Israeli Military Actions in Gaza

The film you will not see on the BBC or

CNN or any other Western media. The Israeli army enters this

town just after Christmas. It's emptied of people.

They go into the homes of Palestinians, and they're often clearly

staying there, and they just smash them up,

and they film themselves smashing them

up. They also delight in going through women's

underwear drawers, and this is a sort of recurring obsession.

You have to see Israeli soldier videos in the context of the

broader output of Israeli society.

If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every

single living being in Gaza would no longer

be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second.

I would press it right now. Give me that button. I'd press it right now.

There you go.

And I think most Israelis would.

We're not looking at some sort of obscure subculture

within Israeli society. This is mainstream Israeli

society.

It's an entire nation out there

that is responsible, and we will fight until we'll break their

backbone.

It's astonishing what Israeli soldiers do put on

film. But that raises the question of what they

don't put on

film. You very rarely see them actually

fighting.

Every now and then you'll see them all firing their guns.

But usually pretty clear there's no incoming.

On the other hand, what you see a great deal of

is them dressing up in women's

underwear. Has Israel managed to destroy Hamas?

I would point to a really simple, common sense thing.

Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos online.

The IDF, the Israeli army, repeatedly posts

videos online. Scour those videos for the

bodies of dead fighters, and there's remarkably few.

I remember twenty years ago in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell before the age of

social media, and I remember making films about that,

footage with piles of

corpses. It's extraordinary how few dead Hamas

fighters we

are seeing. Another extraordinary facet of this

conflict is the repeated attacks on hospitals.

They have assaulted every single one of the thirty-six hospitals

in the Gaza Strip. We have the films of Mohammed Al-Halou,

a remarkable young journalist who really chronicled the whole story of the Nasser

Hospital. The Israelis are very keen to drive people taking

refuge in the hospital out to force them further south.

They send a messenger into the hospital to order the

people there to leave, and they use a detainee,

and they've made it quite

clear to him they know who his mother is, where she is, and that she will be

killed if he does not return. So he does return.

They send him back because the people still aren't leaving.

People aren't leaving because they don't trust the Israelis.

One of the few people who does leave is his mother.

She follows him out with a small group of other people, and he's killed in front of

her eyes. Having used him as a messenger, as a human shield.