The investigation found that Israel, since starting its war on Gaza, has adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties in Gaza.
It also showed that the country routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing. Israel ignored warnings from within its ranks and senior US military officials about these failings.
The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials in Israel, dozens of victims of the strikes in Gaza, and experts on the rules of armed conflict.
Moreover, the investigation indicated that Israel significantly expanded the military targets it sought to hit in preemptive airstrikes while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack.
Use of imprecise bombs
This led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined.
In addition, the military removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.
For instance, the Israeli army leaders approved strikes that they knew each of them would endanger more than 100 civilians.
Furthermore, the occupation army struck at a pace that made it hard to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets.
It also burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days. To find new targets, it adopted an unproven system that used artificial intelligence on a vast scale.
The report pointed out that Israel, from the first day of the war, drastically reduced the use of so-called roof knocks or warning shots that would give civilians time to flee an imminent attack, and when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal.
It sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs, many of which are American-made. These constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war.
The New York Times quoted five Israeli officers stating that "the prevailing mood within the army after October 7 was to attack the enemy without restraint."
Removing civilian casualty limits
Another order, issued by the military high command on 8 October, provided a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable.
Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to endanger up to 500 civilians each day cumulatively.
In any case, the limit was removed two days later, allowing officers to sign off on as many strikes as they believed were legal. The Palestinian authorities later reported occasional daily tolls of more than 500.
The air campaign was at its most intense during the first two months of the war when more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed — or roughly a third of the overall toll.
Since those early weeks, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and the total continues to climb.
Authorization from senior commanders was required only if the target was too close to a sensitive site, like a school or health facility, though such strikes were regularly approved too.
Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world since it was founded a decade ago.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has revealed that a Palestinian child is being killed every hour in Gaza by Israeli occupation forces.
In a statement, UNRWA reported that the number of Palestinian children killed since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on Gaza has reached 14,500, according to UNICEF.
The agency emphasized that there is no justification for the killing of Gaza children, who are losing their lives, futures, and most of their hopes.
Many international humanitarian organizations have accused Israel of committing acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
In November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the Gaza war.
In January, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction, and any 'acts of genocide' in its war on Gaza.
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