JERUSALEM — Israelis on Friday got a fuller dose of rank-and-file angst over their army's winter assault on the Gaza Strip, as newspapers elaborated on allegations that commanders created a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians.
Soldiers' accounts of two killings of women and children appeared Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv. Both papers followed up Friday with lengthy excerpts of the soldiers' comments about confusion and doubt over the rules of engagement during the 22-day offensive, which left an estimated 1,400 Palestinians dead.
The accounts came from a Feb. 13 discussion at a military preparatory academy. The school's director, Danny Zamir, who led the discussion, disclosed the transcript this week. Here are recollections of Aviv, a squad commander in the elite Givati Brigade, other Givati soldiers and an air force pilot. The transcript didn't use their full names.
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AVIV: Toward the end of the operation, there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City. In the briefings, they started to talk about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn't get hurt and [Hamas militants] wouldn't fire on us.
At first the specified action was to go into a house . . . with an armored personnel carrier . . . and start shooting inside. . . . I call this murder. . . . We were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself, "Where is the logic?"
They said it was permissible because anyone who remained in the sector was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled. I didn't really understand. . . . They don't have anywhere to flee to. . . . This scared me a bit.
I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible [in] my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the occupants], "Come on, everyone get out. You have five minutes. Leave the house. Anyone who doesn't get out gets killed."
I went to our soldiers and said, "The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out . . . to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out. . . . This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves, throwing a grenade, all those things."
