US scholar says Israel killed many civilians in ‘panic response’ to Oct. 7
He said the Israeli army’s own actions — not Hamas — were responsible for a large share of Israeli deaths that day
WASHINGTON (MNTV) – John J. Mearsheimer, one of America’s most prominent realist scholars of international relations, says Israel’s military killed many of its own civilians during its chaotic response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault — a reality that, he argues, has been hidden by Western media.
Speaking on The Katie Halper Show, the University of Chicago professor described Israel’s initial reaction as one of “panic and massive firepower.” He said the Israeli army’s own actions — not Hamas — were responsible for a large share of Israeli deaths that day.
“The Israelis got caught completely by surprise and they did not have a very good backup plan,” Mearsheimer said.
“So what they did was they rushed in with massive firepower… and they used that firepower to attack Hamas and the other Palestinian forces that had moved into Israel proper. And they killed a significant number of people not with the Hannibal Doctrine, but just with all that firepower that was brought to bear.”
He added that when Israeli forces launched air and ground attacks to repel the militants, they made little distinction between combatants and civilians.
“You cannot underestimate how many Israelis were killed when all that firepower was brought to bear,” he said.
“If you look at a lot of the pictures and listen to what happened, it’s quite clear that those Apache helicopters wreaked havoc on everything that was down on the ground — and of course that included Israeli civilians.”
Hannibal Doctrine and self-inflicted deaths
Mearsheimer highlighted the role of Israel’s Hannibal Doctrine, a long-standing but unofficial policy that permits Israeli soldiers to fire on their own comrades to prevent their capture. He argued that this policy likely compounded the civilian toll.
“There’s the whole issue of the Hannibal Doctrine,” he explained.
“The Palestinians were bent on taking many of their captured Israelis back to Gaza, and the Hannibal Doctrine calls for killing those people before they get there. So some Israelis were killed as a result.”
While stressing that the killing of civilians on either side constitutes a war crime, Mearsheimer said Western coverage has ignored the extent to which Israeli forces themselves inflicted casualties.
“Most of the Israelis who were killed were either soldiers, who are legitimate targets, or civilians who were killed by the Israeli forces,” he said.
Gaza as a “concentration camp”
The professor, a West Point graduate and former U.S. Air Force officer, is known for his blunt assessments of American and Israeli policy. In this interview, he compared Gaza’s siege conditions to those of a “concentration camp” and described the Oct. 7 attack as an inevitable “breakout.”
“Nobody talks about why there was a breakout,” he said. “Nobody talks about the fact that this was a concentration camp, and what was being done to the Palestinians was abhorrent. Of course there was going to be a breakout at some point.”
He argued that under international law, Palestinians had the right to fight the military forces that kept them confined.
“It’s consistent with international law for Hamas to try to break out of the concentration camp and to engage Israeli military forces in combat,” he said. “That means they’re going to kill some of them. So the fact that they killed Israeli soldiers is not a case of murder.”
At the same time, he condemned any deliberate killing of civilians. “Whoever murdered those civilians committed a war crime,” he said. “I’m opposed to killing civilians for sure. But that’s only part of the story.”
Israeli propaganda in Western media
Mearsheimer criticized what he called the near-total alignment of U.S. and European media with Israel’s narrative of the war.
“Is that reported in the Western media? Of course it isn’t,” he said. “The stories that you hear in the Western media are basically a reflection of Israeli propaganda.”
He also dismissed attempts to liken Hamas to Nazi Germany.
“The Israelis like to portray this as if the Palestinians were the second coming of the Third Reich,” he said. “That’s a ridiculous argument. What the Germans did to the Jews is completely different from what the Palestinians did to the Israelis. The Palestinians were the victims — they’re in this concentration camp — and you had a breakout on October 7. Hardly surprising.”
Broader implications
Mearsheimer’s remarks add to a growing body of criticism from scholars and rights groups accusing Israel of both obscuring its own actions and framing the Gaza war as a battle of “civilization versus terror.” His analysis aligns with his long-standing view that U.S. policy toward Israel is shaped more by ideology and domestic politics than by strategic realism.
“The more you talk in detail about what happened,” he concluded, “the clearer it becomes that Israel bears a great deal of responsibility for what happened that day.”
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