Israeli Troops Have Repeatedly Filmed Themselves Committing War Crimes

A new documentary from Al Jazeera takes a look at evidence of war crimes in Gaza in the form of social media posted by Israeli soldiers recording and celebrating their own attacks on Palestinians. We play excerpts from the film Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, now available online, and speak to two of the journalists involved in its production, director Richard Sanders and Gaza-based correspondent Youmna ElSayed. “Israelis themselves were telling us precisely what they were doing and why they were doing it,” says Sanders about the evidence the team reviewed. “They don’t think it’s complicated. They don’t think it’s nuanced. Their rhetoric is often overtly genocidal.” ElSayed adds, “They’ve had all the courage to do that because they know that they are not even going to be condemned.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Health officials in Gaza say the death toll from Israel’s war has now topped 42,000, though many fear the actual death toll is far higher. We begin today’s show looking at how Israeli troops have repeatedly filmed themselves committing and celebrating war crimes in Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has just released a documentary on Israeli war crimes, based in part on social media posts from Israeli soldiers themselves. The documentary begins with the Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa, as well as footage of the Al-Awda school massacre in July, when Israeli troops killed at least 31 people at a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. The moment the bomb exploded was captured on video by someone recording a youth soccer game in the Al-Awda school courtyard.

SUSAN ABULHAWA: The West cannot hide. They cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know. We live in an era of technology, and this has been described as the first live-streamed genocide in history. And I believe that to be true.

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] That blew me away!

SUSAN ABULHAWA: They are conducting a genocide now with glee. They’re setting their atrocities to music and putting them on catchy reels on TikTok. Ordinary Israelis see what their military is doing and celebrate it.

NARRATION: A crowd is singing, “May your village burn!”

SUSAN ABULHAWA: It’s not just fringe elements who see this and think it’s a good thing.

PRESIDENT ISAAC HERZOG: When a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we’ll break their backbone. … It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from a new documentary on Israeli war crimes made by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. That last speaker was the Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

This is another clip from the documentary. We hear from Human Rights Watch’s associate director for the Middle East and North Africa, Bill Van Esveld [sic]. The clips begin with video posted online by the Israeli 202nd Paratroopers Battalion that shows a possible war crime of the shooting of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. This is a graphic warning.

YOUMNA ELSAYED: As troops leave Gaza, they place commemorative videos online.

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] When they meet the 202nd battalion, they are going to regret being born.

YOUMNA ELSAYED: This video documents the activities of the 202nd Paratroopers Battalion.

CHARLIE HERBERT: I’m just going to halt this here. I’m going to play this back again. This is extraordinary. The fact that he’s put this onto video, he’s released this on YouTube, to me, is kind of quite extraordinary, that degree of impunity.

YOUMNA ELSAYED: The video shows two other instances where unarmed men are shot by snipers.

CHARLIE HERBERT: Of course I don’t know the context of what happened before. I don’t know what happened two minutes before that. They may have been involved in contacting and shooting at Israeli forces, and they may have been legitimate targets. But it sure doesn’t look like it to me.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from a new documentary on Israeli war crimes made by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit.

We’re joined now by two guests. Youmna ElSayed is a correspondent for Al Jazeera who is based in the Gaza Strip. And Richard Sanders is the director of Al Jazeera I-Unit’s new feature-length documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.

Youmna, let’s begin with you, as you narrate this film. If you can talk about the video footage that we see, that is actually taken by Israeli soldiers themselves?

YOUMNA ELSAYED: Yes. Thank you for having me on your show again, Amy.

Of course, Israeli soldiers in Gaza taking these videos and posting them on different social media platforms, they haven’t been — they’ve had all the courage to do that because they know that they are not even going to be condemned by posting these videos. They are showing off how much they dehumanize Palestinians, how much they kill. They destroy their properties. They completely torture them and dehumanize them in different ways, whether they’re children, they’re men, they’re women. They brag about it, and they’re very proud of their doings.

And all this comes back to the fact that the Israeli army acts with complete impunity, and they know that even these videos being posted online, they won’t even be shown in other Western news outlets to point out how horrific these videos have actions committed by the Israeli army towards the civilians. On the contrary, Benjamin Netanyahu comes out and says, “We are the most moral army in the world,” when in reality they are the most inhumane army in the world.

As a journalist, as a civilian in any war zone, I am supposed to have the guarantee that a soldier from any other — any other place in the world, any other nationality in the world, as long as he carries that term, that definition that he is a soldier, he must have morals, he must have ethics that he would not hurt me as an unarmed civilian, as a journalist, as a paramedic. But in Gaza, for them, every single Palestinian, as long as you are a Palestinian, you are a legitimate target.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I just want to issue a slight correction: The person in the first clip that we showed from the documentary was not Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch, but, rather, Charlie Herbert, a retired British major general.

So, Richard Sanders, if we could turn to you, talk about the origins of this documentary, the fact that it begins with the Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa saying we are “in an era of technology, and this has been described as the first live-streamed genocide in history.” I mean, in a way, the film itself documents precisely how it is a live-streamed genocide. If you could elaborate?

RICHARD SANDERS: Well, thank you for having me, Amy.

Yes, and that’s precisely why we begin the film with those comments from Susan Abulhawa. The essential point of the whole film is no one can hide. The Israelis themselves were telling us precisely what they were doing and why they were doing it. The film is rooted in these soldiers’ videos, of which there are thousands and thousands. And we didn’t pick particularly damaging examples. They’re all like that. I mean, one thing that’s very striking is, what you don’t see in these videos is combat, or very rarely. There’s very little combat. Every now and then you see soldiers expending an enormous amount of ammunition, but they’re frequently standing up, and there’s clearly no incoming. So, that’s what you would think soldiers would want to post online, but they don’t.

Now, it’s not only soldiers’ videos, of course, we have in the film. There is Israeli media, Israeli politicians and Israeli social media. We’re not picking – again, as Susan says at the beginning of the film, we’re not picking unrepresentative examples. In the West, there is sometimes this rhetoric — even when people aren’t overtly supportive of the Israelis, there is this rhetoric of “it’s complicated,” “it’s nuanced,” “it’s difficult.” And what we’re really saying in this film is listen to Israelis. Listen to Israelis. They don’t think it’s complicated. They don’t think it’s nuanced. Their rhetoric is often overtly genocidal. It’s certainly frequently all about ethnic cleansing. They couldn’t have been clearer about what they were doing. And if we are ignorant, we’re willfully ignorant.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Richard Sanders, how do you interpret the fact that these videos were made and posted so liberally by Israeli soldiers themselves? I mean, the obvious question is: To what extent did they think they were totally immune from any kind of repercussions as a consequence of what they were doing, which, you know, if you see those clips that you show in the documentary, are so obviously war crimes? In fact, the international legal expert whom you spoke to said that it’s very uncommon to have clips like this. He said “a treasure trove which you very seldom come across … something which I think prosecutors will be licking their lips at.” So, if you could just, you know, talk about that, how — what do you make of the fact that soldiers themselves so openly, transparently and widely distributed their own acts that could be construed as war crimes?

RICHARD SANDERS: They clearly felt this would be popular in Israel. They were competing for clicks, you know. And they were right. These videos were popular. You know, they were using some of the photos they took of themselves on dating apps. And yes, as you say, it speaks to an astonishing sense of impunity. I mean, the clip you’ve played there, where you actually see unarmed men being shot, that’s fairly unusual, but even so, that was put on YouTube by the people who did it.

Now, you know, what we very much hope is that this material — and, of course, there’s an awful lot of material additionally which isn’t in the film — this material will be of use to the ICC. It’s quite interesting, within Israel, if you follow Hebrew-language social media, there’s been a panicky deleting of social media accounts over the last few days. But it’s too late. We’ve got it all saved.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another clip from your new Al Jazeera Investigates documentary, when we see Israeli soldiers, in footage that they themselves shared, talking about the complete destruction of the Shuja’iyya refugee camp in Gaza.

ISRAELI COMMAND: [translated] Butterfly station, this is command. We’re launching Operation 8th Candle of Hanukkah, the burning of Shuja’iyya neighborhood. Let our enemies learn and be deterred. This is what we’ll do to all our enemies, and not a memory will be left of them. We will annihilate them to dust. Command out.

YOUMNA ELSAYED: The destruction of buildings is regularly featured, often set to music.

BILL VAN ESVELD: You see huge blocks getting blown up, universities getting blown up.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that clip ended with Human Rights Watch, Bill Van Esveld. Richard, could you respond to what we saw there? And also, you know, what most surprised you as you were researching this documentary? I mean, there’s extremely disturbing testimony that we hear. And just a couple of examples: a man who says he was forced to lie on a decomposing corpse, as well as another in a detention center in southern Israel who witnessed a young inmate being raped by a dog.

RICHARD SANDERS: To be absolutely honest with you, nothing surprised me. It’s what I would have imagined was happening inside Gaza. I would say, imagine 40 years ago, before social media and, you know, before every camera — every phone had a camera. This would all have been done in the dark. But, in a sense, it makes no difference, as we say in the film, because they’ve posted it all online.

One of — the only thing, I would say, that surprises me — I’m not surprised that the Israeli soldiers feel complete impunity and so on, but the fact that higher up the chain of command and in the government, they clearly feel the same impunity, as well. No one has come down the line and cracked down on this and said, “Stop doing it.” It’s quite clear that Israeli politicians and Israeli military commanders feel that they enjoy complete impunity for what they’re doing in the Gaza Strip, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring — go back to Youmna Elsayed. Last year, we spoke with you in Gaza shortly after an Israeli airstrike had just killed the family of your colleague, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh. He learned of the deaths of his wife, son, daughter and grandson while reporting live on the air. The Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp killed at least 25 people in total. And Wael Dahdouh had fled to the refugee camp with his family after Israel ordered residents of northern Gaza to vacate their homes. This, Youmna, is what you said then.

YOUMNA ELSAYED: When we say there is no safe place in Gaza, we’re not lying. We’re not being biased. We’re not exaggerating. The north, Gaza City, and the south, they’re all just the same in terms of bombardment, in terms of targeting, and in all the life conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was last October. Before this, we spoke to you, Youmna, in 2021 when you were reporting in Gaza and Israel bombed and leveled a 12-story building that housed the offices of media organizations that you worked for, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. Israel claimed, without evidence, the building was being used by Hamas operatives.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Youmna Elsayed in 2021. You notice there we’re not seeing her face, because the media building that we would talk to her in was blown up, that housed Al Jazeera, that housed AP. And then speaking again after — well, at this point, we’re talking about something like 174 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza. If you can talk about the significance of this and, in your reporting on this documentary, the killing of journalists in addition to doctors and nurses, paramedics and ambulance drivers, Youmna?

YOUMNA ELSAYED: Well, Amy, I’ve always said this, and I continue saying it, that every single time there is a war or a conflict in the Gaza Strip, military escalation, something that was so much easier than what we have been going through for the past year, this ongoing genocide, there was always an attack on the journalists and their offices in the Gaza Strip. In 2021, the largest three towers, media buildings, housing all media offices in Gaza, were completely destroyed. Al-Johara had over 50 media offices; al-Sharouk tower, the same; and Al Jazeera and the AP, as well, in that tower alone. This is Israel’s first approach towards journalists and their offices in Gaza at the beginning of any war. It’s always to try to make their job as difficult and as impossible as ever.

And it’s not just in wars and military escalations. I mean, at the protests of the Great March of Return, when we used to cover these protests, and these protests were taking place in the borders — on the borders and from the Palestinian side, where there’s a buffer zone of 300 meters away from that security fence, that was infiltrated on the 7th of October. When someone approached those 300 meters away from the security fence, they were shot. And we were labeled as journalists. And even away from that area, we would be targeted with gas grenades, that drones came and dropped them over our head. So, it was not a coincidence at any of those times.

This time — we have always spoken for many years about the suppression and oppression and violations and aggression of the Israeli army towards Palestinian journalists. But this year or last year, this suppression and oppression and fight against the freedom of press has not only been against the Palestinian journalists. If you’ve seen, it has reached and affected all international journalists, as well, because Israel has banned them from entering the Gaza Strip. And no matter how much letters they have issued, no matter what kind of pressure they have tried to put on the Israeli government to allow them to enter the Gaza Strip to do their legitimate responsibility and work, they were banned. They were declined. So, that oppression, that we have been speaking about for years, has also affected the international journalists today.

But on the other hand, the violation, the aggression against the Palestinian journalists, because we are Palestinian and we are inside the Gaza Strip, has been unprecedented, the killing. One hundred seventy-five Palestinian journalists, until today, have been killed. How many others, dozens others have been injured, and our families threatened and killed and injured? Unimaginable numbers.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Youmna ElSayed, Al Jazeera correspondent based in the Gaza Strip, though speaking to us from London, and Richard Sanders, director of Al Jazeera I-Unit’s new feature-length documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.

Next up, we’ll be joined by the acclaimed Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza, who repeatedly risked his life to document Israel’s war on Gaza. Stay with us.