Ex- Israeli army intel chief Aharon Haliva
The recorded leak, reported by Israel’s Channel 12, was apparently made shortly after Israel began its war in Gaza in October 2023.
Haliva said Israel’s war in Gaza was necessary to avenge the deaths on 7 October 2023 and send a warning.
In the recording, speaking in Hebrew, Haliva provides his explanations for the necessity of killing Palestinians en masse in the Gaza Strip.
"Okay, you humiliated...you slaughtered...Okay, you murdered. All of it is true," he said in reference to the Hamas attack on Israel's Gaza battalion on 7 October 2023 that left hundreds of soldiers and settlers dead.
"The price, I said it before the war, for everything that happened on October 7th, for every single person killed on October 7th, 50 Palestinians should die," he said.
"If it doesn't matter now, if it is children. I am not speaking out of revenge. I am speaking of this as a message to the future generations."
"There is nothing that can be done. There is no choice in this deranged neighborhood."
"The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and requested for the future generations," he said.
"They need a Nakba from time to time to feel the consequences."
Aharon Haliva is a former Israeli Major General who commanded the Israeli army's Military Intelligence Directorate. He previously served as the commander of the 98th Paratroopers Division, the commander of the paratroopers brigade, and the commander of the Israeli army's Officers' School. He resigned his position in April 2024.
Haliva's leak comes as Israel’s security cabinet, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, approved a plan last week to occupy Gaza City and ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of its residents to the south of the strip amid global condemnation.
His words are the latest in a long string of genocidal remarks made by Israelis, from senior officials to ordinary citizens, against the Palestinian people since the start of the war in Gaza.
The leak appeared a day or so after Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu shared his Zionist expansionist vision of a Greater Israel in an interview with the Israeli channel i24NEWS, which was condemned regionally and globally.
The Palestinian Nakba refers to the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of more than 50 percent of Arabs from Historic Palestine by Zionist militias in the 1948 war.
Zionist militias drove more than 800,000 Palestinians from more than 500 villages, towns, and cities through a campaign of violence, massacres, and terror to establish the state of Israel.
Today, most of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are descendants of those dispossessed by Israel in the Nakba and again in the 1967 war.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians among the three million residents in the occupied West Bank are also descendants of families dispossessed in both wars.
More than 2 million Palestinians live as second-class citizens inside Israel, while the number of Palestinian refugees globally is estimated at around five million.
Since 7 October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 61,827 Palestinians and injured 155,275, the overwhelming majority women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Thousands more remain missing or are presumed buried beneath the rubble of relentless Israeli airstrikes.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza has plunged most of the population into famine, with images of starving and emaciated people, including children, triggering global outrage and condemnation, as well as calls on Tel Aviv to end its genocidal war on the strip.
The health ministry in Gaza said on Saturday that 251 people, including 108 children, have already died from starvation and malnutrition as Israel continues to choke off aid and tighten its siege on the strip.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to genocidal acts and ordered the country to take measures to prevent them.
In November of the same year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity in the Gaza war.
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