The Israeli army’s obsession with killing and body count in Gaza
Once the body count has become the metric used, while the army’s forces shuffle aimlessly through Gaza and become a moving target for Hamas guerrillas, it is only natural that an obsession with killing will develop. ■ The “industrialisation of precise annihilation” where soldiers act by virtue of their organisational culture that places killing at the centre of military activity, independent of the question of what target it serves and what collateral damage it causes.
By Yagil Levy • Translated by Sol Salbe
The killing of seven employees of the World Central Kitchen humanitarian organisation in the Gaza Strip can be explained in several ways. The military’s official explanation is that there were errors in identification and coordination as well a deviation from orders. That is, a single point of failure. That failure was exacerbated by the vague nature of, and non-compliance with, the rules of engagement, which are subject to local interpretation. Add to it the prevailing assumption that every adult male caught in the combat zone is a terrorist who should be killed. The loose finger on the trigger is further buttressed by the dehumanisation of the civilian population, which boils down to the argument that “there are no noncombatants in Gaza.”
Without dismissing these explanations, it is also appropriate to offer a different perspective. Israel set itself a goal, an uncommon goal in terms of Western armies in the post-World War II era: to annihilate Hamas’s troops. This is a necro-tactic. A tactic that places the killing of enemy combatants as the main objective of the fighting. The local architect is former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, who boasted that the army’s innovation expresses the principle of “industrialisation of precise annihilation.”
Industrialisation was reflected in the development of the Lavender Artificial Intelligence system, which framed 37,000 men as suspects in Hamas and Islamic Jihad activity, and with the help of another artificial intelligence system, The Annunciation, attacked the buildings in which they were staying. Thus, a numerical target was set for the killing of Hamas members, and in order to achieve this, a disproportionate number of civilians who were with them were allowed to be killed, which has so far led to the killing of more than 30,000 Gazans, most of them civilians. Once a numerical target was set, the body count became a central metric for evaluating the army’s achievements, particularly because of the difficulty in identifying achievements in this war that would ensure an improved security future.
Once the body count has become the metric used, while the army’s forces shuffle aimlessly through Gaza and become a moving target for Hamas guerrillas, it is only natural that an obsession with killing will develop. We saw this clearly in the operation that severely damaged Shifa Hospital. The long-term effects of the attack on the hospital were not carefully weighed against “such a large number of dead terrorists,” as the chief of staff bragged.
The industrialisation of pinpoint annihilation functioned well in the incident in which the aid convoy was hit — identifying militants followed by a “brief closure” of deadly fire, as the military boasts at other times. The obsession with killing was prominent here. Following the identification of an armed Hamas member, or possibly two, three vehicles were attacked from the air. As described in Haaretz, after hitting the first vehicle, the passengers switched to a second vehicle and then a missile was fired at it. When they transferred the wounded to a third vehicle, a missile was also fired at it.
What have we got here if not an obsession with killing? Even according to the army only one or two guntotters were involved. And furthermore, no danger was posed to the Israeli forces. They acted by virtue of their organisational culture that places killing at the centre of military activity, independent of the question of what target it serves and what collateral damage it causes. On this occasion, the collateral damage entailed effectively shutting down an aid supply channel. Any moral considerations were disregarded, because “there are no noncombatants in Gaza.” As expected in such cases, the military carried out a “cleansing ceremony” and punished those directly responsible. The ceremony marks the exception, but validates the norm forged by those who sanctified the “industrialisation of killing” and those who implemented it in the current war. They responsibility is theirs.
