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Ask Haviv Anything

Episode 77: Did Israel intentionally target civilians in Gaza?

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.91K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.


Our current question: Did Israel intentionally target civilians in Gaza?


If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.


If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at haviv@askhavivanything.com⁠.


Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The next question is a very difficult one.

0:07.0

Not a difficult one to answer, a difficult one to answer and be heard.

0:13.0

Did Israel intentionally target Palestinian civilians in Gaza?

0:19.0

I know the answer. I also know all the caveats to that answer, and they're significant and painful.

0:25.7

I also have a great deal of love and respect for soldiers who walked into fire for me and my children.

0:31.2

And in every report that comes out of organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International,

0:36.5

when you talk to the actual writers of the report, we'll explain to you that they're out to

0:39.9

dismantle Israel as a state.

0:41.9

It took Amnesty two years to publish a report on October 7, on October 7th.

0:47.3

And so inside this maelstrom of libel, speaking into this campaign, honestly, isn't easy. I'm going to try and do it.

0:57.5

War is terrible. War is evil. War is hell. In Gaza, we had a war fought inside a civilian

1:05.1

population, in cities. This is the defensive part of my point. I'll get to the place where I'm critical.

1:12.8

We faced an enemy that had dug a tunnel system underneath a civilian population at a scale never before seen in war.

1:20.0

This was the most comprehensive bomb shelter system ever built.

1:23.6

500, 600 kilometers of tunnels under a 40 kilometer territory.

1:27.2

There wasn't a street or a neighborhood that didn't have a tunnel crisscrossing it one way or another in Gaza. Part of the demolition that you see in Gaza that's resulted from the Israeli war was, A, the strategy of constant raiding, going in and leaving, going in and leaving, in part to minimize civilian harm, and in part because the Israelis didn't want to undertake a military occupation. I don't know if that was a wise decision or a terrible decision, but that's the decision. But part of it was because they tried to get to tunnels everywhere, because every third building they encountered was booby-trapped, because tunnel entrances, thousands of tunnel shafts were booby-trapped. It's no small thing that Hamas remains. It's no small thing that the

2:01.2

Israeli war ended with the hostages brought home. And now there's no Israeli taste for more war.

2:07.1

Netanyahu might embark on another war in Gaza, but the Israeli public doesn't want one. We have

2:12.0

good polling on this. As soon as our people are back, we're done.

2:15.1

Hamas wouldn't return the hostages for all of that time, all of those two years.

2:21.1

The very fact that Hamas was willing to watch Gaza's destruction, to create, to engineer

2:26.0

Gaza's destruction on the altar of Israel's destruction, made Hamas an undeterrable enemy,

...

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