Protesters gathered in May at the Shaar Hanegev junction near the Gaza border, holding photos both of Israeli hostages and of children killed in strikes in the enclave. Photo / Amit Elkayam, The New York Times
After a long silence, prominent Israelis and activists are increasingly raising alarms about potential war crimes being carried out by the government.
Abhorrence of Israel’s devastating war in the Gaza Strip has resonated for months in capitals and in university campuses abroad. Now, a growing number of Israelis are speaking out against what they describe as atrocities carried out in their name in the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli protesters are holding aloft portraits of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Academics and authors, politicians and retired military leaders are accusing the Israeli Government of indiscriminate killing and war crimes.
In the early months of the war, the vast majority of Israelis considered the offensive a just and necessary response to the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, even if they were sceptical that the Government’s long-term goal of eliminating Hamas was attainable, opinion polls showed.
Despite that, a majority of Israelis have long wanted a deal that would end the war in exchange for the release of all the hostages still held in Gaza and relieve soldiers exhausted by months of deadly conflict, according to the polls.
But in recent months, a small but increasingly vocal minority has made anguished calls to end the war on moral grounds, even if many Israelis aren’t even aware such protests are even happening. Many of the protesters may have supported Israel’s right to self-defence after the Hamas attack, but many now say it has gone way too far and contravenes their values.
“We are on the edge of the abyss,” said Tamar Parush, 56, a lecturer in sociology at Sapir College in southern Israel, speaking at a recent anti-war protest attended by hundreds of Israelis at the busy Shaar Hanegev junction near the border with Gaza.
“Revenge is not a policy,” she said, adding: “We could have fought a smarter war.”
At first, such voices of internal dissent were raised only on the fringes of Israeli society.
About 1200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Palestinian assailants during the October attack, making it the deadliest day in Israel’s history, and about 250 others were taken hostage. Many Israelis held Hamas solely responsible for the subsequent suffering in Gaza and said they felt little sympathy for civilians there.
About 60,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials, whose tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but includes more than 10,000 children. The war has displaced most of the 2 million residents of Gaza several times and brought the territory to the brink of famine. More than 80 children have died from starvation and malnutrition, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5% of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
About three-quarters of Israeli Jews thought that Israel’s military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.
But the institute said that over time it had found a slight increase in the share of Israeli Jews who thought the suffering should be taken into account to a large extent and a mirroring moderate decline in those who said they were unconcerned.
That increase is reflected in the growing discomfort and activism in Israel’s liberal camp.
“There has been a discernible shift in the discourse,” said Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been documenting the war and believes that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – an accusation vehemently rejected by the Israeli Government.
“There is still a crisis in the peace camp over what can and can’t be said, but people are speaking out more,” Mordechai added.
He was speaking in late May at the Hebrew University campus, where dozens of students and faculty members held a half-hour silent vigil carrying portraits of children killed in Gaza. Simultaneous protests were taking place at Tel Aviv University and other campuses.
Some prominent Israelis have also raised alarms. Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister, decried what he called the “cruel and criminal killing of civilians” and the starvation of Gaza as a Government policy. Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief and Defence Minister, has warned for months of ethnic cleansing. Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the military and leader of the Democrats, a left-leaning opposition party, caused a furore when he said the Government was killing babies “as a hobby”.
The Israeli Government denies committing war crimes in Gaza, though the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s military insists that it acts in line with international law, saying it takes steps to minimise civilian casualties and is fighting a complex campaign against an enemy that hides among the population and exploits civilian infrastructure.
One inflection point came about a year into the war, Mordechai said, when reports emerged of an Israeli plan to move all the residents of northern Gaza to the south. The Government did not officially adopt the plan, proposed by commanders in the reserves, but critics said that elements of it were quietly under way.
Then this year, in mid-March, Israel ended a two-month ceasefire and resumed fighting in a decision that many Israelis believed was primarily politically motivated, to help Netanyahu keep his far-right coalition partners from bringing down his Government. A New York Times investigation found that Netanyahu had acted to prolong and expand the war, allowing Israel to defeat and weaken more of its enemies but also deferring an internal political reckoning.
Hundreds of reservists and retired officers in Israel’s air force signed an open letter in April urging the Israeli Government to agree to a deal with Hamas to return hostages. “The continuation of the war doesn’t advance any of the declared goals of the war, and will bring about the deaths of the hostages, of IDF soldiers and innocent civilians,” the letter stated, using an abbreviation to refer to the Israeli military. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
About 140,000 Israelis from various professional fields have signed similar letters, according to Standing Together, a grassroots organisation of Jewish and Arab Israelis that has spearheaded anti-war protests and advocates peace and equality.
Thousands of Israelis packed the main conference centre in Jerusalem in May for a “People’s Peace Summit” organised by a coalition of more than 50 local peace and social justice organisations. It began with a minute’s silence for all the victims of the war – Palestinians and Israelis, civilians and soldiers.
Since then, more than 1300 university faculty members have signed an open letter decrying what they called a “horrible litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing”.
“We have been silent for too long,” the letter stated, adding, “It is our duty to stop the slaughter.”
Bestselling Israeli authors David Grossman, Zeruya Shalev and Dorit Rabinyan were among scores of writers who signed another letter expressing “shock” over Israel’s actions in Gaza. In the days after the October 2023 attack, Rabinyan had said that her compassion for the suffering on the other side was “paralysed”.
The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. While the left-wing Haaretz newspaper has covered the suffering, a popular right-wing television station, Channel 14, regularly provides a platform for people calling for even harsher action against Gaza’s civilians.
In July, Standing Together activists have been demonstrating outside the studios of the main Israeli television channels to press local journalists to report on the dire hunger situation in Gaza.
“People debate starving or deporting Gaza’s residents on television as if these are legitimate options,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “But a different voice is trying to penetrate the almost unified public discourse,” he added.
Criticising soldiers’ conduct is a sensitive matter in a country where most Jewish 18-year-olds are conscripted, and many Israelis are loath to accuse an army made up of their own relatives or friends of war crimes.
Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv City Council member and a founder of Standing Together, said for that reason the group was careful to criticise the Government, not the soldiers.
“This is a war of destruction,” he said at the protest near the Gaza border, adding: “The Gazans are our neighbours.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Isabel Kershner
Photographs by: Amit Elkayam, Saher Alghorra
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