Israeli soldiers are now speaking out about how they have been ordered to kill men, women, and children in Gaza because “no one counts as a civilian,” “everyone is a terrorist.” They have created a “kill zone” that covers a third of all Gaza’s farmland, where every building has been destroyed and every Palestinian is shot at—for instance, when they come to collect food.

These are some of the most horrifying war stories I have ever read. Just a few weeks ago I heard a Pentecostal pastor claim that Israel does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties and that the International Criminal Court’s charge that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes should not be taken seriously.

But Israeli soldiers themselves say this is happening. Their accounts appear in a report by Breaking the Silence—an Israeli organization founded by combat veterans—and are corroborated by The Guardian, which conducted its own interviews. The existence of the kill zone—where virtually every building has been razed—can also be confirmed by satellite imagery.

These are very real war crimes.

One soldier, Yotam Vilk, recounts how they were ordered to shoot every Palestinian who entered the kill zone. He personally saw twelve people killed, including a teenage boy.

A sergeant in the Israeli army said they were told to kill every man who entered the zone, while women and children were to be driven away with tank fire. Different units seem to have had different rules. One captain said that every person who entered the kill zone “was considered a threat and sentenced to death,” regardless of whether it was a woman or a child.

Another captain described how the pain of Hamas’s horrific terror attack on 7 October 2023 made Israeli soldiers want to inflict the same pain in return:

“[We] set out on this war out of insult, out of pain, out of anger, out of the sense that we had to succeed. This distinction [between civilians and terrorist infrastructure], it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. We decided on a line … past which everyone is a suspect.”

“A lot of us went there, I went there, because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them. And I found out that we’re not only killing them – we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”

Hate breeds more hate, violence breeds more violence. Hamas’s heinous terror attack does not justify Israeli shelling of civilians. There are no winners, no “good” armies in this dreadful war. Let us stand on the side of peace and life in this terrible conflict.