Israel does not intentionally target civilians.

Israel's violent colonial establishment alone debunks this myth. During the Nakba of 1948, Zionist militias carried out 70 massacres, killing 15,000 Palestinians. The Nakba never ended. From the Qibya massacre in 1953 and Kafr Qasim in 1956 to Jenin in 2002, repeated assaults on Gaza, and now genocide, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians is an integral component of Israel's broader settler-colonial project.

That this claim is even debated while Palestinians have endured a live-streamed genocide is extraordinary. The world watched six-year-old Hind Rajab trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her relatives as she pleaded for rescue before being shot over 300 bullets. It watched displaced families burned alive in their tents, patients and medical workers buried in mass graves at hospitals, starving civilians shot while seeking food, and entire families erased from the civil registry. To debate such a claim instead of demanding accountability reveals the extent to which Palestinian lives have been dehumanized.

In just two years of the genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed or injured more than 50,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, killed around 1,700 health workers and over 400 aid workers, and made Gaza the deadliest place in modern history for journalists. If this does not indicate the deliberate targeting of civilians, what does?

Civilian devastation is embedded within the Israeli military doctrine itself. The Dahiya Doctrine calls for disproportionate force and the destruction of civilian areas. After the 2006 aggression on Lebanon, which killed 1,000 civilians, an Israeli military commander declared: "What happened in the Dahiya ..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. These are not civilian villages, they are military bases." The doctrine has since been applied in Gaza in 2008-09, 2014, and now in the genocide.

Israel has the fifteenth most powerful military in the world, equipped with precision-guided weapons and sophisticated intelligence capabilities. Yet it repeatedly employs unguided bombs, disproportionate force, and widespread destruction, including in one of the most densely populated places on earth. During the genocide in Gaza, Israel used AI systems such as Lavender to automate the identification of approximately 37,000 "targets," while the military spent only seconds authorizing bombings despite knowing the system made "errors in approximately 10 percent of cases." This illustrates that civilian killings are the product of deliberate military decision-making.

Israel's mass killing of Palestinians follows a clear policy. Throughout the genocide in Gaza, senior officials repeatedly called for the destruction of Gaza, framed the entire population as a legitimate target, and declared that "the emphasis is on damage, not precision." When such statements are followed by the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, they reveal that civilian harm is not merely foreseen but part of the strategy.

This is not a matter of speculation. Senior Israeli officials are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including intentionally directing attacks against civilians, starvation as a method of warfare, murder, and persecution. Israel further faces genocide proceedings before the International Court of Justice, more than 1,000 UN resolutions documenting systemic violations of international law, and condemnation by major international and Israeli human rights organizations for systematic attacks on civilians. The evidence is overwhelming and cumulative.