The Israeli general who headed military intelligence on 7 October 2023 has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and “it does not matter now if they are children”, in recordings broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 TV station.
Aharon Haliva said the toll in Gaza, which he put at more than 50,000 dead, was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians.
“They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price,” he added, referring to the mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel in 1948. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic.
Much of Israel’s leadership and media has used genocidal rhetoric about Palestinians since Hamas’s 7 October attacks, including describing them as “human animals”, saying there are “no innocents” in Gaza and calling for Gaza’s total destruction and its ethnic cleansing.
However, Haliva’s description of a campaign of mass killing including children was an unusually direct description of collective punishment of civilians, which is illegal under international law.
Haliva, who stepped down from his position in April 2024, also appeared to endorse the casualty figures compiled by health authorities in Gaza, which Israeli officials regularly attack as propaganda. They have proved reliable in past conflicts.
Channel 12 said the undated conversations were recorded “in recent months”. The Gaza health ministry’s toll for those killed by Israeli attacks passed 50,000 in March and has recently climbed above 60,000.
Israel’s most recent published data on the war put the number of militants killed at about 20,000, so Haliva would have been aware that even by his country’s own count most of the Palestinians killed were civilians.
“The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,” he said in the broadcast comments. “For everything that happened on October 7th, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”
About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led cross-border attacks, the majority of them civilians, and 250 were taken hostage to Gaza.
Channel 12 did not clarify how it had obtained the recordings or who Haliva was speaking with. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper described the recordings as a format that allowed the retired officer to “give an interview … without actually being interviewed”.
Haliva’s comments about mass killings of Palestinian civilians did not make headlines in other mainstream Israeli outlets. They focused instead on his criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and warnings of systemic failures in security and intelligence.
That coverage highlighted the vast gulf between how the war is perceived and discussed inside Israel’s borders and beyond them.
Among Israelis, Haliva is widely seen as a centrist critic of the current government and its far-right ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as the general himself noted in the broadcast comments.
He quoted an internal critic at the intelligence directorate telling him it was “lucky” that many of those killed and kidnapped on 7 October 2023 were leftwing Israelis linked to peace movements.
“He told me: ‘If this had happened to us, the right, you wouldn’t have gone to war like this,’” Haliva said. “That’s what people believe here.”
Quique Kierszenbaum contributed to this report
