'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza

Summary

Yuval Abraham, reporting for +972 Magazine in partnership with Local Call, argues on the testimony of seven current and former Israeli intelligence members that three connected changes appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7, 2023, and have likely played a role in producing one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948: an expanded authorization to bomb non-military Power targets and family homes, a loosening of the constraints on expected civilian deaths — in one case, Abraham reports, hundreds approved to kill a single top Hamas commander — and the AI system Habsora, which generates targets at a rate earlier operations could not match and which one former intelligence officer described as facilitating a “mass assassination factory” (‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza, lines 86-104).

What the file is

• An investigation in +972 Magazine, in partnership with Local Call, published November 30, 2023 as displayed in the text copy (line 81) and in the original HTML’s structured data (datePublished 2023-11-30), downloaded from https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ (access basis: publisher-free). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (about 7,851 words, lines 1-398 of text with line 399 the empty line after the final line) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
• The article itself runs lines 86-324, under four headed sections after the opening. The rest of the text copy is the page frame: navigation and support prompts (lines 1-66), photo captions throughout, then tags, the author’s biography, a membership appeal whose text belongs to the page as captured after the war continued, and the magazine footing (lines 326-399).
• Text quality: the article’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. Two printed slips are recorded under Open questions, not corrected.

Section by section

• Opening (lines 86-114): the thesis and basis are given above (see Summary). The army’s target files stipulate in advance how many civilians are likely to be killed at each target (line 94). Sources say Habsora lets the army strike homes of even junior Hamas operatives at scale, and that many homes struck had no known or apparent militant resident; in the majority of cases, sources added, no military activity is conducted from the targeted homes (lines 104-106). A senior intelligence officer is reported to have told his officers after October 7 that the goal was to “kill as many Hamas operatives as possible” (line 110), with civilian-harm criteria significantly relaxed and shelling sometimes based on a wide cellular pinpointing to save time. At the time of writing around 15,000 Palestinians had been reported killed, and over 300 families had lost 10 or more members — 15 times the 2014 figure (line 112). A source frames the departure from past protocol as senior officials, aware of their failure on October 7, seeking an image of victory (line 114).
• “‘An excuse to cause destruction’” (lines 116-152): the October 7 attack as the article presents it, on a report by Physicians for Human Rights Israel — more than 840 civilians massacred, 350 soldiers and security personnel killed, around 240 people kidnapped to Gaza, and widespread sexual violence including rape (line 118). Decisionmakers declared a response of a completely different magnitude aimed at totally eradicating Hamas; IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari said on Oct. 9, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” (line 120). Sources divide targets into four categories: tactical targets; underground targets (tunnels under neighborhoods, whose bombing can collapse homes above); Power targets (high-rises, residential towers, universities, banks and government offices, hit to exert “civil pressure” on Hamas, line 128); and family or operatives’ homes, destroyed to assassinate a single suspected Hamas or Islamic Jihad resident — though Palestinian testimonies assert some families killed included no operatives (line 130). In the first five days, 1,329 of 2,687 targets bombed were power targets, on the IDF Spokesperson’s Oct. 11 statements (line 132). Sources describe looking for “high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas” (line 136), the floor being an excuse to cause destruction, a rationale not stated publicly because, the source says, it “would itself be seen as terrorism” (line 138). Until this war, protocols allowed power targets only when empty (line 140). Official tolls: by the Nov. 23 ceasefire 14,800 killed, approximately 6,000 children and 4,000 women, together more than 67 percent, on the Government Media Office in Gaza, which had taken over tolls after the Gaza Health Ministry stopped on Nov. 11 (line 142); the army estimates 1,000 to 3,000 militants killed (line 144). UN data to Nov. 11 (11,078 killed) gives at least 312 families losing 10 or more people, 189 families losing six to nine, and 549 families losing two to five, against 20 families losing 10 or more in 2014 (line 148). The Oct. 13 order to 1.1 million northern residents to move south, and 1.7 million displaced in total on UN figures; Palestinians see the displacement as part of a “new Nakba” (lines 150-152).
• “‘They knocked down a high-rise for the sake of it’” (lines 154-192): in the first five days the army dropped 6,000 bombs weighing about 4,000 tons, on the army’s own account (line 156); Al Mezan documented the bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza, the Palestinian Bar Association, a UN educational building, a Palestine Telecommunications Company building, two ministries, roads and dozens of high-rises and homes (line 158). The Spokesperson distributed before-and-after images of Shuja’iyya (182 power targets struck) and Al-Furqan (312) (line 162); Air Force Chief of Staff Omer Tishler said every attack had a legitimate military target but neighborhoods were attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner” (line 164). Sources say the military element in a power target was often a fig leaf: “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so” (line 166), and that striking the target functions primarily as a “means that allows damage to civil society” (line 170). The Al-Jalaa Tower bombing of May 2021, claimed as a military target, was in fact a power target, sources say (line 174). The section traces the logic to the Dahiya Doctrine of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, developed by former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot (spelled Eizenkot in this source), under which disproportionate force against civilian and government infrastructure is meant to establish deterrence and make civilians pressure the armed groups (lines 178-180); to the first public definition of power targets at the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when four buildings were bombed in the last four days to convey that “nothing is immune anymore” (line 182); to the November 2018 escalation, in which an officer said the attacks were done “without killing anyone” and with evacuation ensured (line 186); and to 2021, when nine power targets were struck, the Spokesperson’s Unit ran a psy-op toward the Israeli public with fake accounts, and, a source concludes, “they knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise” (lines 188-192).
• “‘Everyone was looking for their children in these piles’” (lines 194-226): the current war abandoned the prior rule that power targets be attacked only after evacuation. An AP investigation after 2014 put unarmed residents at about 89 percent of those killed in bombings of family homes, most of them children and women (line 200). Tishler confirmed “roof knocking” is no longer in use “where there is an enemy” (line 202). A source who compiled power targets says they were designed on the assumption of total evacuation taking two to three hours, with phone calls, warning missiles and drone crosschecks, so “the assumption was that the number would always be zero” (lines 204-206). Abraham locates at least two cases of high-rises collapsed without warning and one collapsed on civilians inside (line 208): the Babel Building on Oct. 10, 10 killed including three journalists, on Bilal Abu Hatzira’s testimony (line 212); the 12-story Al-Taj building on Oct. 25, about 120 people buried and resident Yousef Amar Sharaf reporting 37 family members killed (line 214); and the eight-story Al-Mohandseen building on Oct. 31 in Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the supposed safe zone, with between 30 and 45 bodies recovered the first day and journalists estimating over 150 killed (lines 216-218). Amnesty International’s investigation of Oct. 9 — at least three multi-story buildings and a flea market in Jabaliya Refugee Camp shelled, at least 69 killed — is quoted, including a bereaved father’s account (line 220); Amnesty found no mosque in satellite images near the market the army said it had aimed at (line 224). The IDF Spokesperson’s general reply on warnings — “more from 25,000” live conversations as printed, millions of recorded messages, texts and leaflets, and work to reduce civilian harm against an organization that “uses the citizens of Gaza as human shields” — is given in full at line 226.
• “‘The machine produced 100 targets in one day’” (lines 228-264): by Nov. 10, in 35 days, Israel had attacked 15,000 targets, on the IDF Spokesperson’s figure; the comparative figures given based on multiple sources are 1,500 in 11 days in 2021, between 5,266 and 6,231 in 51 days in 2014, about 1,500 in eight days in 2012 and 3,400 in 22 days in 2008 (line 230). Intelligence sources who served in the previous operations said that a rate of 100 to 200 targets a day exhausted targets of military value in 10 days (2021) or three weeks (2014) (line 232). The Nov. 2 Spokesperson statement credits Habsora with producing targets at a fast pace (line 234); sources say it generates automatic recommendations to attack private residences of suspected operatives, processes data “tens of thousands of intelligence officers could not process” (line 242), and, because senior officials go underground, chiefly makes junior operatives’ homes attackable. The “mass assassination factory” passage follows: “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality” (line 244), a human eye going over targets briefly, and approximately 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza all marked for death on Israel’s estimate. The Targets Administrative Division, created in 2019, is described by former Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi: in 2021 “the machine produced 100 targets in one day” (line 250), against times when 50 targets a year were created in Gaza. A source in the division: “It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target.” (line 252). Five sources confirmed the expected civilian deaths appear in each target file under “collateral damage” (line 256); under a general directive of “Collateral Damage 5” all targets killing five or fewer civilians could be acted on (line 258). In the past, a security official says, junior members’ homes were not regularly marked, and a Collateral Damage 5 approval would follow only for a senior commander; today, the source continues, all houses of any operative regardless of rank can be marked — “So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.” (lines 262-264).
• “A concerted policy to bomb family homes” (lines 266-300): Abraham’s friend and colleague Ahmed Alnaouq, founder with him of the Hebrew Facebook page “Across the Wall”, lost 21 family members when the Air Force bombed his family’s home in Deir al-Balah on Oct. 22; none were militants, the youngest was 2 and the oldest 75, and his 12-year-old niece Malak, the only one to survive the strike, was left in critical condition, her body covered in burns, and died a few days later (lines 268-272). His last message to the family WhatsApp group “Better Together” — “Someone let me know that everything is fine” — went unanswered (line 276). Hospital heads describe families arriving as successions of corpses (line 278). Former officers say homes are attacked when the operative enters, with family and neighbor deaths known and calculated in advance, and in the majority of cases no military activity from the home (line 280); +972 and Local Call have no data on how many operatives such strikes killed, and ample evidence that in many cases none were present (line 282). On Oct. 10 an apartment building in Sheikh Radwan was bombed, killing 40, most of them women and children; Amnesty found a Hamas member lived on an upper floor but was not present (lines 284-288). The concerted policy is dated to Operation Protective Edge: 606 Palestinians, about a quarter of that war’s civilian deaths, were members of families whose homes were bombed, a pattern a 2015 UN report called both a potential war crime and “a new pattern” that “led to the death of entire families” (line 290). Babies killed in family-home bombings: 93 in 2014, 13 of them under 1; 286 babies aged 1 or under already identified killed by the Health Ministry’s Oct. 26 ID list (line 292). Homes were also struck with no known or clear military target (line 294); the Committee to Protect Journalists count of 50 Palestinian journalists killed by Nov. 29 includes journalists killed at home — Roshdi Sarraj of Ain Media, Salam Mema, Duaa Sharaf and Salma Makhaimer, named with their children (lines 294-296). Two weeks in, after 1,903 children, approximately 1,000 women and 187 elderly men had been counted dead, commentator Avi Issacharoff tweeted that Hamas’s military arm did not appear significantly harmed, the most significant leadership damage being the assassination of Ayman Nofal (line 300).
• “‘Fighting human animals’” (lines 302-324): tunnels under homes and roads mean attempts to destroy them are in many cases likely to kill civilians (line 304); intelligence officers say Hamas designed the network knowingly exploiting the population above, claims that also underlay the campaign around Al-Shifa Hospital (line 306). Israel also attacked many military targets, and experts in international law say such targets are legitimate if strikes comply with proportionality (line 308). The IDF Spokesperson’s statement is quoted: the IDF “attacks military targets and does not attack civilians”, and Hamas “systematically uses the civilian population as a human shield” (line 310). Sources similarly claim Hamas deliberately endangers civilians and prevents evacuation, and two say its leaders understand Israeli harm to civilians gives them legitimacy (line 312). The closing history: in 2002 the bombing that killed Al-Qassam Brigades head Salah Mustafa Muhammad Shehade, his wife Eman, his daughter Laila, 14 other civilians including 11 children caused public uproar and war-crimes accusations (line 316); in 2003 a quarter-ton bomb was chosen for a meeting including Mohammed Deif from fear of civilian deaths, on Shlomi Eldar’s To Know Hamas (line 318); in December 2008 Yoav Gallant, then heading Southern Command, said Israel was “hitting the family homes” of senior officials to destroy them but not harm families, after roof-knock and phone warnings and where military activity took place inside (line 320); after 2014 B’Tselem collected survivors’ testimonies of homes collapsing, glass cutting bodies, debris that “smells of blood” and people buried alive (line 322). The policy continues, Abraham closes, through destructive weaponry and Habsora and a loosened political and security establishment; Gallant, now Defense Minister, said after October 7, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly” (line 324).

Key passages

• “Nothing happens by accident” (line 100)
• “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.” (line 100)
• “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” (line 120)
• “We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas” (line 136)
• “means that allows damage to civil society” (line 170)
• “they knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise” (line 192)
• “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality” (line 244)
• “This is a machine that, with the help of AI, processes a lot of data better and faster than any human, and translates it into targets for attack” (line 250)
• “So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.” (line 264)
• “Someone let me know that everything is fine” (line 276)
• “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly” (line 324)

Evidence the work relies on

• Conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community, including military intelligence and air force personnel involved in operations in Gaza, speaking — several of them — on condition of anonymity (line 88, line 94).
• Palestinian testimonies, data and documentation from Gaza, named in the piece at specific points: Bilal Abu Hatzira on the Babel Building (line 212), residents of Al-Taj including Yousef Amar Sharaf’s post on X (line 214), residents’ testimonies on Al-Mohandseen (lines 216-218), and Ahmed Alnaouq’s family WhatsApp group (line 276).
• Official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions (line 88): the Oct. 11 target figures (line 132), the before-and-after distribution and power-target counts for Shuja’iyya and Al-Furqan (line 162), the Nov. 2 Habsora statement with a senior intelligence official quoted in it (lines 234-238), the Nov. 10 total of 15,000 targets (line 230), and the Spokesperson’s two general replies, on warnings (line 226) and on international law and human shields (line 310). Statements to military reporters by Omer Tishler (lines 164, 202) and a 2018 Air Force officer (line 186) are likewise presented as official accounts.
• Tolls and counts as the piece credits them: the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Gaza Health Ministry for the dead to Nov. 23 (line 142) and the Oct. 26 ID list (line 292); UN data for family losses and displacement (lines 148, 152); the army’s estimate of militants killed (line 144); and AP’s post-2014 investigation for the 89 percent figure (line 200).
• Investigations and reports by other organizations as the piece presents them: Physicians for Human Rights Israel’s report for the October 7 figures (line 118), Al Mezan for the institutions bombed and neighborhood destruction (lines 156-158), Amnesty International for its late-2014 power-target report (line 182), its Oct. 9 Jabaliya investigation (lines 220-224) and its Sheikh Radwan investigation (line 288), the UN’s 2015 report on family homes in 2014 (line 290), B’Tselem’s survivor testimonies after 2014 (line 322), the Committee to Protect Journalists for journalists killed (line 294), and Haaretz for the 2021 psy-op (line 188).
• Named public statements and writings: Aviv Kochavi’s in-depth Ynet interview and a senior target-bank official in the Jerusalem Post, both earlier in 2023 (lines 246-254); Avi Issacharoff’s tweet at day 14 (line 300); Shlomi Eldar’s book To Know Hamas for the 2003 bomb decision (line 318); and Yoav Gallant’s December 2008 statement and his post-October 7 statement (lines 320, 324).

Analysis

• Method: an investigation built chiefly on insider testimony. Seven intelligence-community sources, most anonymous, supply the mechanism — target categories, target files with pre-calculated civilian deaths, collateral-damage degrees, and the Habsora production line — while Palestinian testimonies and rights-group investigations supply the named cases, and official statements are quoted against the sources’ account rather than taken as settling it (the Spokesperson’s replies are reproduced in full at lines 226 and 310).
• Perspective: Abraham writes as a journalist, and inside the story at one point — Ahmed Alnaouq is his friend and co-founder of “Across the Wall” (line 268) — which the piece states openly. The sources critical of the practice are quoted in their own terms, including their comparisons to what Palestinian militants bombing Israeli soldiers’ family homes would mean (line 106).
• Limits, on the piece’s own terms: the central sources are anonymous and cannot be checked from the piece; the magazines state they have no data on how many operatives residence strikes actually killed or wounded (line 282); several tolls rest on Gaza authorities whose figures the piece itself notes fall under the Hamas government, while noting they do not deviate significantly from Israeli estimates (line 142); the estimates of militants killed span a wide range, 1,000 to 3,000 (line 144); the high-rise cases in lines 208-218 rest on evidence and testimonies the piece summarizes, and at line 208 the piece says of some high-rises toppled without warning in general, “which we assume to have been power targets”, a phrase it does not apply to the Al-Taj and Al-Mohandseen buildings specifically; and the piece is dated November 30, 2023, covering the war’s initial stages, so its figures are those available then.

People, organizations, places and events

Yuval Abraham, Daniel Hagari, Omer Tishler, Gadi Eisenkot, Aviv Kochavi, Ahmed Alnaouq, Bilal Abu Hatzira, Roshdi Sarraj, Yoav Gallant, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, +972 Magazine, Local Call, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Israel Defense Forces, Al Mezan, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Committee to Protect Journalists, Targets Administrative Division, Islamic University of Gaza, Al-Jalaa Tower, Gaza, Gaza City, Jabalia, Nuseirat camp, Khan Younis, Operation Iron Swords, Operation Protective Edge, Operation Cast Lead

Concepts

Power targets, Habsora, Dahiyeh Doctrine, Disproportionate Force, Nakba, Human shields

How it relates to other sources

• A Textbook Case of Genocide quotes the same Gallant sentence with which Abraham closes — Segal gives the fuller “complete siege” order of October 9, Abraham the shorter form as his closing line — and Segal’s bomb figure for the war’s first week, more than 6,000 bombs, is the Air Force account Abraham also gives for the first five days, with a weight of about 4,000 tons (lines 120, 156, 324). Segal argues from stated intent; Abraham documents a targeting mechanism, from intelligence sources, that made the scale possible.
• Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War prescribes in 2008 the disproportionate strike against centers of civilian power as doctrine, without the Dahiyeh name; Abraham presents the Dahiyeh Doctrine as formulated practice from 2006 and the power-target system as its Gaza application, and reports in 2023 a target-production rate Siboni’s framework did not contemplate. ‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict record that Israel had refrained from adopting the ‘Dahya concept’; Abraham’s sources describe power targets publicly defined at the end of that same 2014 war and expanded thereafter. Both accounts stand on the doctrine pages.
• Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025 disputes the genocide charge for this war and, on Operation Protective Edge, answers the AP family-homes investigation Abraham cites for its 89 percent figure: where Abraham reports the AP conclusion, Orbach et al. hold the AP cases were not representative and that later identification showed concealed fighters among the dead. The disagreement stands, attributed, on the operation page; Abraham’s piece predates that work and does not engage it.
• The membership appeal in the page frame as captured (lines 360-366) speaks of “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza”, language belonging to the frame, not to Abraham’s article, which does not itself use the word genocide for the campaign it documents.

Open questions

• Two family-loss figures stand at different points: the opening gives over 300 families losing 10 or more members in the past two months, 15 times the 2014 figure (line 112), while the UN data to Nov. 11 gives at least 312 such families against 20 in 2014 (line 148). The piece does not reconcile the two datings; both are recorded as given.
• The IDF Spokesperson’s warnings reply says “there were more from 25,000 live conversations during the war” (line 226), as printed; the wording is recorded as printed, not corrected to a conjectured reading.
• At line 230 the name Cast Lead is followed by a closing quotation mark with no opening mark before it, as printed.
• The photo caption at line 67 prints “several location” for “several locations”, as printed.
• The Shaaban family caption (line 286) dates the removal of the six bodies to October 9, 2023, while the text’s Sheikh Radwan apartment-building bombing in which a resident lost 19 family members is dated Oct. 10 (lines 284-288); the piece does not say whether these are the same strike, and both dates are recorded as printed.
• The piece gives the army’s militant-kill estimate as between 1,000 and 3,000 (line 144) and states the magazines have no data on operatives killed in residence strikes (line 282); how many of the residence strikes hit their stated target is left open by the piece itself.
• Abraham spells the doctrine’s developer “Gadi Eizenkot” (line 180); other ingested sources spell the name Eisenkot (see Gadi Eisenkot). Both spellings are recorded.

Coverage

lines 1-399 of 399, read in full.