For Israel, Civilian Casualties Aren’t An Accident

The Dahiya doctrine, expanded in Israel’s siege of Gaza, sees non-combatants as acceptable targets.

Firing on Palestinians waving white flags, shelling a house in which they were forced to gather, refusing to allow the wounded to evacuate or ambulances to respond—while none of these acts by the Israeli military would be out of place in its current assault on Gaza, this list comes from a 2009 report by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Known as the “Goldstone Report,” after South African judge Richard Goldstone, it covers Israel’s war on Gaza from 2008 to 2009, in which 1,444 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed.

In an attempt to justify the Israeli military’s violence against civilians, Israel claimed they had issued pre-raid warnings via calls, leaflets, and radio broadcasts, as well as conceding some “operational errors.” But the Goldstone Report also cites the apparent application of the “Dahiya Doctrine,” Israel’s intentional and explicit targeting of civilians as a fundamental part of its military strategy.

Wounded Palestinians were transferred to Al-Najjar Hospital after being targeted by Israeli warplanes, in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on October 13 2023

The Dahiya Doctrine is named after the Dahieh (also transliterated as Dahiya) suburb of Beirut, a political stronghold of Hezbollah, the Shia political party and militia in Lebanon. During Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2006, known civilian targets in Dahieh were deliberately and widely attacked by the Israeli military, virtually wiping out the entire neighborhood. And Israeli general Gadi Eisenkot told an Israeli newspaper two years later:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on . . . . We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases . . . . This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

The “plan,” as Eisenkot put it, was to respond to any attack with intentionally disproportionate violence—not to necessarily defeat the attackers, but to punish the entire population through the deliberate killing of civilians and destruction of civil infrastructure.