Breaking the Silence: Israeli Military 'Shoots First' Then Builds Hamas Justification, Veterans' Group Says

Nadav Weiman did not describe an isolated mistake. He described a system.

The executive director of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli nongovernmental organization founded by former and serving military personnel, told France 24 that the Israeli military routinely kills Palestinians in Gaza and only afterward searches for reasons to justify the deaths as strikes on Hamas members.

"First, we shoot, we kill, and then we think, and then we try to find a reason why it happened," Weiman said.

He called the process "retrospective incrimination." According to Weiman, after a strike, Israeli intelligence obtains the identities of those killed and examines them for possible links to Hamas or other armed groups. He said the justifications that emerge can include a person's proximity to a building identified as belonging to Hamas, a family member's alleged affiliation, or a prior appearance on a payroll list.

"And then the IDF tries to build a case around certain individuals to say 'We attacked because there were Hamas members over there,'" Weiman said.

He cited three examples: Israeli military operations around Nasser Hospital, the killing of 15 paramedics in Rafah, and Gaza air strikes he said caused large numbers of civilian casualties. The Israeli military was not quoted in the France 24 interview responding to these specific allegations, and the claims remain disputed.

Weiman said soldiers carrying out attacks do not have access to the information later cited to justify them. "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," he said. "This is something that we do after we shoot."

Breaking the Silence said soldiers' testimonies collected by the organization point to a broader pattern, not isolated incidents: Palestinians allegedly classified as terrorists after being killed, including people who were unarmed or under 18, according to the group. The organization did not provide specific testimony excerpts or named cases for this claim in the reporting.

The group also said that since October 7, 2023, cameras in Gaza have been treated by the military as potential threats under what it called "permissive rules of engagement," a policy it linked to the high number of journalists killed during the war, with the military's later explanations then used to defend the killings internationally.

Weiman connected the pattern to a search for international cover. "Suddenly the IDF spokesperson in the state of Israel needs to explain to the international community what we did over there," he said, describing the military's aim as seeking "international legitimisation to do what we are doing in Gaza."

Breaking the Silence was founded in 2004 to give Israeli soldiers and reservists a confidential platform to describe their conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories.