An explosive exposé by Haaretz reporters featured testimonies from IDF soldiers and officers in which they recounted how they were ordered to use live fire to disperse thousands of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza waiting for humanitarian aid.
The story grabbed international attention, and sparked fury among top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, who both called the article a "blood libel."
On the Haaretz Podcast, one of the three journalists who wrote the story, Nir Hasson, takes listeners behind the scenes of his reporting, explaining why IDF soldiers decided to speak to him and his fellow journalists.
The soldiers' motivations, he said, were two-fold. First the "moral issue" of being put in the position to use deadly force to stop "hungry people trying to get some food for their family" disturbed them.
"The second thing they spoke about was the fact that this was not the IDF that they used to know. These were not the values of the army that these reservists used to serve in," Hasson said. "They told me: This is not the way a professional army deals with a civil population. They were very angry at their commanders for telling them to use this kind of tool to control a crowd," and those officers even refused to employ non-lethal methods like tear gas.
