Heavily abridged from source. URL in title. [Opinion. Why be shocked? Israel’s genocide is clear as day. I've learned a great deal from the ex-IDF website, Breaking the Silence.] 'We Were Ordered to Kill': The 1967 Nakba That Israelis Don't Know About Unpublished testimonies from soldiers who fought in the Six-Day War expose a stark gap between Israel's collective memory and what actually happened in 1967. Newly uncovered documents indicate that 300,000 Arabs were expelled or displaced from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights amid violence, looting and destruction Adam Raz Ha’aretz: 04 Jun 2026 The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.” Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.” Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.” Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.” These accounts are nearly 60 years old. Genocide is nothing new. It was planned from the start. Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. In the book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking. None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied. This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said. Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers noted in his autobiography: “We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children. “In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.” Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown Israel trying to conceal its crimes by secretly bulldozing its civilian victims into mass graves in violation of international law.
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