‘My unit killed many unarmed men’: Israeli soldiers recount Gaza war crimes
Der Spiegel has published accounts from ten Israeli soldiers describing how troops killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza and recorded them as “terrorists”.
In testimonies published over the weekend, the soldiers recounted war crimes committed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including killing unarmed Palestinians and destroying neighbourhoods to prevent civilians from returning.
David, an infantry reservist who served several deployments in central Gaza and Khan Younis, told the German outlet: "My unit killed many unarmed men."
A high-ranking officer told him: “The Arabs must be punished. They must understand that we are taking more and more land from them, pushing them back further and further.”
David said “relatively educated, secular Israelis” initially committed the war crimes he described. As the war progressed, “more messianic extremists arrived”.
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Many soldiers treated the killings as a “religious duty”.
David recalled calls to exterminate “all the Arabs, we have to build settlements, we will wipe out Gaza. Things you hear from ministers like Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben Gvir,” referring to the far-right ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.
'My brigade killed 160 to 170 people during our more than 80 days there. Only one man was suspected of carrying a weapon'
- Yaakov, Israeli reservist serving in Gaza
Soldiers often received orders to “shoot men of military age to kill them”. After killing Palestinians, soldiers would light cigarettes and boast to their parents about the killings, David said.
Yuval Green, a reservist who served with the 55th Parachute Brigade in Khan Younis for about 50 days between late November 2023 and January 2024, recalled the orders: “We will show no mercy this time. If a child goes into a house where a terrorist is, we should kill him along with the child.”
Green said the commander “deliberately remained vague” about whom soldiers could kill, “in a way that allowed Palestinians to be killed just like that”.
Another reservist, Yaakov, volunteered to fight in Gaza and spent 250 days in the central Gaza Strip. He described a “scorched-earth” policy under which “Palestinians were to have nowhere left to return to.”
“My brigade killed 160 to 170 people during our more than 80 days there. Only one man was suspected of carrying a weapon,” Yaakov told Der Spiegel.
“All of these dead were reported as terrorists,” he added.
In another incident, soldiers labelled Palestinians cooling off at the beach as “terrorists” and shot them dead.
Tal, another Israeli reservist who was interviewed, described the aftermath of Israel’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on 25 August 2025, which killed 22 people, including five journalists.
“When people are killed or injured, the army's first attempt is always to link them to Hamas. Because if they can say that the deceased were Hamas terrorists, it looks better in the eyes of the world,” Tal said.
Within the army, soldiers called this "post-mortem incrimination".
Israel initially described the journalists it killed as “Hamas terrorists”.
“The soldiers referred to it as a 'Hamas camera' because Hamas could use it to see everything happening nearby,” Tal said. "Their goal was to disable such cameras. But the Reuters cameraman they targeted was not a terrorist. They killed a legitimate journalist.
“My impression is that these soldiers fundamentally viewed journalists as terrorists,” he added.
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