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Secret US State Department documents reveal how senior Israeli figures involved in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) campaign in Gaza, Operation Swords of Iron, played key roles in IDF military doctrines justifying the use of “disproportionate force” against civilians, with the knowledge and support of senior US Government officials.
The documents show that US officials have known for over a decade that a deliberate IDF policy of using disproportionate violence against civilians could result in targeting of civilian aid convoys, but worked to conceal this, creating a climate of impunity that has led to what many UN experts consider genocide in Gaza.
As early as 2010, in the wake of Operation Cast Lead’s destruction of significant swathes of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, US officials were privately told by independent Israeli legal and human rights experts that the IDF was incapable of conducting meaningful reforms to avoid breaches of international humanitarian law and that only “international pressure” on the Israeli Government could hold the IDF’s “senior leadership accountable”.
As early as 2008, the State Department was closely monitoring how incumbent Israeli War Cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot played a crucial role in enshrining the controversial ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ – which calls for the use of disproportionate mass killing of civilians – into core Israeli military strategy, Byline Times can exclusively reveal.
The doctrine was implemented with devastating consequences in Operation Cast Lead, whose war crimes were documented by the UN inquiry led by Justice Richard Goldstone. The inquiry found that Israel committed actions “amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity”. Yet in 2009, the Obama administration worked secretly with senior Israeli military leaders – including current Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – to “refute” Goldstone’s findings.
US officials advised the IDF to use internal inquiries and reviews as a way to undermine the report despite receiving credible information from independent experts in Israel vindicating Goldstone’s main criticisms of Israeli policy.
US Government officials were specifically advised by the Israel division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that the IDF was implementing an indiscriminate shoot-to-kill policy in zones where leaflets had been dropped – an alarming precursor of the “kill zones” established in Gaza during the current war according to Ha’aretz. The policy had resulted in ICRC aid worker vehicles being targeted twice by the IDF.
Israel is ‘Disappearing’ Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza – and Their Families May Never Get Answers
Palestinians are vanishing without a trace into secret prisons and detention centres, and authorities are stonewalling their families
The documents examined by Byline Times and obtained via the Wikileaks archive suggest that the systematic targeting of civilians became entrenched into IDF military practices with increasing impunity under the Obama administration’s watch. They also show that IDF procedures resulting in the potential targeting of aid vehicles have been in place for over a decade – and were effectively reinforced with US support.
They throw new light on how IDF military doctrine has intentionally widened the parameters of ‘proportionality’ to justify the disproportionate destruction of Palestinian civilians. These parameters mean that the larger the defined threat against Israel, the larger the military objective and therefore the wider the scope for disproportionate destruction of Palestinian civilians.
Israel’s Current War Cabinet and the Dahiya Doctrine
The inherently disproportionate targeting of Palestinian civilians enabled by the IDF’s new AI ‘Lavender’ technology in the current war on Gaza has been exposed in a recent report by +972 magazine and Local Call. The report shows how AI programming run by the IDF’s cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200, permits the killing of up to 20 Palestinian civilians as ‘proportionate’ to the goal of targeting a single Hamas operative.
Yet the secret and confidential diplomatic cables unearthed by Byline Times show that the disproportionality built into the IDF’s deployment of AI in Gaza is a direct consequence of Israeli military doctrines. Disproportionate violence can therefore be traced back to intentional IDF military decisions which see Palestinian civilian life as expendable in the pursuit of military goals to counter Hamas.
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One document marked ‘secret’, from 15 October 2008, provided US Government officials with a detailed summary of communications from IDF regional commanders to local Hebrew media. Sent from Tel Aviv to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Council, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State, the cable reveals how US officials were intimately monitoring the IDF’s development of what it now openly called the “Dahiya doctrine”.
The document describes statements made in 2008 by Gadi Eisenkot, currently a minister within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s War Cabinet who previously served as IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. Eisenkot’s Israeli National Unity party joined Netanyahu’s coalition government after the 7 October terror attack to form an emergency unity government. In 2008, Eisenkot was a regional commander in the IDF.
“On the northern border, Major General Gadi Eisenkot described a GOI [Government of Israel] policy to respond with indiscriminate force against Lebanon should hostilities resume”, notes the secret State Department cable.
Although Eisenkot’s statements about the Dahiya doctrine in 2008 are well-known, Byline Times can reveal for the first time that his stated confirmation of the doctrine’s formal approval by the IDF was being closely observed by the Obama administration: “OC Northern Command Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot described a tense situation along the northern Israeli border – and suggested a crushing Israeli response should fighting resume… Eisenkot labeled any Israeli response to resumed conflict the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ in reference to the levelled Dahiya quarter in Beirut during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. He said Israel will use disproportionate force upon any village that fires upon Israel, ‘causing great damage and destruction.’ Eisenkot made very clear: this is not a recommendation, but an already approved plan – from the Israeli perspective, these are ‘not civilian villages, they are military bases.’”
Israeli Aid Worker Inquiry Compromised by Ties to IDF Mass Killing Doctrine
Yoav Har-Even’s direct involvement in supporting the IDF operation in Gaza, despite also being tasked to lead the investigation into the conduct of the operation, is an obvious conflict of interest
As previously re