What is Israel’s ‘most moral army in the world’ doing in Gaza?

Accusations of shooting civilians at will have led some observers to conclude that Israeli soldiers are ‘gamifying’ war.

The Israeli military, which styles itself as the “most moral army in the world”, may be routinely committing war crimes, according to analysts in Israel and doctors who have worked in Gaza.

While killings, beatings and the arbitrary arrest of Palestinians are not new to the Israeli army, a long process of dehumanisation, the infiltration of far-right ideologies in the army and a lack of accountability have led to a scenario where Israeli soldiers can do as they please without even needing an operational reason, analysts said.

“As far as I can see, this is a new phenomenon,” Erella Grassiani of the University of Amsterdam, who has written on what she referred to as the moral “numbing” of Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada of 2000.

“It’s not as if Israeli soldiers haven’t beaten and arrested children for throwing stones before, but this is new,” she said.

“Previously, there were some kind of rules of engagement, even if they were loosely followed, but they were there. What we’re seeing now is completely different,” she said.

Accusations of casual brutality by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the occupied West Bank, are longstanding.

Israeli soldiers have posted social media videos of themselves wearing the dresses of women whose homes they have raided, or playing with their underwear.

In early August, the BBC investigated the cases of Israeli soldiers killing children in Gaza. Of the 160 cases examined, 95 children had been shot in the head or the chest – shots that could not be claimed as “intended to wound only”.

In addition to killing children, there are accounts suggesting that Israeli soldiers have been using the civilians who gather around aid distribution sites run by the self-styled GHF for target practice.

“The GHF sites are set up as death traps,” British surgeon Nick Maynard, who returned in July from his third trip to Gaza since the war began, told media.

“They’re compounds containing enough food for a family to eat for a few days, but not for all of the thousands of people they keep waiting outside. They then open the gates and let the chaos, fighting and even rioting happen, which they then use as a justification to fire into the crowd,” he said.

The nature of the shooting became clear to the doctors and emergency room medics at nearby Nasser Hospital, where Maynard was working.

War as sport

Wound grouping refers to the phenomenon where several patients present with an injury to the same part of their body. The following day, many patients come in with a wound on a different part of the body, suggesting to Maynard that Israeli snipers were either playing or using civilians to improve their aim, as he told Sky News previously.

An investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 in July 2024 painted a bleak picture of Israeli soldiers with no restrictions on their ability to shoot at civilians in Gaza.

“There was total freedom,” a soldier who served in Gaza for months told +972. “If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain – you just shoot … it is permissible to shoot at their centre of mass [their body], not into the air”, the anonymous soldier continued.

“It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”

Of the 52 probes that the Israeli army said it carried out into crimes it has been accused of committing in Gaza or the West Bank between October 2023 and June 2025, 88 percent were stalled or were closed with no action taken, according to a study by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).

Only one had resulted in a prison sentence against the accused.

According to AOAV, the 52 cases they examined involved the killing of 1,303 people, the wounding of 1,880 people and the reported torture of two more.

Even when there was footage of an incident, such as what appeared to be the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman Israeli prison facility, public pressure, including from members of the Israeli cabinet, led to the accused’s eventual release.

Accusations that the Israeli army routinely tortures Palestinians date back to at least 1967, when the Red Crescent documented the systematic torture of prisoners in Nablus Prison in the West Bank.