Israel is falsely designating Gaza areas as empty in order to bomb them
Palestinians mourn those killed in an Israeli airstrike outside the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 3 June 2025
Yuval Abraham reports in +972 on 4 June 2025:
In recent weeks, the Israeli army has been launching airstrikes on residential neighborhoods in Gaza that they treat as evacuated, despite knowing that many of the houses bombed were filled with civilians who could not or did not want to leave, according to two intelligence sources who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call.
The army’s designation of a particular neighborhood as “green,” or cleared of residents, is based on a crude algorithmic analysis of phone usage patterns over a wide area — not on a detailed, house-by-house assessment before bombing, as previously revealed by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The New York Times.
Two intelligence sources noticed in May that the army was bombing homes and killing families, while internally recording that the homes were empty or nearly empty of residents, based on the flawed algorithmic calculation.
“This occupancy estimate is based on a bunch of incredibly crappy algorithms,” one intelligence source explained to +972 and Local Call. “It’s clear there are a lot of people in those houses. They haven’t really evacuated.
“You look at the evacuation tables, and everything is green — that means between 0 to 20 percent of the population remains. The whole area we were in, in Khan Younis, was marked green, and it clearly wasn’t,” the source added.
Last week, an airstrike in Khan Younis hit the home of Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her 10 young children, and her husband Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, who succumbed to his wounds a few days later. “Some [of the children] were mutilated and all were burnt,” her husband’s brother told The Guardian. In a press release issued after the incident, the army stated that it had targeted “suspects” and that Khan Younis had been evacuated.