Israeli soldiers have revealed that Palestinian civilians were killed inside Gaza in a free-for-all at the wish of army officers amid a collapse of legal and military norms during Tel Aviv’s two-year brutal war on the besieged enclave, reports Anadolu Ajensi.

“If you want to shoot without restraint, you can,” Daniel, the commander of an Israeli tank unit, said in a documentary, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, set to be aired in the UK on ITV on Monday.

The Israeli army has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded over 170,000 in Gaza and left the enclave uninhabitable since October 2023.

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Israeli soldiers, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said Palestinian civilians were used as human shields during the conflict, The Guardian reported.

Captain Yotam Vilk, an armored corps officer, said soldiers did not apply the long-standing army standard of firing only when a target had the “means, intent and ability” to cause harm.

“There’s no such thing as ‘means, intent and ability’ in Gaza,” he said. “It’s just suspicion – someone walking where it’s not allowed.”

Another soldier, identified only as Eli, said: “Life and death isn’t determined by procedures or opening fire regulations. It’s the conscience of the commander on the ground that decides.”

‘Hanging laundry’
Eli recounted an officer ordering a tank to demolish a building where a man was just “hanging laundry,” resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.

The documentary also presents detailed accounts of Israeli soldiers opening fire unprovoked on civilians running toward food handouts at militarized aid distribution points operated by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Film maker talks about Israeli ‘shoot to kill’ policies in Gaza    Video: LBC

A contractor identified only as Sam, who worked at GHF sites, said he saw Israeli soldiers shooting two unarmed men running to get aid.

“You could just see two soldiers run after them,” he recalled. “They drop onto their knees and they just take two shots, and you could just see . . .  two heads snap backwards and just drop.”

Sam also described a tank destroying “a normal car . . .  just four normal people sat inside it.”

According to UN figures, at least 944 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli fire near such aid points.

Extremist rhetoric
The film also highlights the spread of extremist rhetoric inside Israel, including statements from rabbis and politicians depicting all Palestinians as legitimate targets after the October 7 events.

“You hear that all the time, so you start to believe it,” Daniel said.

Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who served more than 500 days in Gaza, defended large-scale home demolitions by the Israeli army in Gaza.

“Everything there is one big terrorist infrastructure . . . We changed the conduct of an entire army.”

In September, a UN commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, where a ceasefire came into force on October 10 after two years of Israeli bombardment.

Since the ceasefire, Israeli attacks have killed at least 242 Palestinians and injured 622. One Israeli soldier has been killed.

“I feel like they’ve destroyed all my pride in being an Israeli — in being an IDF (army) officer,” Daniel says in the programme. “All that’s left is shame.”

Appalled by French reporter Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff’s death in Ukraine on Monday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called for a transparent investigation into the circumstances of his death.

At the same time, RSF is stepping up its efforts to provide the best possible protection for journalists in the field.

It says that with the Kremlin “working tirelessly to spread its propaganda” about the war, journalists are needed for verified and independent information.

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A video reporter for the French TV news channel BFMTV, Leclerc-Imhoff is the eighth journalist to be killed in the field in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. His body was reportedly still in Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, but was to be transported to Dnipro for a forensic autopsy, according to a Ukrainian interior ministry adviser.

Leclerc-Imhoff’s BFMTV colleague, Maxime Brandstaetter, and their Ukrainian fixer, Oksana Leuta, who were both slightly injured in the shelling that killed Leclerc-Imhoff, are in the process of being evacuated to Dnipro.

Leclerc-Imhoff, 32, was sitting at the front of a humanitarian truck in Lysychansk when shrapnel from an exploding shell pierced the truck’s armoured windshield and struck him in the neck.

At the time of his death, he was filming the evacuation of around 10 civilians from the eastern front line to a safer location.

Reliable, honest and independent reporting
“Aged 32, Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff paid with his life in the quest for the reliable, honest and independent reporting that is vital for our democracies,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“We are saddened and appalled by this tragedy. RSF asks the Ukrainian authorities to display exemplary transparency and independence with the regard to the investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) into this violation of the rules of war.”

The Kremlin, which has imposed total censorship on freely reported news and information in Russia and the territories its army occupies in Ukraine, used the state news agency TASS to attack Leclerc-Imhoff’s memory.

TASS called him a “mercenary” in the service of “Ukrainian far-right radical forces” in defiance of the facts.

Since the start of the invasion, RSF had already registered 50 events affecting around 120 journalists that qualify as war crimes.

It has just filed its fifth complaint with the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor and with Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, and is continuing to analyse attacks targeting reporters.

Present in Ukraine via its press freedom centres in Kyiv and Lviv, RSF also supplies security gear to news reporters in the field and provides them with safety training and psychological assistance.

The goal is to ensure reliable coverage of the Russian government’s war of aggression and war on information.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.