a profound sense of failure, humiliation and self-recrimination, gave way to a frantic hunt for every scrap of information. A. is one of four soldiers from intelligence and drone units who spoke to Haaretz about the changes they witnessed: a rapid loosening of the criteria for classifying someone as a “terrorist,” a sharp shift in the approach to proportionality and the use of heavy munitions, and a substantial relaxation of the rules governing the killing of uninvolved civilians as “collateral damage” in strikes.
Until October 7, the strike policy of the IDF and other security agencies was largely guided by the international laws of war, foremost among them the principle of proportionality, alongside a constant effort to minimize harm to civilians. This approach was reflected in strict procedures and particularly complex approval processes for targeted killings in densely populated areas.
A telling example came in September 2003, when Avi Dichter, now a Likud MK, headed the Shin Bet security service. A prized piece of intelligence revealed that Hamas’ entire leadership, including Ahmed Yassin, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, was meeting secretly on the top floor of a building in Gaza. The original plan to drop a heavy bomb was abandoned at the last minute out of concern for civilians on the lower floors. Instead, a smaller, quarter-ton bomb was used. The reduced payload failed to bring down the building, and the key Hamas leaders survived.
The soldiers’ accounts describe an entirely different approach to warfare since October 7, 2023, in which even the lowest-ranking target justified civilian casualties. Their testimony suggests that the high casualty figures the army calls collateral damage were not isolated mishaps or individual identification errors, but the result of a strike policy stretched to its limits. Haaretz has published similar accounts throughout the three years of war. These policies, combined with an effort to compensate for the intelligence failure of October 7, led the military to turn a blind eye to a civilian toll unlike anything it had ever seen.
‘We were striking small fry’
One change the soldiers describe after October 7 was the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.
“People arrived at Military Intelligence who weren’t from the unit, reservists who’d never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places,” says A. “They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them. Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry.”
D., who served in strike cells – rear command teams that coordinate drone and other aerial strikes and act as the “eyes” of troops on the ground – reinforces that account as he describes how the criteria and methods changed. “We were always told that things would look different in a war,” he says. “But this was something else entirely. Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That’s how far it went.”
A recurring theme in the accounts is the gap between a target’s importance, the scale of the strike and the civilian toll deemed acceptable. On October 31, 2023, for example, Israeli Air Force planes dropped heavy bombs on a large compound in the Jabalya refugee camp. The target was Ibrahim Biari, commander of Hamas’ central battalion in Jabalya.
An IDF Spokesperson’s statement that evening said Biari had been one of the leaders of the October 7 attack and was directing the fighting in northern Gaza. It said “numerous Hamas terrorists” had been killed alongside him. The statement also said the strike had caused underground infrastructure and nearby buildings to collapse, and reiterated the army’s call for residents to move south “for their safety.”
But soldiers involved in the intelligence work behind the strike offer an entirely different perspective. They describe not just whom the strike targeted, but what those in the strike cells knew moments before the bombs fell.
“We knew Biari was underground, beneath several large buildings, but we couldn’t pinpoint which building he was under,” says D. “So they chose several buildings that were still occupied and decided to bring down all the buildings above the tunnel he was in. We didn’t initiate an evacuation because it was important to kill him before he could get away.”
According to A., who was also involved in the mission, those in the strike cell knew that a particularly large number of civilians could be harmed. Military Intelligence’s calculations of potential collateral damage put the figure at roughly 250 to 300 people, so the decision was referred directly to the chief of staff for approval. The IDF, by contrast, says its collateral damage estimate was around 100 people. The soldiers say far more were ultimately killed.
After the strike, A. says, a damage assessment was conducted to establish what had happened on the ground. “Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren’t 100 percent accurate,” he says. “As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn’t even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on.”
The IDF said in response that the strike “was sent back for replanning several times to reduce the anticipated harm to civilians, which was not in the hundreds. After the strike, it was alleged that the harm exceeded the preliminary assessment.” It added that its investigation had identified tunnels the army had not known about, which caused additional buildings to collapse.
“You can’t authorize the potential killing of 300 civilians for a battalion commander [referring to the assassination of Biari], or the killing of 20 civilians for every Hamas truck driver, and still tell the public we did everything we could to avoid harming innocent people,” says Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence.
The Israeli veterans’ organization collects and publishes soldiers’ testimonies about military conduct in the West Bank and Gaza. Several of the soldiers interviewed for this article gave testimony to it. It’s time the people who wrote those orders took responsibility, instead of trying to throw the soldiers who courageously told the public the truth about how we fought to the wolves,” Weiman says.
D. describes intense pressure from the field. Biari, he says, was commanding forces fighting Israeli soldiers at the time, and killing him was considered an urgent security measure. “We couldn’t get any more intelligence to pinpoint his exact location. They told us, ‘He’s killing soldiers right now. We have to strike him,’ out of concern for the troops on the ground, and in the end the strike was approved,” he says. “They really wanted to kill this guy.”
According to D., no one questioned whether the operational justification for killing a Hamas commander warranted harming so many civilians in that particular strike. His dilemma, like that of all the witnesses who spoke to Haaretz, is broader: Exceptional approvals and heavy bloodshed appeared to have become routine, part of a system that no longer prompted questions.
“I can’t say this particular strike is what really messes with my head,” he admits. “What’s much harder for me is the system of strike after strike after strike, with collateral damage running into dozens of people, sometimes hundreds. Being part of a system like that bothers me more than taking part in any particular strike.”
Another example raised in the accounts is the assassination of Ali Qadi, a company commander in Hamas’ elite Nukhba commando force, whom the IDF identified as one of the leaders of the murderous October 7 attack at the Erez crossing. For the soldiers in the strike cells, his case illustrated the dramatic change within the military.
Before October 7, an intelligence soldier in the Gaza Division warned that Qadi, like other Nukhba operatives, was behaving unusually, but the division’s intelligence officer ignored the warning. Then, a few days into the war, Qadi became a high-priority target, and an exceptionally heavy strike was launched against him.
“He was at home with his family, and they decided to kill him,” says A. “The IDF rushed to announce that he’d been eliminated and how important he was, but Qadi was actually the only one who survived the strike. None of those killed had anything to do with the target. He himself was killed only later.” Another source told Haaretz at the time that, contrary to the IDF Spokesperson’s official announcement, Qadi had survived that strike and was killed later.
“Collateral damage,” known in Hebrew by the acronym NAZA, has become a household term in Israel in recent weeks because of the controversy surrounding the film NAZA. But it is not an abstract concept. In military terminology, it refers to an estimate of how many uninvolved civilians could be harmed in a strike, a central consideration in approving a target.
According to drone operators who spoke to Haaretz during the war, strike policy in the Zik drone units was divided into three main tiers. The first, the “limited” tier, permitted strikes only in response to a direct, immediate threat to troops. The second, the “restricted” tier, also allowed strikes on people providing assistance, intelligence personnel and lookouts. The third, the “expanded” tier, allowed strikes on anyone considered affiliated with Hamas, currently or in the past.
The military also defined the levels of collateral damage permitted without exceptional approval. “Minimal collateral damage” meant no casualties among people near the target. Level 1 allowed up to five uninvolved casualties; Level 2, up to 10; Level 3, up to 20; and Level 4, up to 40.
According to B., who served in the drone units throughout the war, the default from the outset was the expanded tier and collateral damage Level 3. In other words, strikes that could harm 20 civilians required no approval from a senior officer outside the strike cell. Strikes exceeding that threshold were classified as exceptional, with decisions referred to major generals and the chief of staff.
After the ground offensive in Gaza began in late October 2023, the dilemmas inside the strike cells grew more acute. Intelligence personnel were required to create a “sterile area” for advancing troops by identifying “tactical targets”: potential threats to the troops or obstacles to the fighting, flagged by maneuvering brigades and divisions in real time or as part of their advance plans.
C., an intelligence soldier, says that several months into the ground offensive, his strike cell was ordered to prepare an entry zone into Gaza City for an advancing division. Several high-rise buildings in the area were considered a threat to the soldiers. An intelligence assessment concluded that roughly 25 percent of the residents were probably still in their homes.
“We did the calculation and came up with 1,000 people. But they didn’t approve collateral damage of 1,000. What they approved was to start striking and let the residents flee while the operation was underway. That was despite our understanding that there were a great many people there, roughly that number,” he says.
“When we tried to ask about the civilians who were still there and whether this was reasonable, we were told these were ‘tactical targets’ for the troops on the ground. I couldn’t wrap my head around it or believe we were talking about numbers like that.” Still, C. emphasizes the other side of the operational equation. The troops were heading into a dense, booby-trapped urban area, he explains, and waiting for target approvals had become a bottleneck that directly endangered their lives.
“The further we got into the ground offensive, the more time pressure there was,” he says. “A force wanting to move in could wait a long time for a strike to be approved, so in the early stages we struck even when the evacuation wasn’t complete. Protecting the troops took priority, which is understandable, but the numbers kept growing and became unreasonable.”
You can’t say “looters”
The soldiers’ accounts also describe how operational instructions became rigid rules that led to almost automatic strikes while leaving considerable room for error. In combat zones, for example, the presence of any adult male within a few hundred meters of Israeli troops would trigger preparations for a strike. If approval came, the strike went ahead.
Generally, anyone approaching within 300 meters of the troops was considered a threat and targeted, under a safety measure intended to prevent a terrorist from charging the soldiers. But the ability to distinguish details from the air is far more limited than it might appear. “When you spot a figure, it can be really hard to tell whether it’s a 60-year-old or a 12-year-old boy,” explains B., who served in the drone units.
Similar rules became entrenched later, after the IDF established itself along the Netzarim corridor, a strip of land running east to west across Gaza that the military cleared during the war to separate the territory’s north from the rest of the Strip. There, troops were instructed to shoot any Palestinian who crossed a particular line, even though it was not marked on the ground.
As living conditions in Gaza deteriorated, Palestinians began entering abandoned homes or buildings damaged in strikes to retrieve blankets, beds, chairs and food. IDF units labeled them “looters.” But according to the interviewees, the military also treated anyone entering a building in a combat zone as a potential threat who might plant an explosive device or gather intelligence on the troops. These residents were therefore marked for attack.
During the war, Haaretz reported that some Palestinians returned to or remained in their own homes to protect their belongings from looting, leaving them exposed to attack. The issue sparked heated arguments inside the strike cells and reached unit commanders as soldiers and drone operators raised moral concerns. According to one account, a unit commander told soldiers who questioned the policy that every such person must be treated as a terrorist. He also threatened to remove anyone who continued using the term “looters” or questioned their classification as “targets.”
These doubts frequently caused tensions in real time between troops on the ground and the strike cells, which in some cases refused to carry out strikes against people classified as looters.
The most profound breaking point described in the accounts came when negotiations over the cease-fire’s next phase stalled and Israel resumed full-scale fighting in March 2025, followed by Operation Gideon’s Chariots in May.
For some of the interviewees, returning to combat without a clear strategic objective severely eroded their faith in the mission. The sense of purpose that had driven them in the first days of the war gave way to frustration as they realized they were still approving strikes that devastated dozens of civilians merely to hit marginal targets.
In the drone units, the consequences of these strikes were particularly tangible and immediate. B. describes a case in which his crew was ordered to strike a low-level operative who had participated in the October 7 attack. Preparations for the strike were already well advanced when the soldiers located the target, he says.
“We see this terrorist standing in the garden with his family,” he recalls. “I found it hard to carry out the strike with the family there, but some people still thought we should kill him.” After an argument in the strike cell, he says, the strike was canceled at the last moment. “We know we killed uninvolved civilians during the war. It happens,” he adds, trying to explain his personal breaking point. “But in this case, you saw a dad in the garden with his children, seconds before firing. That affected me much more. I felt we were reaching our moral limit.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s response
“The claim that the IDF approved a strike in advance that was expected to kill hundreds of uninvolved civilians is false and entirely baseless. Throughout the war in Gaza, there was not a single such strike, nor has any serious claim been made that a strike carried out by the IDF caused hundreds of deaths.
“The October 31, 2023 strike targeted a command-and-control center that the Hamas terrorist organization had located in a populated area of Jabalya. It was staffed by a group of military operatives, including Ibrahim Biari, a battalion commander in the military wing who directed the fighting in Israel and had previously played a significant role in planning and carrying out the October 7 attack. The anticipated military advantage of the strike was substantial. Nevertheless, the strike was sent back for replanning several times to reduce its area of impact and the anticipated harm to civilians, which ultimately was not in the hundreds.
“After the strike, reports that the IDF did not independently verify alleged that the harm exceeded its preliminary assessment. The Air Force immediately investigated the strike, and additional examinations were conducted. The findings established retrospectively, partly on the basis of other intelligence, that Hamas had dug numerous underground passages in the area that were unknown to the IDF and caused buildings to collapse unexpectedly.
“The IDF’s strike planning and approval process is structured and consists of multiple stages involving weapons specialists and intelligence, legal, operational and other personnel. It is unclear who told the reporter that such a casualty figure was anticipated, what their roles were or how much personal knowledge they had of the matter.
“Their error may stem from having known or heard about general occupancy estimates for the area in the early stages of the process, without having been involved in the many subsequent stages intended to drastically reduce the scope of the strike and its area of impact. During strike planning, strikes are often focused on specific components of a target, the weapons or timing are adjusted, and updated information is received about civilians evacuating following warnings issued by the IDF. It is also possible that these people shared conjecture or rumors about matters in which they had no personal involvement. In any event, the claim is baseless.
“As for the claim that the criteria were loosened, automatic advance approval has never been given to strike different categories of operatives on the basis of a predetermined number of civilians who would be harmed. For every strike, the commander approving it is required to assess individually whether it is expected to be proportionate under international humanitarian law. This means assessing whether the anticipated loss of civilian life, injuries to civilians and damage to civilian objects would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the strike. This obligation has not changed since the outbreak of the war and was further emphasized in instructions issued from its outset.”
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