Bibi Fumes After IDF Soldiers Confirm Lethal Weapons Routinely Used On Crowds At Gaza Aid Sites

Soon after the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing aid to war-torn Gaza in May, disturbing reports emerged of Israeli soldiers killing unarmed Palestinians approaching aid points for food. As the world’s eyes turned from Gaza to Israel attack on Iran, the pace of these reported killings increased — with multiple incidents claiming more than 50 lives each. Now, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper has dropped a bombshell report, with Israeli soldiers and officers confirming the routine use of deadly force on unarmed Palestinians as a barbaric form of crowd control — with the practice carried out under orders from superior officers. 

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authority says 529 Palestinians have been killed at humanitarian aid sites or while waiting for food trucks just since late May, when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) took on the task of distributing food in the strip. While Israel’s defenders invariably discredit Gaza casualty counts, US Army Colonel Nathan McCormack, who previously headed up the Joint Chiefs’ Levant and Egypt branch, has said, “We (Department of Defense, Department of State and the U.S. Intelligence Community) consider the Gaza Health Ministry figures to be generally reliable.” A shadowy organization, GHF is led by an evangelical Christian leader with close ties to Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump. 

This morning in Gaza, Palestinians went to receive American aid from the GHF. Israeli forces opened fire on them, turning a humanitarian moment into a massacre. pic.twitter.com/92Qr4qLENk

— TIMES OF GAZA (@Timesofgaza) June 1, 2025

Employing a rhetorical device frequently used when Israel is accused of lethal wrongdoing, Netanyahu dismissed the newspaper’s report as a “blood libel” against the IDF 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called the soldiers’ and officers’ accounts “vicious lies designed to discredit…the most moral army in the world.”

However, perhaps bowing to the sheer breadth of the report by Haaretz, the IDF says it’s investigating the allegations.  

According to the enlisted soldiers and officers who spoke to Haaretz, a variety of deadly weapons have been routinely used as a means of communicating whether Palestinians have permission to approach the aid stations. 

The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning. According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night – ahead of the opening – it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area. — Haaretz

BREAKING: Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of starving Palestinians on their way to receive aid from the U.S. distribution center in the Netzarim Corridor, central Gaza.

In western Rafah, southern Gaza, over 40 people were killed and at least 150 injured in the other… pic.twitter.com/5kJ2zASOm2

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) June 1, 2025

These soldiers are not talking about rifles being fired in the air. As one of them tells it: 

“It’s a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces. I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

According to the same whistleblower, IDF soldiers refer to the practice of using lethal fire to control Palestinians’ approach to food distribution points as Operation “Salted Fish,” using the Israeli name for the children’s game Americans call “Red Light, Green Light” – in which players caught moving at the wrong moment are eliminated. 

An IDF officer offered a similar description:  

“At night, we open fire to signal to the population that this is a combat zone and they mustn’t come near. Once, the mortars stopped firing, and we saw people starting to approach. So we resumed fire to make it clear they weren’t allowed to. In the end, one of the shells landed on a group of people… [In another incident], we fired machine guns from tanks and threw grenades. There was one incident where a group of civilians was hit while advancing under the cover of fog. It wasn’t intentional, but these things happen.”

“[Gaza has] become a place with its own set of rules,” said a reservist who recently completed his latest tour in Gaza. “The loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an ‘unfortunate incident,’ like they used to say.”  Officers tell Haaretz that the IDF works to ensure that footage of what transpires at the aid sites doesn’t make it into the public eye. However, some video shot by Palestinians has reached the world beyond their deadly, disease-stricken, food-starved mass-enclosure: 

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Haaretz reports that Israeli soldiers call the shootings at Gaza aid sites “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to a game where any movement gets you shot. One soldier said they open fire from hundreds of meters away on anyone lining up early, sometimes… https://t.co/B6u3aQDVqu pic.twitter.com/9McH0VddG2

— z (@zesqyb) June 27, 2025

Shedding light on another dimension of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, a veteran IDF soldier gave insight into the ongoing physical destruction: 

“Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives [roughly $1,500] for every house they demolish. They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don’t demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front.”

The soldier said that deadly force is used even when the bulldozers are in areas where Palestinians have permission to be — and even where the proximity to the Palestinians was created by the advancing of the equipment. Lethal force is used anyway. “For a contractor to make another [$1,500] and take down a house, it’s deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food,” he said. 

Whole areas of Gaza wiped off Google Maps pic.twitter.com/7hgV405Wv9

— RT (@RT_com) June 21, 2025

After one streak of three June incidents near food points in which the IDF took 50 or more lives each time, a meeting was held at the IDF’s Southern Command, according to senior officer who attended. The review elicited the fact that troops had used artillery shells to disperse crowds. The senior officer said the conversation about the use of artillery on unarmed people was only framed only by how publicity of such force might undermine Israel’s ability to keep proceeding with its campaign:

“[Nobody asked] why that weapon was needed in the first place. What concerns everyone is whether it’ll hurt our legitimacy to keep operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.”

We have to ask: What exactly is it going to take for Israel to stop insisting it has the “most moral army in the world” — and for the United States government to decide it wants nothing to do with it?