A Moment Of Truth About Killing Gaza's Children

An intergenerational message received

“It doesn’t matter if they are children.”

That’s Ex-Israeli Intelligence Chief Aharon Haliva’s brutally honest assessment of the 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. His remarks were recorded shortly after Israel reached that bloody milestone in March of this year. He resigned from the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate a year earlier in response to the security failures surrounding Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

That means he was not speaking officially.

But he was speaking candidly. And his blunt admission suggests something other than physical proximity to a suspected member Hamas is at play when the IDF kills underage non-combatants in bunches.

It’s been clear since the end of December 2023 that there is no meaningful restriction on the number of children Israel’s soldiers and pilots can kill, maim and orphan. The IDF set a heady pace during the five weeks, killing one child every ten minutes. Nearly nine thousand children were killed during the first eleven weeks of bombing.

On December 5, 2023, the IDF reassured the public (particularly in the US) it was only killing two civilians per Hamas fighter. The Times Of Israel also cited unnamed officials who claimed “the IDF was deploying high-tech mapping software to try to reduce noncombatant deaths.”

Those assurances didn’t match the reality reported by the BBC just the day before. It introduced the world to the acronym “WCNSF.” It’s shorthand for “Wounded Child No Surviving Family” and it’s assigned during triage because injured children without parents, siblings or legal guardians require specific attention and additional resources.

Obviously, Gazans do not have the infrastructure or resources to care for a generation of battle-scarred orphans. Imagine the trauma of being Injured, trapped and then pulled from a collapsed apartment building, only to discover your mother, father and siblings are dead. That’s exactly what happened to Noor, a 14 year-old Palestinian girl who became a WCNSF twenty months after the BBC’s story first aired:

On August 6, at around 3:00 a.m., an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment where my sister Somaiya, 35, her husband Anas, 35, and their daughters Noor, 14, Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, were staying. The airstrike killed my sister’s family except for Noor, who survived with an arm fracture that required surgery. When Noor was admitted to the hospital on August 8 and rushed to the operating room, she called out to her parents, who were gone forever.

Her story comes via her uncle “Yousef,” a Gaza-based coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). She does still have an uncle, though, which sets her apart from other WCNSFs who have lost their uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents.

One hundred thirty-two members of the Abu Naser family died on October 29, 2023, when the family-owned apartment building was struck by the IDF, which said the intended target was an “enemy spotter” on the roof. NPR asked for visual evidence to back up the claim. The IDF declined. Even if there was one spotter on the roof, does that warrant destroying an entire building? Is there another way to neutralize one spotter on the roof of a multi-family apartment building? Could bullets be used instead of bombs?

The decision to bomb one rooftop spotter left the remnants of four generations of the Abu Naser family to bury one hundred of its members in a mass grave … on the same day. Less than a year later, a Reuters investigation found the Abu Naser family’s experience was part of a pattern:

By Oct. 7 2024, one year into the war, 1,238 Palestinian families that have been wiped out, with no survivors, according to ministry figures. The data defines families as married couples and their children. 70% of these families were made up of between 2 to 4 people.

The rest of the extinguished families Reuters examined ranged in size from five to eleven. Given that, it does appear that the IDF’s “high-tech mapping software” has failed miserably.

One possible culprit is “Lavender,” an AI system the IDF used to generate “kill lists” of suspected members of Hamas. In a battlespace where physical proximity to a suspected member or associate of Hamas is all it takes for non-combatants to forfeit their right to live, Lavender’s lists are the only rationale the IDF needs to kill civilians by the dozens. A joint investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call talked to “six Israeli intelligence officers” with “first-hand” experience using AI “to generate targets for assassination.” They confirmed Lavender’s “central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians”:

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Note that the only real requirement is that the target be “male.” That’s problematic given the error rate, but it’s not nearly as catastrophic as using bombs to take out one male who walked into a crowded apartment building. Not a sniper or a commando or a drone. Not a booby-trapped pager. They prefer to drop bombs … including 500lb behemoths sent by the United States.

It’s a decision made by human beings about human beings. Targeting and mapping tech only provides the pretext. People set the parameters and the rules of engagement. And people still have the final say. What the IDF has done with Lavender speaks volumes…

[T]he Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

“Where’s Daddy?” makes sure the target isn’t attacked until after he enters his family’s residence … and that implies an aim beyond defeating Hamas. It’s not just Lavender’s kill list, either. It’s also how the IDF operated on July 15, 2025, when thirteen members of one family were trapped under the rubble of their home after an IDF strike.

This time, though, it didn’t happen in the flash.

Rescuers tried to pull them out for approximately eight hours, but IDF drones stalked them and fired upon them as they repeatedly attempted a rescue. They’re called “double-tap” strikes. “Double tap” refers to the practice of doubling back to hit a target with a second strike after the target’s comrades and/or first responders and/or family members rush to the scene. It’s basically attracting more fish to the burning barrel so you can shoot them, too.

In this case, the intent appears to be simple cruelty.

As eyewitnesses told Haaretz…

According to local rescue authorities and relatives of the victims, the IDF prevented their rescue for roughly eight hours. Any attempt to get close to the scene was met with a drone strike, they said.

The tactic of doubling-back to attack rescuers was corroborated by +972 Magazine and Local Call. In it, a source told them:

Thwarting the rescue of the wounded from beneath the rubble…means that the target, if present, will still likely die — either from their injuries, from suffocation due to toxic gases, or from hunger and thirst.

“If present” is telling. What if the target isn’t present? What if the target is dead?

Regardless, the non-combatants are expected die … just like the seven children and seven adults trapped for eight hours were consigned to die. IDF drone pilots madetheir survival impossible. And the IDF knows it:

A source who was present in attack coordination rooms known as strike cells in the Israeli army’s Southern Command, and who witnessed double tap strikes, told +972 and Local Call that the military knows the practice is a death sentence for dozens, and sometimes hundreds of wounded civilians trapped under the rubble, along with their would-be rescuers.

It’s a particularly troubling practice human rights organization’s criticized when the CIA used double-tap strikes during the Obama Administration. In fact, Netanyahu was just forced to explain a deadly double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital that killed medical responders and journalists who rushed to the initial strike site on the fourth floor. The official story is that the IDF was targeting a “Hamas camera” supposedly used to monitor troop movements. Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap.”

Again … the target and the response seem completely out of proportion. Are we to believe an airstrike is the IDF’s only option when faced with a camera on the fourth floor of a hospital? And a double-tap strike, at that? Frankly, if that was a mishap then mishaps must be IDF policy.

The patterns are what they are.

It’s why AP was able to find even more examples of entire families eliminated by the IDF. That’s multiple examples from multiple sources all telling (or leaving behind) similar stories. The pattern is clear. So are the outcomes. Per AP:

An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed — sometimes four generations from the same bloodline — in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war.

Nearly a quarter of those families lost more than 50 family members in those weeks. Several families have almost no one left to document the toll, especially as documenting and sharing information became harder.

Jacobin recently lamented what most US-based media have completely ignored:

After a year, the number of family bloodlines that had been ended entirely — erased from Gaza’s civil registry, with not a single surviving relative and the family name permanently retired — was 902.

Ending genetic lines sounds eerily like the outcome of a genocidal military campaign.

Ironically, Netanyahu recently argued that Israel could’ve easily committed genocide by inflicting “the Dresden bombing on them,” but, he added, it’s refrained “because that’s not the way we conduct war.”

He gave away the game when he linked a Dresden-like bombing campaign to genocide. As he said, Israel could if it wanted to, but chooses not to. Enter Bailey Ulbricht and Allen S. Weiner of Stanford Law School. They made Netanyahu’s unintentional case in the The Hill:

During the first year of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli forces damaged or destroyed nearly 60 percent of all buildings in all of Gaza and 70 percent of all housing stock. In the two northern governorates, damage rates were particularly severe: 70 percent and 74 percent of all buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 80 percent of all housing stock. This is comparable to the level of damage in Dresden, where 80 percent of residential buildings, 56 percent of non-industrial buildings, and 23 percent of industrial buildings were damaged or destroyed.

…Israel closed the gap over time…

By July 2025, 78 percent of all buildings across all of Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, comparable to damage rates in Dresden. Overall damage rates in Gaza also surpass the damage in Nagasaki (40 percent) and Hiroshima (67 percent) after the atomic bomb detonations in 1945.

To be fair, some of those buildings were toppled by independent contractors Israel pays to drive their bulldozers into Gaza and raze buildings. Haaretz examined the government’s program in July:

In addition to the daily-payment formula, some people work as contractors with the Defense Ministry and get paid per house demolished. Figures obtained by TheMarker, Haaretz's business newspaper, for work offered in recent weeks to Israel's biggest construction and infrastructure companies show that the ministry is contracting the owners of heavy equipment. As more buildings in Gaza are demolished, the bigger are the profits for the equipment owners.

From the contract terms, it emerges that for a building of up to three floors, the Defense Ministry will pay 2,500 shekels. Taller structures earn 5,000 shekels. The costs of bringing the heavy equipment into Gaza and a phone are borne by the ministry.

That methodical, slow-motion path to Dresden-like destruction is almost more damning than the bombing. It’s an official policy that reflects the government’s intent. Equally troubling is a “classified Israeli military intelligence database” obtained by reporters working on a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call.

By extrapolating the IDF’s own numbers, the trio determined that 83% of Gaza’s casualties are civilians. Put another way, just 17% of those killed were “fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database.” It makes one wonder again if the IDF’s high-tech mapping software is failing to deliver or, particularly in the case of Lavender, if it is working perfectly.

That’s the type of question that usually gets answered by a whistleblower or an investigation. But it may have been answered by the man quoted at top when he dismissed concerns about the then-50,000 Gazans who been killed:

“It doesn’t matter if they are children.”

The former intelligence chief explained why he is comfortable with killing children in bunches.:

For everything that happened on October 7, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn't matter now if they are children. I'm not speaking out of revenge, I'm speaking out of a message to future generations. They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.

Haliva’s “message to future generations” is being received loudly and clearly every day by Palestinian children condemned by reason of their birth. For him, Palestinian “non-combatants” simply do not exist, regardless of their age, gender or activities. There are no Palestinian “civilians” and there is no “civilian infrastructure.” Every thing and everyone inside The Strip is a viable target.

This is not a new idea, either.

In 2018, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said, “You have to understand, there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas.”

He was responding to questions about the killing of nine Palestinians during, as The Jerusalem Post reported, the “massive ‘Great March of Return’ protest along the [Gaza] barrier’s route.”

Four years earlier, former head of Israel's National Security Council Major-General Giora Eiland argued that “there is no such thing as innocent civilians in Gaza” during a bombing campaign called “Protective Edge.” That campaign was triggered by rocket attacks Hamas launched in response to a deadly Israeli military response to the murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated kidnappers. The majority of those killed by the IDF’s six week campaign were civilians.

Then as now, the indiscriminate nature of the bombing drew international criticism. Eiland responded:

Well, [Gazans] are to blame for this situation just like Germany's residents were to blame for electing Hitler as their leader and paid a heavy price for that, and rightfully so.

When Eiland made that argument in 2014, eight years had passed since Hamas won the multiparty election in question—which was the last election—with 44.45% of the vote. That means a majority (55%) of Gaza’s eligible voters voted against Hamas. And, at the time, a majority of the population was too young to vote. So, the “they” Eiland said “rightfully” deserved to be punished for electing Hamas was, in fact, a minority … particularly by 2014.

In the intervening years between 2014 and today, the percentage of Gazans who actually voted for Hamas has declined precipitously. One data analysis shows that just 8% of Gazans alive today voted for Hamas in 2006. Half of the population wasn’t even born in 2006, and just over a quarter were too young to vote. No Gazan has voted for nearly two decades. But the “no innocents” argument has been adopted by the majority of Israelis.

A Hebrew University poll released in June found that 64% of Israelis of agree that there are “no innocents in Gaza.” A follow-up poll released two months later saw that tick down slightly to 62% agreeing “there are no innocent people in Gaza.”

The utility of a guilty civilian population is clear. Collective punishment can be meted-out without remorse and children killed without compunction. But there is an additional rationale built into the rhetoric.

That case was made in a piece published earlier this year by the Adelson-owned newspaper Israel Hayom. Titled 'No innocent civilians': Why Gazans have earned their transfer,” author and journalist Nadav Shragai demonstrates one of the oldest tricks in one of the oldest books:

The Gazans are not unfortunate and pitiful victims of the war who need to be rescued from the ruins and given hope and a future elsewhere through consensual transfer. On the contrary: Gaza is the modern-day Sodom, and many of its men, women, and children are "wicked sinners." If Abraham our forefather were to return for a moment and engage in dialogue with God about Gaza similar to his biblical discourse about Sodom, he would struggle to advocate even for the residents of this modern Sodom.

Not only are all Gazans guilty, they are guilty of being worse than Sodomites. And we know what God did to them. Netanyahu makes the same appeal using a different Biblical target of God’s’ genocidal wrath. He has repeatedly characterized the Palestinians as the modern-day version of “Amalek”—a Biblical reference to a people God marked for extermination … here’s the King James translation of 1 Samuel 15:3:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. It too.

Although most Americans have never heard Netanyahu’s references to Amalek, these barely-coded messages are well understood in Israel and largely embraced by the Greater Israel expansionists who populate Netanyahu’s government. They, like Nadav Shragai, have found a divine rationale for treating Gazans as less-than-human:

International humanitarian law, also known as "laws of war," cannot truly be applied to Gaza. Gaza is one of the cases where collective punishment is moral, because the collective itself supported, identified with, engaged in, or was employed in terror for years.

Gaza’s children deserve to suffer because “the collective itself supported, identified with, engaged in, or was employed in terror for years.” But Netanyahu gets a free pass. despite his key role in keeping Hamas funded throughout years of rocket attacks and reprisals.

Two months after October 7, a New York Times investigation unpacked Netanyahu’s use of Qatari money. When, for instance, the US threatened to sanction Qatar because of its support for Hamas, Netanyahu sprung into action and “lobbied Washington on Qatar’s behalf. Per the NYT:

In 2017, as Republicans pushed to impose financial sanctions on Qatar over its support for Hamas, he dispatched senior defense officials to Washington. The Israelis told American lawmakers that Qatar had played a positive role in the Gaza Strip, according to three people familiar with the trip.

…and he kept the ball rolling a year later…

During a 2018 cabinet meeting, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides presented a new plan: Every month, the Qatari government would make millions of dollars in cash payments directly to people in Gaza as part of a cease-fire agreement with Hamas.

…and did he face opposition…

Naftali Bennett, who was Israel’s education minister in 2018 when the payments began and later became the defense minister, was among members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government who criticized the payments. He called them “protection money.”

…but, despite his criticism….

When Mr. Bennett began his one-year stint as prime minister in June 2021, he continued the policy. By then, Qatar was spending roughly $30 million a month in Gaza.

Bennett’s continuity is revealing and indicative of a well-established policy. As for Netanyahu, he had an opportunity to end the payments “just weeks” before Hamas’s attack. But when the Qataris asked the Director of the Mossad if Israel wanted the payments to continue…

Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.

None of this should be news to Israelis. The relationship has been known for years … and still they vote for him and use Gaza’s children as scapegoats. Perhaps it’s because sustaining Hamas has been central to Netanyahu’s strategy to prevent Palestinian sovereignty. The Jerusalem Post reported on the cynical strategy in 2019:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.

…and…

The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Although it’s demonstrably true that Netanyahu is far more responsible for supporting Hamas than Gazan children born after the 2006 election, it’s the children who’ve lost lives, lost limbs and lost families … all because Netanyahu sustained Hamas as a poison pill to kill any chance of a negotiated settlement. As long as Hamas exists, the State of Israel does not have, as Netanyahu has said repeatedly, “a partner for peace.” Instead, Hamas became his enthusiastic partner in war and a perennial justification for collective punishment.

It does lead one wonder if can he afford to lose Hamas … and if he does lose Hamas as a viable enemy, will another criminal element become the next poison pill?

Whatever happens to Hamas, the fact is he and the government around him have no intention of ever allowing Palestinians to have full autonomy and national sovereignty or Israeli citizenship in a one-state solution. And he and the Greater Israel expansionists who keep him in office are stuck with millions of unwanted people living on land they covet.

As far as Israel’s expansionists are concerned, there really is only one answer to Israel’s Palestinian question—the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank. Trump and Jared Kushner agreed. The problem is how to do it. Collective punishment is their solution. Destroy sanitation. Raze homes. Impose malnutrition. Deny healthcare. End education for children while simultaneously traumatizing them, maiming them and killing them. Wipe out families, in fact. Force Gazans to choose exile or death.

It’s a choice that showed up in the 6% decline in population Gaza experienced during the war’s first fifteen months. As Reuters reported at the start of January, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found then “about 100,000 Palestinians left the enclave while more than 55,000 are presumed dead.”

Both outcomes match the goal of population removal.

The same is true of it’s willingness to kill children and exterminate families. Killing civilians without hesitation or remorse reiterates the binary choice individual Palestinians will face every day in their tents, at aid distribution sites, in hospitals or when they try to dig a WCNSF out of a collapsed building.

Israel’s war is paving the way for a coerced mass exodus.

That message is amplified by tons of unguided “dumb” bombs. They are effective in eliminating “human shields” living in apartment buildings, taking refuge in schools or seeking medical attention in hospitals. They 500lb dumb the US provides are also very effective at eliminating people sitting in cafes. It’s commonly estimated that forty-five percent of all the bombs Israel drops are “dumb.” But it’s not quite accurate to call them “unguided.”

Every bomb that kills, maims or traumatizes is, as Aharon Haliva said, guided by “a message to future generations.”