The Israeli forces veteran group has said that merely tying shoelaces in Gaza and the West Bank is enough to shoot a person dead under the Israeli military rules of engagement.
They said the same shoot-to-kill protocols have been imported to the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military’s veteran advocacy group, Breaking the Silence, published the report of a conversation with an anonymous captain in the Israeli military who said Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank had been permitted to shoot anyone thought to be “messing with the ground.”
This means even if someone is tying the shoelaces, they are likely to get killed under the IDF protocols.
The captain said that specific phrase was “code,” first used in Gaza and initially intended to describe Palestinians suspected of planting explosives.
However, he said that the term was continuously used to justify shooting Palestinians who might be otherwise going about their daily business.
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“Think of yourself as a civilian: You mess with the ground to tie your shoelaces, pick something up, throw away garbage; you might be looking for something; you might be picking a flower,” the captain said.
“(But in Gaza), messing with the ground is a code name for planting an explosive device, always.”
In a detailed post on X, the group wrote, “You don’t know that he’s planting an explosive device. It could be a civilian, in varying percentages."
"And the numbers that Daniel Hagari (IDF Spokesperson) gives the public when he says, 'We killed X number of terrorists,' or when Netanyahu gives a speech in Congress and says, 'In Rafah, we killed 1,203 people and not one innocent civilian'—it’s total bullshit because we don’t know.”
The group admitted that they had no mechanism to distinguish between civilians and combatants.
"That’s the truth; we just don’t know." So you blame it on this mechanism of incrimination? "Yes. Those 1,203 people they’re talking about, who were killed in Rafah, we simply don’t know."
It is presenting a non-complex reality when the reality is really super-super complex. “If you are a Gazan and you bend down to do something on the ground, is there a reasonable chance that you are incriminating yourself? Yes,” they said.
“I think about it a lot, about, like, if my life were filmed from a drone, what would look suspicious? Especially if you’re looking at it through this prism of incriminating people because you’re looking for targets; you’re looking for it. Putting a hand in a bag,” they said.
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