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In October 2023, Israel found a pretext to breathe new life into the old story of massacre and expulsion. The main difference this time lies in the scale and duration.
Written by: Jonathan Cook | June 11, 2026,
The truth is slowly coming to light: Israel’s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago. Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza:
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Soldier 1: „Human life didn’t matter. You could kill—there were no laws. No one would have said a word to you. But it doesn’t feel right. Above all, it kills your humanity.”
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Soldier 2: „At first, I refused to execute Arabs who offered no resistance [i.e., civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill them. We went through a process where we stopped seeing them as human beings.”
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Soldier 3: „We caught some guys, lined them up, and killed them. Looking back, it seems like murder.”
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Soldier 4: „We went around the refugee camps in Gaza and carried out purges… Every soldier who was there set up a »concentration camp,« and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused even the slightest disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve there during the current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. These accounts are nearly 60 years old; they were published last week by the Israeli Haaretz daily newspaper „We were ordered to kill” with the headline.
The Israeli soldiers, who were interviewed shortly after the 1967 war—often referred to as the Six-Day War— not only admitted that they and others routinely committed war crimes, but also pointed out that they did so on the orders of their commanders.
The reports were compiled by Avraham Shapira A Day 7: Soldiers talk about the Six-Day War in his book *[Title]*, although many of the testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.
These should not be merely historical curiosities. These accounts serve as vivid reminders of what Israel is doing during its current, nearly three-year campaign of destruction against Gaza—the demolition of every home, hospital, school, university, bakery, and government office; the killing of tens of thousands, and likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and the blocking of aid and the starvation of the population—is part of a decades-long pattern of Israeli military conduct.
Nothing „began” on October 7, 2023, when Hamas broke out of the Gaza „concentration camp” for a single day —the 4th soldier had already noticed the harsh fate of the Palestinians in Gaza 59 years ago.
Rather, Israel found a pretext that day to breathe new life into an old story in which it has been massacring and expelling Palestinians for decades. The main difference this time lies simply in the scale and duration.
Washington and other Western capitals have given Israel the time and leeway to finish in Gaza what it had previously been able to achieve only in part. Israel’s current, vastly superior firepower—provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States—has enabled Israel to achieve what it could previously only dream of: wiping Gaza off the map.
The policy of starvation
The soldiers who reported the abuses in 1967 acknowledged that their job was not to „fight the enemy”—or to „eliminate terrorists,” as Israeli leaders now put it. Rather, it was to kill and terrorize Palestinian civilians under the guise of war.
Few soldiers were ashamed to explain why they committed atrocities. Their mission was to establish a reign of terror, which was an integral part of Israel’s effort to drive as many Palestinians as possible from the remaining parts of their homeland, the territories that the Israeli army had captured in 1967 and subsequently occupied illegally.
They saw this as a new opportunity to complete the campaign of ethnic cleansing launched by Zionist militias in 1947 and 1948, following the withdrawal of the British Mandate authorities from Palestine. By the end of the campaign, approximately 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes within the borders of the newly proclaimed Jewish state.
Many ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries, such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled to the remaining pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—the 22 percent of their homeland that Jordan and Egypt had protected from further Israeli advances in 1948.
The Israeli leadership viewed the 1967 war as a second chance: an opportunity to occupy and colonize all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants.
Weeks after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told his cabinet where the expulsions should begin. „Our primary interest is in evacuating Gaza,” he said.
Given the international pressure, it was clear to him that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza had to be carried out in secret to attract less attention. Anticipating Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza, which began in 2007, he suggested that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza „precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” that Israel was imposing there.
In his view, the ethnic cleansing program could be accelerated by depriving the population of basic necessities, such as water. „Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will turn yellow and wither away.”
In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel went a step further: it calculated exactly how many calories to allow into Gaza so that the people living there would become increasingly malnourished. Or as Dov Weisglass, a senior government adviser, explained in 2006: „The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not let them starve to death.”
Seventeen years after Gaza was forced onto a „diet”—when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized the moment. They destroyed those „orchards” and turned the „diet” into a full-scale starvation blockade—a crime against humanity for which the International Criminal Court has issued warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
Targeting innocent people
Palestinian historians understood the crimes of 1967 long ago, but of course no one listened to them. It took Israeli historians much longer to begin piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.
A Haaretz A new study, based on research by the Akevot Institute, details the ruthlessness of the mass expulsion of Palestinians that began in 1967. As the paper reports: „Historical research shows that Israel expelled some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza, and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion involved the murder of civilians, the spreading of terror among Arab communities, looting, and ultimately destruction.”
After successfully driving out large numbers of Palestinians again in 1967, the next task—as in 1948—was to prevent their return.
Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed in areas bordering Jordan and Egypt, where Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ orders were to kill every Palestinian family that tried to return to their homes.
Here is a soldier’s testimony, which was Haaretz as he recounted, and as Avnery noted in his autobiography: „We closed off these crossings and were ordered to shoot to kill without warning. Indeed, every night such shots were fired at men, women, and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men, women, and children.”
„In the morning, we went out to search the area, and on the express orders of the officer present, we killed those who were still alive, including those who were hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we covered the bodies with earth until a tractor arrived.”
Those who report Israeli abuses today warn that this military doctrine remains unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown that Israel is secretly attempting to conceal its crimes by dumping civilians into mass graves in violation of international law.
This is what happened, for example, when troops massacred Palestinians seeking aid a year ago, and again when soldiers executed 15 Palestinian paramedics at their ambulances during a raid in March 2025.
Another soldier, troubled by the 1967 „shoot to kill” policy, recalled a conversation with his commander: „I asked the officer: ”And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too?’ The answer I got was: ‘Don’t be a sissy.’”
There is nothing unusual about this. It is well known that since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 1,000 infants under the age of one in Gaza—not all of them anonymously, through airstrikes.
The Israeli military allowed five premature babies in the incubators at al-Nasser Hospital to die and begin to decompose after its soldiers took control of the building in late 2023.
Israeli commanders also knew that the most vulnerable among the victims of the aid blockade would be the first to die. Infants froze to death or starved to death because the population was deprived of shelter, formula, and food, and mothers did not have enough to eat to produce milk.
As Soldier No. 2 noted, Israeli military doctrine encourages soldiers not to view Palestinians as „human beings,” not even Palestinian infants. Their lives are considered worthless.
A Familiar Past
Last week, Israeli soldiers killed another Palestinian infant in the West Bank after raiding a car driven by Fahd Abu Haikal, a lecturer at Bethlehem University, in the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is under particularly brutal occupation.
One of the soldiers fired at the car from just a few meters away as it slowed down to stop, from a position where he must have been able to see the passengers. The bullet killed Abu Haikal’s seven-month-old infant, Samet, and wounded his wife, who was holding the baby. Abu Haikal’s 11-year-old son, who was also in the car, watched as his infant brother bled to death.
Israeli soldiers have been killing Palestinian infants for decades. Yet this has not provoked even a shred of outrage from the Western media and politicians, unlike the unanimous outcry they expressed over Israel’s completely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 infants on October 7, 2023.
In fact, only one Israeli infant was killed that day: nine-month-old Mila Cohen, who—like Sam Abu Haikal—was shot in her mother’s arms.
Israel’s 1967 campaign of expulsion in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it the result of a spur-of-the-moment decision. The Haaretz According to this view, the policy was carefully planned many years in advance.
Since 1948, Israel has been waiting to carry out further expulsions and seize the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland—the territories that had been denied to it in order to complete its violent settler-colonial project.
The 1967 war—against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—provided the pretext.
Ishai Amrami, a high-ranking battalion commander during that war, later admitted: „What I witnessed firsthand was an attempt at a mass population transfer.”
As the Haaretz notes: „The Palestinians were merely bystanders in this story. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians living in the West Bank did not participate in the war, and that it was not their war. Nevertheless, they were the ones who paid the price.”
Israel has begun the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, just as it did after 1948, so that there would be no homes left for Palestinians to return to. But just as the Haaretz notes that Israel fell victim to its own rapid military success. „This was one of the rare instances in the history of the conflict when Israel was forced to back down due to intense international pressure.”
It hardly needs emphasizing that, unlike in 1967, this kind of international pressure has been sorely lacking over the past three years. A new generation of Western leaders, such as Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, a former prominent human rights lawyer, has endorsed Israel’s explicitly genocidal agenda against the Palestinians in Gaza, calling it „self-defense.”.
Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s Western leaders and their media have decided to give Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed—and have provided the weapons and intelligence — to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their help.
Emboldened by this impunity, Israel attempted to expand the destruction, with limited success in Iran and much greater success in southern Lebanon.
Since Western politicians and the media are happy to forget about Gaza, Israel maintains relentless pressure and oppression there. A so-called „Yellow Line,” which marks the boundary of Israeli military control over the devastated enclave and which Palestinians are barred from entering, has gradually expanded to cover 70 percent of the territory.
The people of Gaza are literally being driven out of the ruins of their homeland, while Israel tries to find a third country—Egypt, or perhaps Somalia—that is willing to take them in.
Extract context
As the famous American cosmologist Carl Sagan once said, „You have to know the past to understand the present.”
This is precisely why Western politicians and the media have been so careful to take the past out of context, and to remove the context and background—such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, which explain Israel’s current behavior—in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon.
Western audiences, deprived of an understanding of the region’s history, were easier to manipulate into believing that Israeli atrocities were responses—and supposedly „proportionate”— — to Hamas’s one-day attack against Israel in late 2023.
An obvious truth has become obscured: for at least eight decades, Israel has exploited every opportunity it could find to drive the Palestinians from their homeland.
The Hamas attack in October 2023 was not a turning point or a breaking point, as it is so often portrayed in the West.
In 1967—that is, 56 years before the Hamas attack—Eshkol suggested that unforeseen events could accelerate Israel’s ethnic cleansing program. A moment may come in the future—which he called an „unexpected luxury solution”—when Israel can quickly realize its dream of a Palestine free of Palestinians.
„Perhaps we can expect another war, and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a kind of »luxury,« an unexpected solution,” he explained to the cabinet.
Filling in the missing context, as Israel Haaretz With a new article in its publication, the story takes a new turn.
The events of October 7, 2023, seem less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-ditch response to decades of Israeli atrocities aimed at making the Palestinians’ living conditions so miserable—through impoverishment, isolation, starvation, and murder—so miserable that they would either flee their homeland or die there.
When viewed in its proper context, Israel’s alleged „retaliation” in Gaza—its genocidal rampage—appears for what it truly is: a continuation of its eight-decade-long campaign of ethnic cleansing. In fact, it is the final act. The climax.
David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of Israel, wrote to his son in 1937, 11 years before the establishment of Israel: „We must drive out the Arabs and take their place.”
In a diary entry written during the mass expulsions of 1948, Ben-Gurion summed up the prevailing mood among his generals: „If we accuse a family, we must harm them without mercy. Women and children, without mercy. Otherwise, this is not an effective response. During the operation, no distinction should be made between the guilty and the innocent.”
The goal was to use fear as a weapon, terrifying the Palestinians to the point where they would not dare to remain in their homeland.
Mordechai Maklef, a high-ranking commander in the young Israeli army, remarked two years later, in 1950, on the logic of Israel’s policy: „It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in Galilee without resorting to terror.”
Even if we disregard the Palestinian accounts from that period, the small portions of Israeli archives that have so far been made available to Israeli historians document the massacres and systematic rapes committed against Palestinians in 1948.
In recent Israeli films, such as Tantura – the village where a horrific massacre was carried out against Palestinians – the elderly men who served as Israeli soldiers at the time corroborate the archival documents, recounting how they personally witnessed the rape of Palestinian girls.
It should be noted that the use of rape as a weapon continues to this day—in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls Israel’s „network of torture camps.”.
These acts of violence—now often carried out using dogs trained for this purpose—have become so widespread that it has become impossible to keep them hidden. Even the mainstream media, such as the The New York Times They also caught his attention—albeit very belatedly—triggering a chorus of protests and Netanyahu’s threats of legal action.
Sexual abuse of detainees held by Israel is so routine that international peace activists were subjected to systematic rape when hundreds of them were captured last month near Cyprus, in international waters as they began their journey toward Gaza to break through Israel’s genocidal blockade.
Israel wants fear to spread—from Palestine itself to anyone who wishes to show solidarity with its people.
Western politicians and the media have barely mentioned these horrific crimes committed against their own citizens. Why? Because acknowledging these crimes would mean admitting that even worse atrocities are being committed against Palestinians under Israeli rule.
Prisons for Aiding and Abetting
Gaza is not an anomaly. It is entirely consistent with eight decades of Israeli military strategy. Westerners are unaware of this simply because their political and media establishments have worked hard to prevent them from finding out.
If the Western public knew what has actually been happening to the Palestinians for over 80 years—first at the hands of the Zionist movement, and then by the State of Israel—then the ranks of the protest marches would swell even further, making it politically impossible to ignore these demonstrations.
If people in the West knew what was really happening to the Palestinians, they might join the activists who are trying to cripple Israeli arms manufacturers, such as Elbit Systems, which operates quite openly in Western countries, such as in the United Kingdom. As a result, we might succeed in disrupting the supply of drones and other weapons used to massacre the people of Palestine and Lebanon.
Instead of thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands might be willing to hold up banners in the United Kingdom protesting against genocide, only to be arrested as „supporters of terrorism,” overburdening the prison system and making a mockery of Britain’s so-called „justice” system.
Instead of being dulled by ignorance, if more Westerners were armed with knowledge, they could board ships, assembling a fleet that the Western media would be unable to ignore. But most importantly, if they understood the true context—if Israel’s decades-long pattern of killing, raping, and expelling Palestinians were known— Western public opinion might realize that their political and media elites are not moral actors. They do not represent the values of a superior civilization. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.
They are frauds. Or, to be more precise, they operate within political and financial structures that make it impossible to speak truths that would undermine the Western power system, which enriches a tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the fossil fuel industry’s enormous profits.
This system of power drives some Palestinians to an early grave, while others are sent to concentration camps, into exile, or into poverty.
Meanwhile, here in the West, it is driving us into prisons without physical walls—prisons of either ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and helplessness.
In any case, just like Soldier No. 1, we find our humanity withering away. Our hearts have either grown hard or been broken. The challenge we face is the same as that faced by the Palestinians: to find a way out of our confinement.
