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Israeli Intelligence Corps

Good morning, today we will learn Arabic verbs.

It is a very prestigious programme.

You work on a computer?

Yes.

In training, you learn how to plan airstrikes.

OK.

The system contains all the air force’s targets.

Is there a building in Gaza whose destruction you planned?

Um...

I definitely took part in planning the destruction of buildings.

Do you remember how many?

Um...

No.

Let me fix the chair for you.

You know this is complicated for me.

Yeah?

If I don’t hide my identity

Israel will put me in jail for what I will expose.

But people won’t disturb us on a rooftop.

Yes.

You can see the city, but the city can’t see you.

I'm in front of the screen.

It looks like this.

A few buildings.

This is the building I need to bomb.

First of all, I get its dimensions.

This is 20 metres.

This is 15 metres.

Then I confirm how many floors there are.

- How do you know? - Generally by counting windows,

or by the height of the building.

A standard floor in Gaza is about three metres tall.

Like this...

We understood a Hamas operative was on the sixth floor.

But intelligence estimated there were also four civilians on that floor,

so the NAZA of that floor was four.

Four NAZA.

What is NAZA?

Collateral damage. The number of civilians who will die from a strike.

We say 15 NAZA. We don’t say 15 people will be killed,

and certainly not that 15 children and women will be killed.

We say 15 NAZA.

Do you know what the NAZA numbers were?

Um...

I don’t remember them.

Do you know someone who knows and would agree to talk to me?

I really want to understand.

Um...

Yes, and I don’t think he’s interested in discussing it.

I’m also trying to understand...

Oy.

Is there a shelter here?

These are rockets launched from Gaza.

This is the sky over Gaza, and this is the sky over Tel Aviv.

When you first join the intelligence unit

and you discover the information,

you understand there are two simultaneous realities:

one that’s visible and one that’s invisible.

I remember being taught in training that all Palestinians know

they’re constantly being surveilled.

Every phone conversation, every text message, the location of every phone.

I’m responsible for how intelligence is collected.

We have the technological tools...

Should I keep talking despite the planes?

You feel a bit like god because you hear everything they say.

We’ve gathered here to open a new phone centre in Gaza.

Thank you, officer, for connecting our village to the outside world with telephones.

Let’s call the head of Gaza’s municipality.

Can you hear me well?

I just hope they didn’t create a ‘special’ line for us.

After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967

Palestinians weren’t allowed to create their own infrastructure.

In order to produce intelligence,

we need to know everything about how the system works.

The best way to do that is to build it ourselves.

We control them.

We thought, the more we knew, the more we were in control.

And then October 7th happened.

At our base everyone asked the same thing:

What happened?

In those first few days the hours felt like eternity

as Hamas’s brutality became clear.

Some 1,200 Israelis were murdered, including 900 civilians.

- I need help. They kidnapped my dad to Gaza. - How old are you, Ella?

Hamas committed a horrific massacre against us.

An atrocity.

And...

I wanted to deal with it by doing something that could help.

And the only way I could help was by doing my military role.

These unbelievable images will stay with the entire nation for years.

Our enemy murders women and children in their houses,

in their bedrooms.

At the start we didn’t know the casualty numbers,

how many were killed at the Nova party.

Once I understood the scale, annihilating Hamas sounded

like an amazing idea.

Let’s finish this.

Let’s go in, annihilate, and go out.

I focused on senior leaders in Hamas’s military wing.

They outsmarted us.

We were very angry.

After October 7th everyone kept saying:

there are no innocent people in Gaza.

This notion spread throughout the army

and suddenly we’re toppling entire buildings.

It wasn’t even an issue.

Every hour, we’ll take down ten skyscrapers in Gaza until you return our hostages.

At the start of the war we bombed everything.

NAZA wasn’t an issue.

We just took down targets.

We wanted to topple down buildings.

We said: we need to erase Gaza.

That was how we felt on that day.

Whatever we do, they deserve it.

Gaza became like a factory, a factory of targets.

There were thousands of assassination strikes.

Thousands.

It was done on a mass scale, efficiently, like in a factory.

I was on a data science team that used artificial intelligence to mark targets.

In the past, an intelligence officer did the hard work.

Today, a computer system collects the data.

- What does the system do? - It recommends targets.

But which targets?

Real-time targets.

Meaning what?

Human targets.

Human beings.

Our goal was to characterise

how a Hamas operative behaves.

How the phone of a Hamas operative behaves.

Then to use artificial intelligence

to find more phones of Hamas operatives.

- Finding them... - Among the general population.

So AI finds phones in Gaza that behave similarly...

to a Hamas phone, yes.

This is a perfect task for machine learning.

To create a profile and check if there’s a match: yes or no.

It’s a simple task.

OK.

Is it a cat or a dog?

Does it have the characteristics of a cat or a dog?

That was Lavender.

Intelligence officers call this a score sheet.

Different parameters increase your score.

Say you spoke on the phone with some Hamas members - you get two points.

If someone saved you on their phone as ‘Ahmed Hamas’, you get more points.

You apply the system to the entire population of Gaza, all two million people.

Every 30 minutes or so, I’d get an alert

with Hamas members who can be bombed.

We could topple a building with some amount of NAZA

for a junior operative with no real influence.

They were so junior that we didn’t even know who they were.

Did it ever happen that someone was killed after being marked by Lavender...

But it turned out they weren’t in Hamas?

Yes, for sure.

There’s no doubt.

The owners of a bakery near a Hamas training compound

will have lots of links to Hamas members.

- How many people did Lavender mark? - Tens of thousands, about 60-70 thousand.

- 60-70 thousand people? - No, no, phone numbers.

Every such phone that we located, we could bomb.

The system’s parameters are so complex that it’s hard to know what they are.

It made a lot of mistakes.

It once marked an 80-year-old man or an old woman.

They bombed her house with her entire family in it.

And this bothered the intelligence community on a professional level.

The intelligence officer said he was willing to risk being wrong 15% of the time.

Lavender knows 85% of the time if a phone belongs to a Hamas operative.

So at least 15% weren’t Hamas operatives?

Yes.

They were knowingly marked with 20 NAZA.

With everyone at home.

Yes.

Having AI decide who lives and who dies

is better than leaving the decision to someone

whose friend was killed by Hamas last week.

So you developed the algorithms for these things?

Not on my own. A few people.

It caused mass killing on a huge scale.

Ironically, many people patted my back for it.

They said: ‘Be proud.

Look how many targets were bombed because of what you did.’

But inside I felt uncomfortable

responding positively. I didn’t know how to deal with it.

How many people do you think were killed because of what you developed?

More than hundreds, if not thousands.

I don’t know how many exactly.

But masses of people.

Look...

The person who did the killing is the person who dropped the bomb.

The analyst marked the target and the fire officer decided on the firing policy.

But you created the tool.

Yes.

That...

That made it possible to bomb on a mass scale.

I am just a small cog.

A small cog, but still, you made a tool which killed hundreds...

It made it possible.

And if I hadn’t been there, someone else would have done it.

The question was: what’s the best way to kill them?

There were two options.

My department was asked:

What should we do? Strike at night at home?

On all their children and wives?

Or bomb them when they’re assembling on the ground?

I had some say in my department.

They asked everyone in the room, including me.

And...

The consensus was that we should bomb at night

because the odds of success were higher.

We did this ‘night location’ project to identify where everybody in Gaza lives.

- Everyone? - Everyone who has a phone.

When you go to sleep and you put your phone near the bed, and it’s there all night,

every so often it transmits a signal.

And people usually sleep in their homes,

so when we collect all the location signals from every night over six months

and put it all together, we get to the home locations.

This mapped out the locations of operatives,

not while they’re in combat but when they go home?

It’s because we decided to cast a wide net,

to generate as many targets as possible.

The goal was quantity not quality.

That’s what led us to private homes.

What’s the easiest target to locate? Private homes.

We have much more data about them.

Private homes have all these civilian elements, bills and an address.

People who aren’t the target are there, like his family.

There are only so many military sites in Gaza, hundreds?

But there are lots of private homes.

There are 40,000 operatives, so that’s nearly 40,000 homes.

The basic unit is the home.

IDF systems are built on homes.

There is a serial number for every home.

- For every home in Gaza? - Yes.

- Is that every floor, or every building? - Every building.

Every building.

If you want to refer to a floor, you just specify:

building 6351, floor 7.

We find them in their homes.

In their family’s home, or the home of a lover.

‘Where's Daddy’ is a mechanism alerting us when the operative comes home.

We’d spy on the family

to learn when the father gets home.

I hack into the phone of a 12-year-old girl.

If a girl calls her mum,

‘Mummy,’ she says, ‘when are you returning home?

Daddy just came back.’

That’s a message that would alert the system.

Because it contains the words ‘return’ and ‘daddy’.

We’re doing everything to avoid harming civilians

while our enemy hides behind civilians, using them as human shields.

Hamas uses human shields in some cases

but the human shield claim about private houses is absurd. It’s just not true.

We bomb them in houses because that’s how we find them.

It’s not like the IDF thinks someone is threatening them from the house.

They just come home to sleep. That’s where we catch them.

- Because it’s easy? - Yes.

- Because their son said: ‘Daddy is home.’ - Yes.

It’s easy. It’s much easier.

And when you spy on the 12-year-old girl who says: ‘Daddy, you’re home.’

- You kill her, too? - Yes, that’s right.

You hack her phone and then kill her.

We can activate every sensor in the phone and use it to our advantage.

That includes recording you, photographing you.

We would use the phones of family members to hear them in their home before bombing it.

I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life.

'I heard the target. We can bomb.' This made it more professional.

What did you hear inside the homes?

I just heard normal life.

It could be TV, a prayer.

A man talking with his wife at night.

A baby crying in the background.

How many such buildings were you involved in taking down?

- Hundreds. - Hundreds?

Yes.

How could you bomb when you heard a baby crying inside?

So...

the general atmosphere is...

hatred.

You understand that the goal is to destroy.

Powerful explosions were felt across the country from IDF operations in Gaza City.

I remember I got to a shift, and the officer in charge said:

‘We marked all the Hamas company commanders.’

All of their homes.

I worked on one guy whose home had 13 NAZA.

I hear his kid watching TV,

but what can I do about it?

And the kid is just 1 NAZA. You’re allowed to kill 13.

Yes.

An entire family was there.

So we bombed their homes at night.

At the same time.

Then there’s an assessment

to see if they were there or not.

It turned out none of them were killed. Only their families were killed.

The commanders weren’t home. They were fighting.

It wasn’t surprising.

That’s it.

Only women and children.

It was like...

It didn’t work.

Israel has escalated its aerial attacks in Gaza, dropping hundreds of tonnes...

In order to identify a target’s home,

and to calculate the best angle to bomb it from,

I looked at pictures in his phone,

assuming it would have pictures of his house.

He had a selfie with his two daughters smiling on his balcony,

a balcony like the one over there. They sat outside.

He took a selfie like this. They’re smiling, he’s smiling.

The IDF bombed, but it turned out that

he already left his apartment, and only forgot his phone there.

When the IDF got approval to bomb, he was already gone.

The two girls were in the apartment.

This incident scarred me because I saw their pictures in his phone.

I saw that these were little girls, between three and six years old.

I remember I heard a woman crying and screaming on the phone

that her daughter’s body was burning.

The daughter was still alive.

She was begging someone to come save her.

Did the two little girls die?

Yes. Yes.

Do you know what happened to the father?

No.

It’s likely he died eventually.

If they want him dead, he dies.

Most of the time that’s how it works.

I remember the stress.

I remember the phone call, on speaker. It was the air force.

They asked me: ‘8200, do we have approval to bomb?’

We got confused with our systems, we were really stressed

and we couldn’t find the GPS coordinates we needed.

It was already 8:06.

The air force wanted to go at 8:00.

Finally we found it and gave approval. They bombed, and the next day

we discovered the target and his whole family were killed in their home.

Did you need to prove weapons were produced in the house?

No, of course not.

We knew weapons were not produced in the house. It was his house, his family’s house.

He stopped being an operative a long time ago.

But they...

They decided to kill him.

- How many children died? - Just a few. Not dozens.

Children of a family. Maybe 3, 4... 6.

As for the numbers: 2,000 targets attacked so far.

You click on a big ‘play’ button

and the NAZA interface pops up.

- Sketch it please. - The interface?

Yes.

This is the screen.

This is a map of the neighbourhood.

I get a full map of every building in Gaza.

I can click on a house and see how many people will be hurt when I bomb it.

- You have this for all of Gaza, right? - Yes.

You see it like this: Apartment 6, floor 5,

Ahmed and his family will die.

It shows how many kids he has, his wife.

Some strikes killed 20, 30, even 300 people.

Does the NAZA distinguish between children and adults?

No.

No distinction.

A baby is 1 NAZA?

Yes.

Yes.

I never made any distinctions.

What’s the highest number you remember for one airstrike?

I don’t know how many were actually killed because it was never assessed,

but there was approval once to kill 500

for one human target.

500 people, that’s a small Israeli town.

Yes.

It’s like a video game, we would always say.

- You’d say that? - Yes. The targets were like a video game.

Because everything is done remotely.

I remember strikes with 200 NAZA.

He was senior. We didn’t know where he was staying.

So we’d bomb everywhere we suspected he might pass through.

Large radiuses, too.

Let’s say, from where we’re sitting, all the way to that building.

We’d bomb it all. An entire neighbourhood.

At one point, we could bomb everyone listed in Lavender with 20 collateral damage.

20 NAZA.

20 NAZA became a benchmark.

We’d take down lower ranks in Hamas without a second thought.

Those were the official orders.

But if you can kill 20 people per member,

and there are tens of thousands of members...

You end up with all of Gaza, yes.

That’s true.

I’m not really sure what to do with this realisation.

Yes, you’re right.

That’s why at some point I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stay there.

I can’t take part in this.

- But you did. - What?

- You already took part. - Yes.

Citizens of Israel!

We obliterated the enemy from the air.

This will be a victory of good over evil,

of light over darkness.

During training, they showed us a film called Eye in the Sky.

There’s a strike cell, which is what I did in the army.

Is that a kid? Zoom in.

They really tried to convince us it was moral.

I told myself that, too.

When I’d attack someone and see he was injured but alive,

I would usually drop another bomb on him.

I don’t know if I was ever happy I killed someone.

There aren’t really Arab haters in my unit.

It’s an elitist unit, a lot of people from Tel Aviv.

There aren’t really Arab haters, or extreme dehumanisation.

But the people you’re describing,

who we’re also interviewing,

that you say don’t hate Arabs,

are the Israelis who killed the most Arabs

in the last two years.

Yes.

All I can say is that we’re completing the mission.

That’s the mission.

I would come to the headquarters to plan strikes.

On my breaksk I would go out for lunch in Tel Aviv and come back.

There were strikes I’d carry out and then I’d go out with friends.

226 days - we’re all waiting for you

Bring them home - right now!

Tel Aviv

Intelligence officers are

Israel’s social elite.

We’re considered leftists, from Tel Aviv, from the upper middle-class.

It’s a highly desirable unit.

In the military they call us the ‘tip of the spear’.

This is the spot.

Brothers!

We place here the founding stone for the city of Tel Aviv.

‘The day will come and this stone will cry out from the wall.’

If you will it, it is no dream.

At one point the army decided to flatten entire areas.

We’d go house by house. Everything. Until nothing was left.

- My job was to document it all. - You’re documenting the destruction?

Yes, I mark on a map what’s still standing, what’s not.

I’m not on the ground. I have drone footage broadcast to me.

Destroying houses for the sake of destruction was done on a daily basis.

Hundreds of houses. Strip by strip.

Inside my unit the destruction was viewed as strategic.

The policy is to destroy everything as quickly as possible,

before we lose international legitimacy.

As much as possible.

We ‘cleaned’ it of buildings.

You wouldn’t believe there was ever civilisation there.

It looks clean.

One year of war.

367 days and nights

since the horrors of October 7th,

101 hostages, dead and alive, are still held by Hamas.

The IDF is flattening, there’s no other word for it,

so people there don’t have a place to come back to.

I sat in meetings with senior officials

talking about moving the whole population from northern Gaza to the south,

with no intention of allowing them to return.

The idea was maximum pressure to make them all get out of there.

Didn’t matter how.

To create pressure?

Yes. Military pressure.

We would burn every house we entered.

Every house. It didn’t matter which.

We wanted to make sure they wouldn’t return.

How do you burn a house?

You can pour gas and set it on fire.

You could use olive oil left in the fridge.

You could put couch pillows in the middle of the room and set them on fire.

The wool is very flammable.

We became experts in burning houses.

I remember the commander told me: ‘We broke a record today.

We burned a house down in eight minutes.’

Most of the people we spoke to who were in intelligence or administrative positions,

- weren’t inside Gaza like you. - You have both kinds.

It’s a small command post inside Gaza,

working with units outside.

Gaza’s Rimal neighbourhood

looked like Tel Aviv. It had tall glass buildings,

hotels on the beach, resorts.

When I was there, I looked around;

it looked like a battlefield in a movie.

We’d go into houses and see family photo albums,

school notebooks.

We erased history.

Entire families were erased in a bombing

but we burned what they left behind.

I have this neighbourhood.

I divide it into many small squares.

The system shows me that

in this square, many people had evacuated.

So this area has 25% of its original residents.

Here, only a small number evacuated, so it’s 50%.

Here, barely anyone evacuated,

so it’s 75%.

- 75% are left? - Yes.

All of Gaza is mapped out like this.

The map had...

this was green, this yellow, and this red.

Whatever was 100% was white.

In the south you had purple - 300%.

Yes.

- Because everyone was going south? - Yes.

This was the route.

We were instructed

to bomb buildings in areas where 75% had evacuated, according to the algorithm,

and 25% were still present.

Each building was supposed to take five to ten minutes at most.

So you’re bombing buildings

without...

The building needs to disappear.

And you don’t know...

I don’t know who’s left or what happens after.

And what’s the thinking? We told people to leave, whoever stays it’s their problem?

Yes.

What about people who can’t evacuate?

Disabled people, people afraid of getting attacked if they move?

Good luck to them.

This...

- These are buildings? - Yes.

- That you see from above? - Yes.

Each building had a garden.

There were walking paths here.

But...

How many people lived in those buildings?

So, if I remember correctly,

each one had...

four floors?

It looked like this, more or less.

four floors, divided into two.

Stairs and an elevator.

An entry door inside.

So it was about eight apartments per building.

Eight apartments, say five people in each, multiplied by how many buildings?

Let’s say eight, but there were actually more.

That gets you to...

320.

- You understand? - Yes.

320, even if it’s only 25% of that.

You assumed 25% remained because the map had a green square?

Yes.

Exactly.

So you’re left with 80 dead.

Which is a lot.

And 80 is just one neighbourhood.

We worked on five to ten more.

And what was bombed from this neighbourhood?

Everything.

So you’re destroying neighbourhoods.

- Do you think they’re trying to go back home? - Yes.

You're inside what used to be their neighbourhood.

Of course they’re trying to return.

There wasn’t a single day without someone getting killed.

There’s an imaginary line, and we decided that beyond it, it’s our zone.

How is a Gazan supposed to know where our zone begins?

He’ll learn the hard way.

You expect them to learn it through blood.

That’s the only way for them to learn. We’re not handing out fliers

or marking the line.

That means that anyone who enters the zone

needs to die.

I stayed back, using military surveillance tools.

You see people bending down to pick up clothes from the ruins of a house.

You see that’s what they’re doing.

No soldier was at risk.

They killed them.

- How many people like that did your soldiers kill? - 140.

No one was ever armed.

We counted them as terrorists.

Whoever you decided to kill was considered a terrorist.

There was a boy...

who entered our zone.

He didn’t do anything.

I saw him from the camera.

I don’t know why he entered.

He wasn’t doing anything.

That’s it. They bombed him.

- From the drone? - Yes.

We didn’t collect the bodies.

They just stay there?

The dogs eat them.

Yes.

Look, I saw it from the cameras.

You watched?

I couldn’t stand watching a dog eating a body.

But people around me watched dogs eating bodies.

Did you consider telling them not to fire?

You’re not allowed to say that.

It’s not your role.

What’s your role?

My role is technical.

I’m not supposed to express any moral or principled position.

My role is entirely technical.

Every day, drones were used to kill people who walked in our zone.

They weren’t people you identified as armed?

Never. Forget the word ‘armed’, it’s not relevant.

I saw armed people once.

So, who were the dozens of people you all killed there?

- Hundreds. - Hundreds.

I saw with my own eyes little kids standing surrounded by bodies.

Three bodies.

Scattered across the area.

Little kids standing there, I’ll never forget it. I saw them from the drone.

- Who were those bodies? - Bodies. People we killed when we got there.

Gaza is filled with bodies.

Bodies everywhere. I saw mass graves.

Mass graves flooded by rain and tonnes of bodies.

It’s not a grave, it’s a pit, with bodies piled inside.

There are bodies everywhere. You walk around in Gaza, you see bodies.

You add to the bodies.

The bodies are the most graphic thing you see in Gaza.

You’re constantly adding new bodies.

Why kill them?

I don’t know.

For months, Israel is considering such a plan to encourage migration from Gaza.

We decided that starting this morning, we will prevent all goods from entering Gaza.

We were told that this is the only way to ‘clean’ northern Gaza of its population.

If there are no living conditions there, they’ll move to where there are.

They need an incentive to leave their homes.

So, there won’t be any food in the north, only in the south?

Yes.

It was like a game.

The Gazans have to walk on the bridge, and if they stepped off it, they were shot.

People walked on the bridge to reach the food distribution site.

And there was a valley people would run through to get the food faster.

Snipers killed them.

It was funny; the snipers said they’d run so fast they couldn’t get to them.

- You see it on a screen? - Yes.

They’re just running towards food. They were afraid it would run out.

So every time...

A person would step out of the line to the food distribution site...

- They’d be killed. - Yes. They’d be shot.

You couldn’t get everyone, like I said.

Those were the rules of engagement.

Are you not describing mass murder?

I don’t...

I don’t know how many people died.

I saw it on the screen, one falls down, two...

I didn’t know how many people died, but, yes.

They were people...

Some days 16 died. Other days, 20.

Those were the numbers.

Sometimes six.

Like this. They’d just fall.

On their faces.

There’s momentum from the running, so they’d fall like this.

Like this.

The snipers are far away.

Yes.

The bodies would pile up.

- One on top of the other? - Yes.

- And the food is here? - Yes.

Yes.

Every morning people would...

Food is getting distributed.

Three separate teams of soldiers would massacre the population.

I would follow with the camera, which caught everything.

I saw an insane… I saw an insane amount of people running towards food.

They looked like a swarm of ants rushing towards food.

My team would kill one or two.

- At the food sites? - Yes, my team would kill one or two.

Sometimes a lot more than that.

Sometimes a lot more.

I’d rather not give numbers but sometimes they were in the double digits.

- In one day? - In one hour.

What are the people shooting telling themselves?

That they aren’t allowed to walk there, and if they walk there, we’re allowed to kill them.

The light is out.

Believe me, I’m sparing you a lot of things.

I know I should tell you, but there are things I can’t say.

I was the best of the best.

I worked so hard to get to the unit I served in.

So few people are accepted into my unit, you wouldn’t believe how few.

Other Israelis dream of serving where I served.

So why didn’t anyone stand up?

I grew up with an Israeli perspective. I visited Poland with my school.

I asked myself how Germans could live with themselves, with what they had inside them.

I thought they were just pure evil.

But today I understand it.

I understand how a man can blow a place up

and go home to his degree in clinical psychology.

I don’t know what to say.

I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does that mean I am?

We need to follow those rules to survive.

We’re soldiers.

What do you mean survive? You’re describing snipers killing hungry people running toward food.

Yes.

- Snipers who are far away. - Correct.

How is that related to your survival?

When you fight an enemy...

- But are those people your enemy? - Yes.

Those hungry people?

I’m not ashamed to say yes.

I don’t think I’m saying something out of nowhere.

If people constantly talk about erasing Gaza,

in the end soldiers will kill innocent people.

When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza’, what do you mean if not executing people?

So that’s how we do it;

by making sure they can't stand up in any way.

We suffocate them.

Think about it, it makes sense.

They don't follow the rules. They know the rules.

- So whoever breaks a rule, dies. - Yes.

The sense in Israeli society is that that’s what we should do.

Only together we will win!

Do you think it’s a genocide?

Yes.

Completely.

Are you saying that you participated in a genocide?

Yes.

I believe so.

I think that even if you say it’s NAZA,

it’s intentional killing.

It’s intentional.

We can’t say we didn’t intend to kill him. He was there and we intended to kill him.

We have to describe things as they really are.

We intended to kill those children.

Was there a moment that changed you, a turning point?

Sadly I had no such moments.

Why do you say sadly?

Because I’m disappointed I took part in that system, and...

I didn’t doubt it or oppose it when I was inside.

It’s really, really like your hormones are going crazy.

You aren’t sleeping and you’re having fun.

It’s so insanely fun.

- Fun? Even though it’s war? - Totally.

People talk about how they’d enjoy escalations.

It’s fun, it’s mission-driven.

You complete missions, and you’re sharp, and there’s a sense of meaning. It’s fun.

It’s really enjoyable.

Which moments did you most enjoy?

Strikes that were successful were fun.

You enjoy completing your mission.

Do you think about the people in the building that was bombed?

Zero.

Not at all. I’d move on to the next mission.

Because you don’t see them as humans?

No, because we just wouldn’t talk about those things.

I remember there was talk of psychologists possibly coming to talk to us about strikes,

but there was no need.

There was just no need.

We were fully in it.

How many people do you think were killed from strikes you were involved with?

Several thousand.

- And not one person around you raised doubts? - Not even one.

Not even one.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Memorial Ceremony

Tel Aviv Cinematheque

A tribute to Claude Lanzmann

80 years after the Holocaust,

the international bodies created to prevent another Holocaust

are considering denying the Jewish state the right to protect itself.

International arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The charges are among the gravest in international law.

Using starvation as a weapon of war - a war crime.

Impeding humanitarian aid and medical treatment - a war crime.

Murder and persecution of civilians - a crime against humanity.

Intentional attacks on civilians - a war crime.

The more war crimes we committed, the more pressure there was.

We are a political department,

whose role is first and foremost political.

What we do allows all of the other departments to function.

We are the department above all the departments.

Palestinians who were harmed by the actions of the IDF

and wanted to appeal to the international community to seek justice for relatives who were hurt

were seen by the security establishment as a security threat.

Meaning, we treated them like a security threat.

- Did you spy on victims of war crimes? - Yes.

We would thwart their petition to The Hague,

mainly by finding dirt on petitioners.

We’d look for people having affairs outside their marriage,

people in homosexual relationships.

Do you know of cases at The Hague that were pulled because of things you took part in?

Definitely.

In our department, all Palestinian diplomatic activity is seen as a security threat.

What do you monitor? What is ‘political intelligence’?

Any connections between Palestinians and international officials.

Some officers in our department don’t even know Arabic.

Their only job is to listen to phone calls in English.

They’d call us Bibi’s department.

We collected intelligence that went to the prime minister.

Our goals were defined clearly;

we were briefed on what the prime minister was interested in.

The idea was for Israel to operate without external pressure.

Like, anything to help Israel’s international legitimacy to continue the war.

Bibi’s ultimate goal is to prevent a Palestinian state.

We called it peace thwarting.

Some officers thwart terrorism, and others thwart peace.

On the one hand, we make sure there’s no political horizon.

On the other hand, we want to preserve normal life in Israel.

One Friday evening

I waited for a guy to say he is home.

We focused on civilians.

There were about five families inside his home.

His kids and his brother’s kids were there.

Young.

I don’t know their exact age.

Toddlers. Under ten.

He also had a teenage daughter, and some very young children.

You worked assuming you will kill everyone in the house?

Yes.

I heard their voices,

and their relatives’ voices.

I heard them talking and crying.

Not just crying,

screaming.

I heard him trying to pull them from underneath the rubble.

Phone call, phone call.

Phone call.

I listen to calls in this system.

- What is the system called? - Homeland.

Homeland.

I also spied on his family.

So the next day, I heard his sisters describing what had happened.

‘My mother and the kids died.’

I remember they were bombed, and I went outside.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette with the officer in charge of targets.

I asked him: ‘What do you...

What do you make of all of this?’

He said: ‘You have to trust the system.’

I mean...

If I don’t trust the system, then...

everything will fall apart.

So I trust the system and I do my job as part of the system.

Oh my god.

Come here, bring him.

My love!

I can’t hear you, my love.

I can’t hear you, my love.

Salma!

Salma!

Salma, my love!

Sa’id!

Sa’id!

Sa’id!

Sa’id!

It’s daddy.

Sa’id is his youngest son.

It’s daddy.

May he rest in peace.

It’s daddy.

Sa’id!

Sa’id!

It’s daddy.

Sa’id!

Didn’t I tell you to look after your sister?

Didn’t I tell you to look after your sister?

Didn’t I tell you to look after your sister?

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