An Israeli veterans’ organization composed of current and former military service members has leveled serious allegations against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), claiming the military routinely carries out lethal strikes on Palestinians in Gaza before retroactively assembling evidence to frame those killed as Hamas affiliates — a practice the group calls “retrospective incrimination.”
Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit founded in 2004 that offers a confidential space for Israeli soldiers to share their on-the-ground experiences in the occupied Palestinian territories, laid out the claims in comments from its executive director Nadav Weiman during an interview with France 24.
Weiman outlined a clear pattern he says emerges from dozens of soldier testimonies collected by his organization: the IDF conducts strikes first, kills targets, and only then launches an effort to dig up links to Hamas or other armed groups to justify the deadly operation. Soldiers executing strikes on the ground, he emphasized, do not possess the affiliation evidence that is later used to defend the attacks to the international community.
“First, we shoot, we kill, and then we think, and then we try to find a reason why it happened,” Weiman stated in the interview. He pointed to multiple high-casualty incidents as examples, including the IDF’s large-scale operations surrounding Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics in Rafah, and multiple air strikes that have left large numbers of civilian non-combatants dead.
Weiman explained that after strikes are completed, Israeli intelligence pulls the identities of all people killed, then analysts comb through records to find any potential connection — no matter how tangential — to armed groups. Common justifications used after the fact, he noted, include the killed person being located near a building the IDF associates with Hamas, having a family member with alleged links to the group, or having previously been listed on a movement payroll. From there, the IDF constructs a narrative to frame the strike as a targeted operation against legitimate military targets.
To illustrate the disconnect between on-ground action and post-strike justification, Weiman drew a comparison to operations around Nasser Hospital: “I don’t think that the tank that fired the tank shells at the hospital had a booklet with 25,000 Hamas members, and they looked photo after photo and said, ‘Ah, there are Hamas members over there’. This is something that we do after we shoot.”
The group says this practice is not a series of isolated mistakes by individual soldiers, but rather the product of intentionally permissive rules of engagement that have opened the door to widespread human rights violations throughout the ongoing Gaza war. The core motivation for the retrospective labeling, Weiman argued, is the Israeli government and military’s desire to secure international legitimacy for their military campaign in Gaza.
“Suddenly the IDF spokesperson in the state of Israel needs to explain to the international community what we did over there, who are the targets for the attack,” Weiman said. “And that’s why I said legitimisation before, because the IDF in the state of Israel wants international legitimisation to do what we are doing in Gaza.”
Soldier testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence show the pattern of post-killing classification as terrorists extends even to unarmed Palestinians and children under the age of 18, the organization confirmed. The group also highlighted another consequence of the current permissive rules of engagement: the IDF has classified any person carrying a camera in Gaza as a potential threat to Israeli forces, treating camera operators as legitimate military targets.
That policy, Breaking the Silence says, directly explains the extraordinarily high death toll among journalists reporting on the war in Gaza. Just as with other civilian deaths, the group claims the IDF has retroactively justified the killing of journalists by linking them to armed groups after the fact to defend its actions to global audiences.
Original reporting for this story was published by Middle East Eye, a media outlet that provides independent coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding global regions.