This 'smoking gun' proves Netanyahu's genocidal intent

You'll note this has not received coverage in the Western media.

This is a devastating smoking gun which again proves Israel’s genocidal intent, including that of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is of course wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Yes, it’s important not to let Netanyahu become the fall guy. Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is a collective endeavour by the Israeli state. At the moment divisions have opened up at the top of the Israeli state, driven partly by Netanyahu’s growing authoritarianism and his alleged corruption - which led the Israeli government to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security services, which critics say is due to alleged ties between Netanyahu’s office and the Qatari regime.

That’s led to mass protests, and Netanyahu has pronounced “there will be no civil war,” which is not exactly regarded as a reassuring statement to have to issue.

But Netanyahu was Israel’s leader throughout Israel’s genocide, and just because elements of the state may or may not have motives for leaking something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

And with that in mind we turn to a story in Ynet, the online portal of Yedioth Ahronoth, which is the biggest newspaper in Israel. It is a story about Herzl Halevi, who was Chief of the General Staff of the so-called Israel Defense Forces from January 2023 to this month - that is, during 7th October, and almost the entirety of the genocide.

The article is in Hebrew, but when translated into English it says the following:

When Halevi presented the IDF's operations to the cabinet in the first 48 hours of the war, he noted that the Air Force had attacked 1,500 targets in Gaza. This is a huge number, requiring exceptional intelligence and operational capabilities. Netanyahu erupted in anger, yelling and banging on the table. "Why not 5,000?" he scolded the Chief of Staff. "We don't have 5,000 approved targets," Halevi replied. "I'm not interested in targets," Netanyahu retorted. "Take down houses, bomb with everything you have."

You have here a revelation of straightforward genocidal intent by Netanyahu at the beginning of the genocide. The journalist continues:

The outburst was part of what was later described, by Gadi Eisenkot and others, as a collapse in Netanyahu's performance in the early days of the war. The officers I met in those days said that Netanyahu had lost his judgment.

Gadi Eisenkot is himself a former chief of staff of the IDF, and served in Israel’s post-7th October unity government as a minister without portfolio. The officers referred to are military officers.

Well, regardless of what the military officers wanted - and many of those may well fear being slapped with an international arrest warrant like Netanyahu - the fact is he was the leader of the country making these demands. And what he was demanding was extermination. He was demanding indiscriminate bombing and the destruction of personal homes, and the use of the entire armoury.

As US lawyer Dylan Williams notes:

This Netanyahu quote reported by an Israeli outlet constitutes prima facie evidence of:

1. the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population; and

2. intent to kill to destroy, in part, a national or ethnic group—elements of the crime of genocide.

This itself is corroborated by what Joe Biden said when, describing his conversation with Netanyahu after the first week or so after 7th October - Biden said he warned Netanyahu to stop carpet bombing communities. But clearly there was no shift in Israeli policy so the US just facilitated that carpet bombing with a relentless supply of weapons.

As research by the NGO Airwars found, at least 5,139 Palestinians civilians were killed by the Israeli army in October 2023, which is what this article is discussing, and of those at least 1,900 were children. They concluded “It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

They concluded that of the incidents examined in this indiscriminate destruction demanded by Netanyahu, 99.4% of incidents killed civilians, and 0.6% killed militants.

So we can link the genocidal intent of Netanyahu expressed in that article with the genocidal consequences.

It’s just worth taking a moment to reflect on something. All the way through this genocide, the claims that the Israeli state was merely targeting Hamas militants in a so-called “war”, that Israel was doing its best to avoid civilian casualties, that civilian deaths were caused by Hamas’ use of so-called human shields - all of these claims were treated not only as credible, they formed the dominant narrative in the Western media.

The few with a mainstream platform who dissented from such claims were the ones treated as fringe, as extreme, the ones promoting outrageous smears and blood libels - indeed antisemitic or Hamas apologist smears against Israel.

Even as Gaza was reduced to rubble. Even as tens of thousands were butchered, and this tiny strip of land was turned into a mass grave.

It was obvious from the very beginning what Israel was doing, given the incessant public genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders and officials - that Israel was deliberately killing civilians on a mass scale. This is a really important point - the killing of Palestinian civilians was not simply the inevitable unfortunate consequence of disproportionate military action, which is about as far as some Western media outlets were prepared to even debate. The killing of civilians was and is deliberate. The slaughter of civilians is intentional. It is by design.

It is also worth reflecting on an article published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz in July 2024:

As soon as the war with Hamas began on October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered that the army's recording system be turned off in the command center at army headquarters, which is where all security cabinet meetings and other defense-related meetings were being held in those days. The army complied with this order.

According to Haaretz the recording system is automatically in operation and records everything, but Netanyahu demanded that security cabinet meets and indeed “any other meetings he specified” would not longer be recorded or transcribed by the IDF, but only by the Prime Minister’s Office

This is an extremely convenient way of suppressing evidence of criminal and indeed genocidal intent, of the sort reported in Ynet.

But what of the plans being proposed now. Well the Financial Times explains that the Israeli military has drawn up plans to “reconquer Gaza in a bid to finally defeat Hamas.”

It says it’s not yet approved by the security cabinet but had been devised by the new IDF chief of staff with the unofficial backing of far right ministers. And frankly it is terrifying

Gaza is already one of the most densely populated communities on earth as is, with a pre-genocide population of 2.3 million or so, and a land area similar to east London. This plan proposes confining the surviving population into a tiny area of Gaza, coded the al-Mawasi Humanitarian area. The plan would then mean administering Gaza and reoccupying it - but not like last time because this population will be forced into what in practise would be an intolerable concentration camp:

Indeed, chillingly, the Financial Times reports:

One of the people familiar with the deliberations said Israel could take over the distribution of all humanitarian aid and had recently assessed how many calories each Palestinian would require.

We should link this plan to the desire of the Israeli state to “thin out” the population.

You see, this is a crime which involves no subtlety. From the beginning, it was executed in plain sight.

I want to end by referring to another story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It’s about an Israeli academic named Dr. Sebastian Ben Daniel, from the computer science department of Ben Gurion University. He said that Israeli soldiers “have been taught to be baby-killers.” 20 senior faculty members at the university have demanded he be fired.

Because in Israel if you speak the truth about the genocide being committed by your state, then you face the consequences, whilst you can openly incite genocide against an entire people, issue the most extreme racist, dehumanising and murderous statements about Palestinians, and not only not suffer adverse consequences, but be treated as respectable and even venerated.

Well, the evidence for Israel’s genocide is overwhelming. And those who denied what was obviously the case from day one will be held to account.