At exactly 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military leadership issued an order that unleashed one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.
Effective immediately, the order granted mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers that were the focus of earlier campaigns, but also the lowest-ranking fighters.
In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.
The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history. Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.
It meant, for example, that the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.
In previous conflicts with Hamas, many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt. Sometimes, officers could risk killing up to five civilians and only rarely did the limit rise to 10 or above, though the actual death toll was sometimes much higher.
On Oct. 7, the military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat, according to a senior military officer who answered questions about the order on the condition of anonymity.
Hours earlier, Hamas-led terrorists had stormed into southern Israel, seizing towns and army bases, committing atrocities, firing thousands of rockets at civilian areas, killing up to 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. As Israelis battled Hamas fighters inside their borders, the officer said, Israel’s leaders also feared an invasion from the group’s allies in Lebanon and believed that they had to take drastic military action.
“All of the places where Hamas was deployed, in this city of evil, all of the places where Hamas has been hiding and operating from — we will turn them into rubble,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a speech on Oct. 7.
An investigation by The New York Times found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.
The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century. Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.
In its investigation, The Times found that:
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Israel vastly expanded the set of military targets it sought to hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. That 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 leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.
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On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
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The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.
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The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.
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From the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that 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.
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, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
From November 2023 onward, amid a global outcry, Israel began to conserve ammunition and tighten some of its rules of engagement, including by halving the number of civilians who could be endangered when striking low-ranked militants who posed no imminent threat. But the rules remain far more permissive than before the war. Since those early weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while Israel disputes the ministry’s figures, the total continues to climb.
Provided a summary of The Times’s findings, the Israeli military acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after Oct. 7 but said in a 700-word statement that its forces have “consistently been employing means and methods that adhere to the rules of law.”
The changes were made in the context of a conflict that is “unprecedented and hardly comparable to other theaters of hostilities worldwide,” the statement added, citing the scale of Hamas’s attack; efforts by militants to hide among civilians in Gaza; and Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
“Such key factors,” the statement said, “bear implications on the application of the rules, such as the choice of military objectives and the operational constraints that dictate the conduct of hostilities, including the ability to take feasible precautions in strikes.”
The relatives of Shaldan al-Najjar, a senior commander in a militia allied with Hamas that joined the Oct. 7 attacks, were among the first casualties of Israel’s loosened standards.
When the military struck his home in a war nine years earlier, it took several precautions to avoid civilian harm — and no one was killed, including Mr. al-Najjar.
When it targeted him in this war, it killed not just him but also 20 members of his extended family, including a 2-month-old baby, according to his brother Suleiman, who lived in the home that was hit and witnessed the immediate aftermath. Some relatives were blown from the building. His niece’s severed hand was found in the rubble.
“Blood was splattered all over the neighbor’s wall — as though some sheep had just been slaughtered,” the brother recalled.
Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties, often by ordering evacuations of whole cities before strikes, and by dropping leaflets over neighborhoods and posting online maps about imminent operations.
Israel says that Hamas’s military strategy makes bloodshed more likely. The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.
Unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas, Israel and all Western armies operate under a multilayered oversight system that assesses the legality of planned strikes. Each attack plan is usually meant to be analyzed by a group of officers, which often includes a military lawyer who can advise on whether strikes might be unnecessary or unlawful.
To comply with international law, officers overseeing airstrikes must conclude that the risk of civilian casualties is proportional to the target’s military value, and take all feasible precautions to protect civilian life. But officers exercise significant discretion because the laws of armed conflict are vague about what counts as a feasible precaution or an excessive civilian toll.
After the shock of the Oct. 7 attack, a dozen officers recalled, some Israeli officers involved in the counteroffensive became less stringent about adhering to military protocol. While some commanders tried hard to maintain standards, five senior officers used the same phrase to describe the prevalent mood inside the military: “harbu darbu.”
It is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.
Why Civilians Were at Higher Risk
The Israeli military first targeted Shaldan al-Najjar during the war in August 2014. He was a senior commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had conducted suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel for decades.
Before that strike in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, the air force gave his neighbors three chances to escape, according to his brother Suleiman.
Israeli officers called one neighbor, and then another, with warnings of an upcoming strike on a nearby target that the military did not identify. Then the military dropped a small projectile on the house, what it calls a “roof knock,” standard practice then before strikes on targets believed to hold ammunition or tunnel entrances. That was enough for everyone, including Shaldan al-Najjar, to escape unharmed.
But seven hours after Hamas attacked Israel last year, the order from Israel’s high command made roof knocks optional. In practice this meant the procedure was rarely used, officers said.
There were no warnings before an Israeli fighter jet fired at Shaldan al-Najjar on the evening of Oct. 10, 2023, as he visited his siblings’ home. The explosion killed Mr. al-Najjar, along with his stepmother, four children, a younger brother, a sister-in-law, 13 nephews and nieces, including the 2-month-old baby boy, named Zein, and at least one neighbor, according to records compiled by Gaza’s health authorities.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had been targeting a member of Islamic Jihad, but declined to release more information.
Under Israeli military protocols, there are four categories of risk for civilian casualties: Level Zero, which forbids soldiers to put any civilians at risk; Level One, which allows up to five civilian deaths; Level Two, which allows up to 10; and Level Three, which allows up to 20 — and became the standard on Oct. 7.
Suddenly, officers could decide to drop one-ton bombs on a vast array of military infrastructure — including small ammunition stockpiles and rocket factories — as well as on all Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. The definition of a military target included lookouts and money changers suspected of handling Hamas’s funds, as well as the entrances to the group’s underground tunnel network, which were often hidden in homes.
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.
The effect was swift. 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.
Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection. Three of them said those targeted included Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimated killed at least 125 others.
Another order, issued by the military high command at 10:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, provides a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable. Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.
Military officials characterized the order as a precautionary measure intended to cap the number of strikes that could take place each day. A scholar at West Point consulted by The Times, Prof. Michael N. Schmitt, said it risked being construed by mid-ranking officers as a quota that they had to reach.
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 Gazan authorities later reported occasional daily tolls of more than 500, but it was unclear how many were civilians or if their deaths had occurred over several days.
The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war. By November, two officers said, the air force had dropped so many one-ton bombs that it was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions.
This forced pilots to rely on unguided and less accurate bombs, the officers said. They were also increasingly dependent on outdated Vietnam-era bombs that can fail to detonate, according to two U.S. military officials briefed on Israel’s arsenal.
The air force used the one-ton bomb to destroy whole office towers, two senior Israeli military officials said, even when a target could have been killed by a smaller munition.
While declining to comment on specific incidents, the Israeli military said that its “choice of munitions” was always governed by the rules of war. The senior military official said that heavy munitions were required to hit Hamas’s tunnels.
The Najjar family was struck by a precision-guided one-ton bomb — an American-made JDAM, according to a Times assessment of a guidance fin that the family said it had found in the rubble. The bomb completely destroyed their three-story building, flattening five apartments as well as a car workshop on the ground floor, according to the brother and two other surviving members of the family.
“After the dust and smoke cleared, I looked at my building,” said Suleiman al-Najjar, who said he survived because he was on his way back from the hospital. “There was no building.”
A Depleted Target Bank
Throughout the war, hundreds of Israeli intelligence officers spread across several military bases scrambled to find and strike new targets, relying on an automated surveillance system that enabled them to work exponentially quicker.
In earlier wars in Gaza, officers had typically worked their way through a “target bank” — a database of hundreds of militants and locations that already had been methodically researched and vetted. In this war, the air force raced through much of the list within days, 11 officers and officials said, putting intelligence officers under intense pressure to find new targets.
Many were encouraged to propose a certain number of targets each day, according to five officers.
Several elite intelligence units, officials said, were given more time to find small numbers of high-value targets, like senior Hamas political leaders and top military commanders. Other units focused on rocket launch sites and ammunition stores. One unit looked specifically for civilians who provided financial services to militant groups.
But most intelligence units, particularly those in infantry divisions preparing to invade Gaza, were given very little time to build a much longer list of targets, officials said. That mainly involved trying to locate tens of thousands of low-ranking militants.
Israel has long maintained databases, one of which was code-named “Lavender,” that list phone numbers and home addresses of suspected militants, according to 16 soldiers and officials. Israel also controls Gaza’s telecom networks, allowing it to tap and track Palestinian phones. By listening to calls made by phones associated with the militants, intelligence officers tried to work out where they were, officials said.
But the databases sometimes included outdated data, according to six officers, increasing the likelihood that officers would misidentify a civilian as a combatant. There were also too many calls for the officers to manually track.
To speed up the process, officers used artificial intelligence.
In recent years, the Israeli military had developed computing systems, one of which was known as “The Gospel,” that could automatically cross-reference information from several different sources, including phone conversations, satellite imagery and mobile phone signals.
In the chaotic opening weeks of the war, different intelligence units harnessed these automated computing systems in varied ways to triangulate data and locate militants.
One common method involved automatically cross-referencing the location of a phone with its owner’s home address. When a phone appeared to be in roughly the same place as an address linked to its owner, the system flagged and recorded the owner’s phone calls.
Arabic-speaking soldiers then listened to these calls to determine whether a wanted militant had been found. Some units used speech-to-text software to translate the conversations automatically.
The military said officers always verified the information provided by the automated systems and it denied that artificial intelligence was ever more than the starting point of a human-led verification process. But the amount of verification varied from unit to unit, according to at least eight officers.
Some officers said they would only confirm someone as a militant if they overheard the person speaking about their involvement in Hamas’s military wing.
In other units, three officers said, an individual was considered a confirmed militant if he was simply listed in Lavender. Details of that process were previously reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news website; the Israeli military has denied that was military policy and said that any analyst who relied solely on Lavender would have been overruled by superiors.
Once officers were satisfied that they had confirmed a legal target, they would begin planning an attack, such as a missile strike if the target seemed to be staying the night at home, the soldiers said.
The first step was to gauge the civilian risk.
In the most rigorous version of that assessment, officers sometimes hacked a target’s phone handset to listen to the conversations taking place nearby, in order to build a better picture of whom he was with, according to three officers familiar with the process. In some cases, the hacking allowed officers to pinpoint the target’s location as well as which way he was facing, how many floors he had climbed and how many steps he had recently taken.
As an additional precaution, officers sometimes attempted to trace the phones of the buildings’ other known prewar residents — a laborious process that could take more than an hour.
But the military was pursuing so many targets that officers often lacked the time or resources for such sophisticated surveillance, particularly when tracking low-ranking militants early in the war, according to seven officials and soldiers.
Officers could still intercept calls and determine a phone’s rough location by checking which cellphone towers received its signals. That information was less precise — and it was more difficult to ascertain who was nearby.
Overlooked Civilians
In the absence of more accurate data, Israeli intelligence officers routinely used a simplistic model to estimate the number of civilians who might be killed in an airstrike, according to 17 soldiers and officials.
The military divided Gaza into 620 sectors, most the size of a few city blocks, and estimated the number of working phones in each using the signals received by cellphone towers. After comparing phone and Wi-Fi usage with prewar levels, the military then estimated the proportion of residents who remained in each sector.
To gauge the number of civilians inside a particular building, officers typically assumed that the building’s prewar residents had fled at the same rate as the surrounding neighborhood.
Even at its best, the model provided information that might be out of date by the time of an airstrike. The volume of attacks meant that there was often an hourslong gap between the assessment of civilian risk and the actual strike on the target, according to eight officers.
When the air force tried to kill a money changer connected to Islamic Jihad in mid-November 2023, for example, seven hours had passed since intelligence officers last checked where he was and who he was with, according to an official familiar with the attack. The strike killed two women — but the target survived because he was no longer there, according to the official and a second person familiar with the incident.
The model also suffered from fundamental flaws.
It relied, for example, on people having enough electricity to power their phones — and a working phone network. But power and network outages in Gaza often made that impossible.
The location of handsets also cannot be determined with complete accuracy based on phone signals; phones that seem to be in one neighborhood may be in an adjacent one. And the model also ignored how, during times of war, people often cluster together in large groups, three officers said.
Starting in November, senior officers in the American Joint Special Operations Command repeatedly raised concerns about the model’s accuracy with their Israeli counterparts, warning that it was leading to catastrophically imprecise assessments, according to the two senior U.S. military officials familiar with the conversations.
Some within the Israeli military also sounded the alarm. Throughout November and December, Israeli Air Force analysts urged colleagues to use more extensive drone surveillance to check for the presence of civilians, according to internal military assessments. Little to no action was taken, at least for several weeks, according to those assessments. The air force was supposed to recheck estimates of civilian presence but did not always do so.
Even when conducting after-action reviews, the military rarely tried to count how many civilians had been killed, making it almost impossible for officers to assess the model’s accuracy, according to 11 officers involved in target selection.
The Israeli military’s statement to The Times did not address questions about the model, but it said that in general the military’s methods “adhere to the rules of law, whether it be the choice of munitions or the use of digital technologies to support this effort.”
Israel’s strike on a residential street on the edge of Gaza City on Nov. 16, 2023, exemplified how inaccurate the model could be. The military told The Times in a statement that it was trying to destroy one of the many tunnels used by Hamas’s military wing. In the process, it hit a large house.
Before the war, 16 members of the extended Malaka family lived in the three-story building, according to two surviving brothers, Hazem and Nidal Malaka. After the war began, dozens of other relatives moved in, they said.
At the moment of the strike, 52 people — including Hazem and Nidal Malaka — were crammed into the bottom two floors. The brothers drew a family tree for The Times that detailed their names and backgrounds, and provided photographs of many of them. The oldest was the 64-year-old family patriarch, Jamal, and the youngest was his 2-year-old granddaughter, Sham.
By this point in the war, the surrounding neighborhood, Zeitoun, was largely depopulated. Israel’s formula for assessing the building’s occupancy, based on phone usage in the wider neighborhood, would have suggested there was only a handful of civilians left.
And several hours before the strike, phone reception was lost across Gaza, service providers announced at the time. That meant that a manual attempt to track the handsets of the building’s prewar residents may have suggested there was no one there at all.
The first reports of the strike emerged only after the network outage ended, three days later on Nov. 19.
By the brothers’ count, at least 42 people were killed and just 10 survived. Hazem Malaka said that most of them were not officially recorded as dead because the victims’ bodies were left trapped in the rubble instead of being taken to the nearest hospital where deaths are registered.
Hazem Malaka, 40, lost his pregnant wife, son and daughter. To the best of his knowledge, he said, their bodies still lie crushed “under three floors of concrete.”
Tightening the Reins
About two months ago, Israel struck a hospital compound in central Gaza where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. Several burned to death, including Shaaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old university student, who was filmed flailing helplessly in his tent as the flames engulfed him.
Israeli officials blamed Hamas for the blaze, saying it likely occurred after an Israeli missile, targeting a Hamas command center, hit munitions that the group had stored in the hospital compound.
“All I wanted was for him to look at me one last time,” said Mr. al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, as he recalled watching his son burn to death.
The attack occurred about 500 yards south of where the militant commander Shaldan al-Najjar was killed a year and four days earlier.
Still, the military has steadily used fewer munitions over the past 12 months, according to officers and records reviewed by The Times. The average number of munitions used by Israel each month in Gaza fell from a high of nearly 15,000 in October and November 2023 to less than 2,500 from February through May. (The Times was unable to verify the number of munitions fired since June.)
In relative terms, Israel has also tightened its rules of engagement.
On Nov. 5, 2023, the military leadership decreed that officers needed special permission to endanger more than 10 civilians in strikes on low-ranking militants who posed no imminent threat to Israeli infantry. By late January, officers needed special permission for nearly all such deadly strikes, except for those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.
But the rules were still far looser than they were before Oct. 7.
Mid-ranking officers could still sign off on most strikes that endangered 10 civilians or less — a threshold far higher than the prewar norm.
And many strikes proved far deadlier.
In July, Israel fired several missiles at Hamas militants, including a top commander, Muhammad Deif, killing at least 57 people, according to Airwars.
Israeli officers have also acted with near impunity. Only two officers are known to have been fired for their role in the air campaign, after they oversaw a drone strike that killed several foreign aid workers whom the officers had confused for militants.
The military said that a panel appointed by the military chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes.
No one has been charged.
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