Thoughts on this oped from Foreign Policy??
Read the beginning paragraphs at the link above- The author’s claimed impetus for the culture shift is explained.
Under the leadership of the military’s chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, from 2019 to 2023, the killing-based criteria were reinforced. Kochavi’s goal was to remake the army into a “lethal, efficient, and innovative” fighting force—in other words, a death-generating army. He promoted this vision by enhancing the precision of weapon systems, improving the coordination between forces and intelligence, and increasing the rate of fire.
Kochavi’s directive for field commanders to assess, at the end of each combat phase, the number of enemy forces killed and objectives destroyed—rather than solely focusing on territorial conquest—signified a shift toward necrotactics, where the primary goal of military engagement is killing the enemy. Killing becomes not just an outcome of warfare but its principal aim.
The approach of using body counts as a metric of success has notably intensified during the current war. Soon after the Oct. 7 attack, the Israeli military began consistently reporting the number of Hamas fighters killed, echoing the way U.S. generals announced enemy fatalities during the Vietnam War—a scenario where traditional metrics for evaluating combat success are elusive, thus making the body count, rather than the strategic objectives achieved, the primary indicator of success. This was particularly evident as the Israeli death toll ticked up and the stated objective of dismantling Hamas appeared increasingly unattainable.
In fact, the military appears to have established a quantitative goal from the outset. According to the journalist Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, the Israeli army developed an artificial intelligence-based program named Lavender, designed to identify targets for assassination. This system tagged approximately 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza as suspected militants, marking their residences (and therefore their families as well) for potential airstrikes. The deployment of Lavender contributed to the deaths of around 15,000 Palestinians in the war’s first six weeks, according to the report.
By setting a numerical target, the Israeli military shifted from viewing outcomes as a measure of progress—like neutralizing the threat posed to Israel from Gaza—to making body counts the main standard.The trend has been reinforced by a pervasive adoption of the language of killing among military commanders. “Now we will go forward and kill them all,” Brig. Gen. Roman Goffman was quoted as saying just before the ground operation in Gaza began, in just one prominent example.
As Israel faces an impasse in Gaza, lacking a politically articulated exit strategy, the reliance on killing and its quantification as a metric for success becomes increasingly pronounced, leading to the erosion of operational constraints. This shift was evident in the recent raid at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which inflicted extensive damage to Gaza’s most crucial health care infrastructure. The hunt for Hamas members has, to a significant degree, become an end in itself, complicating the dynamics of the conflict and placing military objectives above political resolutions.
This shift provides some context for the tragic killing of the aid convoy team—though it makes it no less disturbing. Once one or two armed individuals were spotted in the convoy, their neutralization became a top priority, apparently eclipsing overarching strategic considerations—factors that should have been incorporated at the tactical level. Fundamentally, such a situation warranted an approach aimed at preventing civilian casualties, especially along a deconflicted route designated for humanitarian aid delivery and when no direct threat was posed to Israeli troops. Moreover, the overarching political rationale should have prioritized safeguarding humanitarian missions, given the potential repercussions for Israel’s global standing amid the crisis in Gaza.
4 replies on “How a Culture Shift in the Israeli Military Helps Explain Gaza’s Death Toll”
This ‘culture shift’ in the IDF appears to be but an exercise in semantics. The object of warfare is always the destruction of the opponents will to resist by causing casualties. The stated goal was the elimination of Hamas fighters but since progress on that goal is hard to achieve and harder to document there is a shift to the supposed tabulation of overall population casualties in the expectation that these will adversely effect the opponent’s will to fight. This ‘shift’ in language indicates a lack of strategic success or an absence of clear, achievable strategic goals.
It was the same with the US in the Vietnam war where lack of strategic vision and advances turned the narrative into one defining ‘progress’ as grinding attrition in the pursuit of ‘victory’ through enemy exhaustion. It didn’t work there and won’t work now where the strength of the human spirit to resist is greater than the cumulative impact of military hardware and the resulting casualties.
This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’ is but the extension of war propaganda designed to emulate conquest and buttress morale on the ‘home front’, both ‘national’ and ‘international’ and in the army.
I think you hit the nail on the head Mark!
1-The object of warfare is always the destruction of the opponents will to resist by causing casualties.
2 This ‘shift’ in language indicates a lack of strategic success or an absence of clear, achievable strategic goals.
3-This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’ is but the extension of war propaganda designed to emulate conquest and buttress morale on the ‘home front’, both ‘national’ and ‘international’ and in the army.
I’ve been having troubles with the let’s blame AI for what going on. (This came out after the very obvious and intentional killing of the aid workers)
It felt like a way to shift blame from human to machine-
“This ‘culture shift’ besides laying bare the absence of advanced humanitarian ‘culture’”
See there it is. The culture shift that makes clear there is no humanitarianism involved and yet makes it okay to keep up the killing.
I don’t like it. It has very bad, broader ramifications
Wait what, Are they blaming AI ?
That is some next-level pulling the wool over your eyes. I am not fully versed in the type of AI they are using, but can’t be more than some sort of pattern matching with data from multiple sources.
And this process is not perfect, because you can’t account for all the edge cases etc. (I doubt they even tried to calibrate for 100% certainty)
But in the end I suspect in these cases, the target should still be validated by an officer. It this is not done and they only have yes-man. Than the responsibility lies on the office and officers. (And the developers of that AI, because they most have convinced someone to get funded to build such a system)
Hey Kaz
The AI is the Lavender System
“the Israeli army developed an artificial intelligence-based program named Lavender, designed to identify targets for assassination”
“The deployment of Lavender contributed to the deaths of around 15,000 Palestinians in the war’s first six weeks”
Lavender was used when the humanitarian workers were killed.
There seems to be this attempt to blame the AI for all the civilian deaths, but, from my reading, yes I believe these killings were still supposed to be validated and were validated by humans.
The media spin is attempting to portray the killings as the cold calculated death by AI, rather than the IDF and Israeli policies