Every day for two months, Michael Ofer Ziv spent hours watching grainy, black-and-white footage of the Gaza Strip from a tiny room across the border.
As an operations commander, he was tracking Israeli forces inside Gaza and approving airstrikes.
Every day, he said, his unit had a certain quota to fill.
“They will tell us, today you have seven, today you have nine… you sometimes argue for more, but you will never fire less than you’re given,” he told CNN in an interview. CNN has reached out to the Israeli military for comment on his claims.
One by one, buildings blew up on his screen like a hypnotic reel of destruction.
At first, it was easy to forget that those images were real, and not just a video game playing on a screen. But the more he stepped out of that war room, the more he was exposed to the reality of those strikes.
One minute, he was looking at soundless footage of airstrikes he ordered; the next, he was on his phone watching unfiltered videos of Palestinians shrieking, carrying their loved ones who had been killed because of the Israeli military.
“This is happening in real life and has an actual effect on those people… at some point, your brain kind of cannot disconnect those two things anymore,” he said.
Once he connected those dots, there was no going back.
Asked for comment, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that Ofer Ziv’s claims around targeting were “baseless, unfounded, and misrepresent the sensitivity, precaution, and strict obligation to international law with which the IDF selects and pursues its targets.”
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