The NGO noted in a report on the subject that the response of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to the attack by the Palestinian Hamas movement on October 7th, 2023 “unleashed a wave of violence that swept the region.” For more than a year, Israel has waged an unrestricted war against the Palestinian people, it stressed.

The organization stated that indiscriminate violence always marked “the approach of the Israeli apartheid regime towards the Palestinians,” although now “it appears in its most direct and exposed form.”

The report documented attacks by Israeli soldiers against residents of the West Bank city of Hebron.

The attack undertaken by Hamas greatly exacerbated the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, with explicit calls for violence and revenge by politicians and opinion leaders, the organization warned.

This strategy attempts to present Palestinians as an undifferentiated mass of enemies, in which causing harm to them is considered not only legitimate but even welcome, said B’Tselem, who criticized this policy and warned that many Israelis have now adopted “the view that every Palestinian is guilty until proven otherwise.”

This approach takes different forms, but its most aggressive manifestation is in Gaza, with extensive and indiscriminate use of lethal weapons in crowded residential areas, denounced the NGO, which condemned the destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass deportations, and the use of hunger as a weapon of war. “All of this is presented to the Israelis as necessary military achievements, the cost of which in human lives is insignificant,” he said.

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