At that point, Israeli warplanes had already dropped massive quantities of bombs on various targets within the Gaza Strip. The ongoing military campaign has since taken over 10,000 lives in the besieged territory, including more than 4,000 children. This extensive assault has led to a humanitarian crisis, displacing the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents and forcing tens of thousands into a desperate search for food, safety, and water. In the wake of the bombardment, starvation and disease are rampant in Gaza’s devastated areas. Humanitarian organizations express little optimism regarding Israel’s recent decision to allow four-hour “pauses” in operations to enable residents in northern Gaza to relocate southward.
There is extensive discourse on what Israel’s strategy and ultimate objectives may be as it seeks to eliminate the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and eradicate the Islamist militant group from its Gaza strongholds. However, underlying this military approach — and implied in Hagari’s comments about prioritizing damage over precision — is a longstanding Israeli military doctrine that appears to be currently in effect.
The so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” emerged following the devastating 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya refers to the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah maintained its stronghold and which were ravaged by Israeli airstrikes after hostilities erupted when Hezbollah militants abducted two Israeli soldiers. The initial assault caught Hezbollah off guard, as their senior leadership had not anticipated their headquarters being reduced to rubble nor had they prepared for such a relentless onslaught. “I thought we shouldn’t exaggerate, that Israel would only retaliate a little, bomb a few targets, and that would be the end of it,” a Hezbollah operative recounted to former Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid in 2006.
The doctrine that arose from this conflict was most famously articulated by IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot. “We will use disproportionate force against any village from which shots are fired at Israel, inflicting immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases,” he stated in an Israeli newspaper in 2008. “This is not merely a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been sanctioned.”
Around the same period, former Israeli colonel Gabriel Siboni authored a report under the auspices of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, which suggested that the required response to militant actions from Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza should involve “disproportionate” strikes that primarily aim to inflict long-lasting damage rather than solely targeting the enemy’s capacity to launch rockets or other attacks. The objective should be to inflict such extensive destruction that it serves as a future deterrent, regardless of the civilian consequences.
“With the onset of hostilities, the IDF must act swiftly, decisively, and with a force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses,” he wrote. “Such a response aims to inflict damage and punishment to an extent that necessitates long and costly reconstruction efforts.”
This doctrine seemed to be in operation during a conflict between Hamas in Gaza and Israel at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. A U.N.-commissioned report regarding that confrontation, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,400 Palestinians and Israelis, concluded that Israel’s campaign was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to function and to provide for itself, and to impose upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
The doctrine has persisted in the years since. “Israeli military correspondents and security analysts have repeatedly reported that the Dahiya doctrine was Israel’s strategy throughout the war in Gaza this past summer,” noted Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi in the fall of 2014, following another Israeli offensive that left over 1,460 civilians dead, including nearly 500 children. “Let us be frank: this is less of a strategic doctrine than it is a clear outline of collective punishment and potential war crimes.”
He added: “Not surprisingly, one finds little mention of the Dahiya doctrine in statements from U.S. politicians, or in the coverage of the war by most mainstream American media, which focused on characterizing Israel’s actions as ‘self-defense.’”
In the current context, Israel’s right to defend itself has been vigorously championed by legislators and analysts throughout the Western world. In light of the unprecedented scale and horror of the October 7 attack, there appears to be a solid consensus in Israel that its military must take whatever actions are necessary to neutralize Hamas. Accordingly, numerous Israeli political leaders have called for the total destruction of Gaza, the depopulation of the area, and its eventual resettlement by Israel.
Eisenkot is now a member of Israel’s unity “war cabinet.” No Israeli political leader or defense officials have explicitly invoked the “Dahiya doctrine” as a guiding principle for the devastation unleashed in Gaza.
“I do not believe this doctrine applies today,” Siboni, now with the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the French newspaper Le Monde last month, asserting that all of Israel’s current targets are clearly military in nature.
Siboni further stated that Israel’s efforts to encourage Palestinians in northern Gaza to flee south indicated its humanitarian approach. “As for those who remain, too bad,” he remarked to Le Monde. “They choose to put their lives at risk.”
