Jonathan was doing national service in an infantry platoon when Hamas broke through the Gaza perimeter fence on October 7th 2023, killing 1,195 people and taking more than 200 hostages. His unit was dispatched to secure a kibbutz after Hamas had been driven out. He saw the dead bodies of terrorists lying in the street, the burnt houses and blasted walls, the whole terrible, bloody aftermath. “It was very emotional,” Jonathan told me. “We lost friends and we saw the sights in the kibbutzim. It affected us very much.”

We met in the Tel Aviv offices of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO. It was established in 2004 by former military officers to collect testimony about the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza from the soldiers who enforce it. To date Breaking the Silence has logged testimony from over 6,000 people. The organisation is widely denigrated inside Israel. Right-wing activists have tried to infiltrate it and it has been harassed with lawsuits. Its leaders are often denounced in the Israeli press as “traitors”. 

Nadav Weiman, the executive director, told me that Breaking the Silence is trying to counter the Israeli government’s narrative that atrocities and war crimes were committed only by bad apples. “It’s the entire system,” he said, “It is systematic crimes that we are doing.”