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When Soldiers Confess and Politicians Pretend Not to Hear

 


By Malik Mukhtar

At last, a green shoot of conscience cracked open the sidewalk of British politics.
The UK Green Party, in an act that history may one day see as moral clarity, voted to recognize the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as what the victims and sometimes the perpetrators themselves have long whispered—a terrorist organization.

Predictably, the powerful will roll their eyes, invoking “complexity” and “context” as though the act of leveling hospitals, blockading entire populations, and bombing refugee areas  a PhD in nuance to recognize. But the Greens did something far simpler: they listened—not to spin doctors or diplomats, but to the voices that Israel’s military establishment often tries to silence: its own soldiers.

“We shot anything that moved.”

That phrase did not come from a Hamas fighter.
It came from an IDF combat veteran, recorded by Breaking the Silence, the Israeli veterans’ group dedicated to exposing what its members saw in uniform.¹

One soldier described how Gaza operations were ordered with “insane firepower,” and another confessed: *“You see someone running in an area you were told no one should be — you shoot. Whether kid, woman, whoever — you shoot.”*¹

A sniper recounted being ordered to fire on a Palestinian mother with her child, “because command wanted deterrence.”¹ A tank operator admitted to “leveling houses with families inside” simply because “it was easier than checking.”¹

These are not rumors. These are testimonies sworn not by an enemy or by rumor-mongers, but by those who wore the uniform.

The Terror We Sanitize

When a non-state group kills civilians, we cry “terrorist.”
When a state with jet fighters, diplomatic immunity, and lobbyists does similar or worse, we call it defense.



The IDF is perhaps the only military in history that bombs hospitals while delivering moral lectures about how precise its strikes are.



 It starves 2.3 million people behind fences, drops leaflets telling them to evacuate, then bombs the evacuation routes. It bulldozes neighborhoods while calling them “combat zones,” jails poets, kills journalists, and buries paramedics in ambulances.

Yet we don’t call that terror — not officially — because that word is reserved for those without uniforms, without tanks, without the imprimatur of “legitimacy.”

When the Green Party stood up in Bournemouth and declared, “Enough,” it was not a radical gesture. It was reality spoken aloud.
Their call to proscribe the IDF under the UK Terrorism Act was not violence; it was the language of exhausted decency—the decency that defined postwar moral politics before it got hijacked by strategic partnerships and arms deals.



The Soldiers’ Gospel of Horror

The Breaking the Silence testimony archive is a kind of spiritual exorcism. A paratrooper recalls watching a child bleed because “no medic could cross the line.”² A commander remembers a slogan painted on a tank: *“No Arabs, No Problems.”*² A veteran admits: *“We destroyed entire neighborhoods just to prove we could.”*²

In one 2025 report titled The Perimeter, soldiers testified that during operations following the Hamas October 2023 attack, units were ordered to raze large swaths of land along the Gaza-Israel border, turning them into a “kill zone” in which *“anybody who entered was a target.”*³ One soldier said, “We didn’t know a lot about the places we were destroying or why.”³ Another said the buffer zone operations effectively destroyed entire civilian infrastructures: homes, factories, fields.³

Other testimonies reveal that Israeli forces used Palestinians as human shields—forced to enter booby-trapped buildings, dressed in Israeli uniforms, tied and sent ahead of soldier units to clear houses.⁴ This was not isolated; veterans told media the practice was so widespread it resembled a protocol.⁴

The Hannibal Directive—an IDF policy for violent hostage retrieval—was also confessed by soldiers as a free-for-all fire order. One infantry officer recounted: “You fire at every suspicious place … you don’t spare any means.”⁵ An artillery battery admitted shelling inhabited zones for hours.⁵

These are not wild conspiracy tales. These are soldiers’ confessions, many collected by Breaking the Silence, an NGO founded by Israeli veterans in 2004 precisely to record such testimonies.⁶

A Green Light of Conscience

So when the Green Party stood and said “Enough,” it did more than pass a motion. It opened a rift in a political culture that equates “strategic partner” with “exempt from moral accountability.”

Their motion demanded:

  • a formal UK apology for the Balfour Declaration,
  • a UN peacekeeping force in Gaza and the West Bank,
  • a full arms embargo on Israel,
  • suspension of British training of Israeli soldiers,
  • support for ICJ/ICC genocide charges against Israel,
  • the proscription of the IDF itself.⁷

They asked Britain to confront its own reflection and stop pretending that the reflection is a friendly face.

The establishment will call them naïve.
But history may call them essential.

Because when the soldiers confess and the powerful pretend not to hear, the silence becomes the accomplice.



If truth still matters in a world numbed by propaganda, then the Green Party just did what every moral government should have done as soon as Israeli soldiers began confessing:
They stopped pretending not to hear the screams.



Footnotes / References

  1. Breaking the Silence, “Testimonies (video and statements)” — soldiers’ confessions about Gaza and West Bank operations.
    URL: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database & video testimonies pages

  2. Breaking the Silence, “Public testimonies / Selected publications” — testimonies about occupation, combat, and harm to civilians.
    URL: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/publications

  3. The Perimeter report by Breaking the Silence (2025) — soldiers’ accounts of destruction, buffer zones, “kill zones.”
    URL: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/inside/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Perimeter_English-2.pdf
    Also reported by The Guardian on Gaza perimeter destruction.

  4. Reports and testimonies on use of human shields, military-induced civilian advance, forced use of Palestinians in dangerous operations.
    URL: Guardian article “Israeli forces in Gaza ‘use civilians as human shields’”
    And additional BTs testimonies and Haaretz coverage cited by Breaking the Silence.

  5. Hannibal Directive soldier testimonies recorded and referenced in Breaking the Silence / other veteran reports.
    URL (Wikipedia summary): Hannibal Directive page includes soldier accounts referencing Breaking the Silence and testimony about fire orders.

  6. Breaking the Silence (organization background) — founded in 2004 to allow veterans to recount their experiences in the occupied territories.
    URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Silence_%28organization%29

  7. Green Party motion text—calls for proscribing the IDF, arms embargo, apology, UN force, etc.
    URL: Bright Green article summarizing the motion passed at conference.


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