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<\/picture>\nGaza has become a killing field\u2014that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Colonel Kurtz, the psychotic killer of Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s\u00a0Apocalypse Now<\/em>, the famed Vietnam War movie of 1979 based on Joseph Conrad\u2019s 1899 novella\u00a0Heart of Darkness<\/em>.<\/p>\n What began as a retaliatory war by the internationally revered Israel Defense Forces against a disciplined Hamas guerilla force turned into the systematic starvation of a society whose civilian survivors\u2014men, women, and children\u2014are the victims of an Israeli military whose combat units are often led by the second generation of Israeli settlers. These officers, increasingly prominent as the war in Gaza goes on, are religious zealot majors and lieutenant colonels who believe it is their calling to shoot and kill any Palestinian who moves, whether combatant or civilian.<\/p>\n There are more than 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including fifteen in East Jerusalem. There are also more than two hundred illegal outposts that are supplied with weapons by the increasingly radical Israeli government while not officially sanctioned by that government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.<\/p>\n The IDF recruiting pattern explains the growing violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in the war. I was told that 40 to 45 percent of today\u2019s higher officers in the IDF come from settler families in the West Bank who combine \u201cdeep religiosity with Netanyahu\u2019s political fervor.\u2019\u2019 The Israeli veteran told me of watching in horror, with colleagues, as Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery were continuing to, as he put it, \u201clevel\u201d north Gaza and turn it into a dead zone. He said that there \u201chave been more and more reports of colonels and even generals issuing orders to kill every Palestinian you see and destroy every building still standing. Israel\u2019s war in Gaza has become fanatical. It\u2019s apocalypse now. Killing for killing\u2019s sake. It is corruption like never before.\u201d<\/p>\n
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