IDF chief says troops face "baseless lies" in campaign to smear soldiers

Israel's most senior serving officer said there are organised efforts to blacken the reputation of Israeli soldiers and their commanders, speaking at an event held to thank donors to the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers. According to a statement published by the IDF spokesperson, the Chief of the General Staff told the gathering that such attempts rely on what he called "baseless lies and manipulations".

The same remark was carried in Hebrew by an alert from the Israeli news site Ynet, which quoted the Chief of the General Staff saying that attempts are being made to blacken the name of Israeli soldiers through lies with no foundation. Both accounts report the same core claim, made at the same event, and neither attributes the alleged campaign to any named person, organisation or country.

Who was speaking, and what the title means

The Chief of the General Staff, known in Hebrew as the Ramatkal, is the highest ranking officer in the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, and the only officer to hold the rank of lieutenant general in Israel's military. The post sits under the civilian authority of the defence minister and the cabinet, and its holder is responsible for the operational conduct of the armed forces. Public remarks by the Chief of the General Staff are routinely distributed by the IDF spokesperson's unit, which is the military's official press arm and the channel through which this quote was released.

The organisation that hosted the event

The Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers is the standard English rendering of an Israeli non profit widely known by its Hebrew name, the Agudah Lemaan HaChayal. It raises funds, much of it from donors abroad, for the welfare of serving soldiers rather than for weapons or operations: recreation centres, support for soldiers without family in Israel, and assistance for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Diaspora communities, in North America in particular, are a significant part of its donor base, which is the context for an appreciation event of the kind described in the reports.

The phrase he built the remark around

The IDF spokesperson's statement quotes the Chief of the General Staff invoking the expression usually translated as "all of Israel is responsible for one another", a rabbinic formulation, kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, that is commonly used in Jewish communal life to describe mutual obligation between Jews. In the statement he presents it as an expression of the individual's responsibility for the welfare of the nation as a whole, and then links that principle to what he describes as the attempts to slander soldiers and commanders.

Why the subject is a familiar one

Criticism of the conduct of Israeli forces, and Israeli responses to it, have been a recurring feature of public argument during and after the war in Gaza, including in international legal and diplomatic forums. Israeli officials have repeatedly characterised parts of that criticism as a campaign against individual soldiers, while critics have framed the same material as documentation of conduct in the field. The reports published here do not adjudicate that argument, and they do not identify which specific allegations, publications or proceedings the Chief of the General Staff had in mind.

What the reports do not say

Neither report names the Chief of the General Staff, gives the location of the event, or says when it took place beyond the timing of publication. The IDF spokesperson's English text is cut off in mid sentence as he begins to describe the phenomenon as national and international, so the remainder of that thought is not available in the material, and we have not filled it in.

The reports also do not say who is alleged to be conducting the attempts he describes, whether he was referring to media coverage, legal action, social media activity or something else, and whether any specific example was cited. No figures were given: nothing on the number of soldiers affected, complaints filed, or cases opened. There is no indication in the material of any response from the bodies whose criticism of the IDF has been publicised, and no comment from Israeli civilian officials. The Hebrew alert from Ynet points readers to a fuller report, which is not reproduced in the material available here.