A former Israeli soldier says serving in the last Gaza invasion made him an 'antiwar' activist

• A veteran of the Israel Defense Forces says serving in the 2014 Gaza war made him a peace activist.
• Benzion Sanders, writing in The New York Times, said he was shocked at the civilian death toll.

The last time Israel sent ground troops into the Gaza Strip, back in 2014, it was with the stated aim of preventing rockets from being fired at Israeli cities and knocking out the Palestinian territory's vast network of tunnels.

"Then, as now, Israelis were told that we were going in to deal a decisive blow to Hamas," Israel Defense Forces veteran Benzion Sanders wrote in The New York Times on Saturday. Instead, Sanders argued, all the death and destruction — more than 2,200 dead Palestinians and dozens of Israelis — "accomplished nothing," which should serve as a lesson for those seeking vengeance in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel, which left about 1,500 people dead.

"While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn't change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror," Sanders wrote. "A ground invasion is doomed to failure."

All communications in the Gaza Strip, home to about 2 million Palestinians, have been cut off as Israel steps up its bombardment of the territory and begins ground incursions. Western officials, including in the Biden administration, have in recent days been urging the Israeli government to hold off on an all-out invasion, arguing for more modest aims than the complete destruction of Hamas.

Israeli airstrikes have already killed thousands of Palestinians. Responding to criticism from human rights groups, the IDF has claimed such strikes only occur after civilians have been warned; it has also urged civilians to evacuate out of Gaza City in the north. Residents, however, have told Insider that nowhere is safe.

In 2014, Sanders said he believed the IDF's assurances that all steps were being taken to protect civilian life. When he took part in the ground invasion, however, he encountered a different reality, helping turn him into an "antiwar" activist.

"We were told Palestinian civilians had fled," Sanders wrote. "I realized this wasn't true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been lying on the sand floor of a shack, in a pool of blood."