“A plan that has already been authorized.”
Those are the words of the man many expect to be Israel's next prime minister, describing the Dahiya Doctrine — a strategy of deliberately disproportionate destruction of civilian infrastructure. He said them not as a confession but as policy, in an interview, in 2008.
This is not a leaked secret or an enemy's allegation. The Dahiya Doctrine was articulated by an Israeli general and formalized in Israel's own national-security think tank. That is exactly why it can be graded straight: the evidence is Israel's own words. The complications — what the doctrine means in law, how it maps onto Gaza, and the strange fact that its author later broke with the government now applying its logic — are where the care is required.
What this page is about
Gadi Eisenkot was the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019, served as an observer in Israel's war cabinet after October 7, 2023, and now leads the Yashar party as the main challenger to Benjamin Netanyahu in the October 27, 2026 election — a race in which Israeli polling has repeatedly shown him the front-runner to be the next prime minister (with the usual caveat that Israel's coalition math means no bloc is projected to win outright). He is also, by name, the author of the Dahiya Doctrine: the Israeli military concept of responding to attacks from within populated areas by inflicting large-scale, deliberately disproportionate destruction on civilian infrastructure, to impose ruinous reconstruction costs and deter future fighting.
We can state this plainly because it was stated plainly, by its authors, in public. In a 2008 interview Eisenkot — then head of Israel's Northern Command — said that what happened to the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in the 2006 Lebanon war “will happen in every village from which shots will be fired… We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction… This isn't a suggestion. It's a plan that has already been authorized.” The same year, Colonel Gabi Siboni set the doctrine down in writing at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, calling for force “disproportionate to the enemy's actions… to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction.”
We grade the facts — the doctrine, the words, the law, the UN finding — and we fence the hard parts hard. Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and inflicting collective punishment are prohibited under international law; a UN inquiry found the doctrine was applied in Gaza in 2008–09; and the same logic is widely cited in the destruction of Gaza since 2023, now the subject of formal proceedings at the ICJ and ICC — which we report as proceedings, not verdicts. And we carry the genuine complication: Eisenkot authored the doctrine as a general in 2008, but in 2024 he left the Netanyahu government and became one of its sharpest critics, after his own son was killed in Gaza. It belongs in Israeli Influence, beside our other graded coverage of how this war is conducted and explained.
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“A Plan That Has Been Approved.”
The words of the man many expect to be Israel's next PM, describing the Dahiya Doctrine — a strategy of deliberately disproportionate destruction of civilian infrastructure. Said not as a confession but as policy, in 2008.
The doctrine, in its authors' own words
The man: Gadi Eisenkot, former IDF chief, is the front-runner to be Israel's next prime minister.
FACTThis is why it matters now. Eisenkot served as the 21st chief of the general staff of the IDF (2015–2019), joined Israel's post-October 7 war cabinet as an observer (2023–2024), and in 2025 formed and now leads the Yashar party. Heading into the October 27, 2026 election he has been the leading challenger to Benjamin Netanyahu, with multiple Israeli polls showing his party ahead of Likud and showing him preferred over Netanyahu for prime minister — making him, as many observers put it, the most likely person to form the next government. The honest caveat is structural: Israel elects a parliament, not a president, and no bloc is currently projected to reach the 61 seats needed alone, so the premiership will turn on coalition arithmetic. Front-runner, not foregone.
The doctrine is real, named, and his — and it was published in Israel's own institutions.
FACTThe Dahiya Doctrine takes its name from the Dahiya (Dahieh) quarter of southern Beirut — Hezbollah's stronghold — which the Israeli Air Force largely razed during the 2006 Lebanon war. The doctrine generalizes that act into a strategy: respond to attacks from within a populated area with large-scale destruction of the civilian infrastructure around the militants, to impose costs severe enough to deter. It was first announced publicly by Eisenkot, then commander of Israel's Northern Command, in a 2008 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and set down in writing the same year by Colonel Gabi Siboni at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a leading Israeli security think tank. This is the crucial point for grading: it is not an allegation smuggled in from outside, but doctrine articulated by Israeli commanders in Israeli outlets.
His own words: 'We will wield disproportionate power… This isn't a suggestion. It's a plan that has already been authorized.'
FACTThe centerpiece, and it is a direct quotation. In the 2008 Yedioth Ahronoth interview, speaking of Lebanese villages from which Hezbollah might fire, Eisenkot said: 'What happened in the Dahieh quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases… This isn't a suggestion. It's a plan that has already been authorized.' Siboni's INSS text matched it in the language of strategy: the IDF must act 'with force that is disproportionate… meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction.' Note the legal hinge built into the doctrine itself — the reframing of villages and civilian neighborhoods as 'military bases,' which is precisely the move the laws of war exist to prevent.
The law: deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and inflicting collective punishment are prohibited.
FACTThis is not a matter of opinion but of black-letter law. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects, the use of force disproportionate to the anticipated military advantage, and collective punishment of a population are prohibited and can constitute war crimes. A doctrine that openly calls for 'disproportionate' force against the 'civilian infrastructure' of an area, explicitly to pressure a population, sits in direct tension with each of those rules — which is why its proponents reclassify the civilian targets as military ones, and why critics call it a doctrine of collective punishment by design. We grade FACT that the law prohibits these things and that the doctrine, as its authors describe it, is in tension with the law; whether any specific operation crossed the legal line is a separate question for the courts.
A UN inquiry found the doctrine was applied in Gaza in 2008–09 — with an honest caveat about that report.
FACTThe doctrine did not stay theoretical. The 2009 United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict — the Goldstone Report, examining the 2008–09 war — referred repeatedly to the Dahiya doctrine, described it as requiring 'the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure,' and concluded the strategy had been put into practice and was 'designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.' The fairness caveat we are obliged to carry: in a 2011 op-ed the report's lead author, Richard Goldstone, wrote that some of his conclusions might have been different had Israel cooperated with the inquiry — but his three co-authors publicly reaffirmed the report and its findings. We grade FACT that the UN inquiry found the doctrine applied as described, and we carry both Goldstone's partial second thoughts and his co-authors' rejection of them.
Gaza since 2023: the doctrine's logic is widely cited, and the legal questions are now before the ICJ and ICC — posed, not asserted.
SOME SMOKEHere we pose rather than pronounce, because this is live and adjudicated law. Analysts, journalists, and legal scholars tracking the scale of destruction in Gaza since October 2023 have repeatedly invoked the Dahiya doctrine as the framework that makes sense of it — the deliberate, system-wide flattening of infrastructure as deterrence. The scale of physical destruction is documented and extraordinary; that much is FACT. What is not settled is the legal characterization: South Africa has brought a case at the International Court of Justice alleging genocide, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. We grade FACT that these proceedings exist and that the destruction is vast; we grade SOME SMOKE, explicitly posed, the conclusion that the campaign constitutes genocide or that it is a direct execution of the Dahiya doctrine — those are the questions the courts are now deciding, and we do not get ahead of them.
The complication that keeps it honest: the doctrine's author became the government's critic — and buried his son.
FACTA cartoon would stop at 'the next PM wrote a doctrine of destruction.' The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. Eisenkot articulated the Dahiya Doctrine in 2008 as a general; he was not the architect of the 2023–present Gaza campaign's execution — in that war he sat in the cabinet as an observer and then, in 2024, left the Netanyahu government, becoming one of its most prominent critics over its conduct of the war and its lack of a plan for hostages and for the day after. In December 2023 his own son, Gal, was killed in action in Gaza. The man now running as the 'anti-Netanyahu' is thus both the author of Israel's most notorious doctrine of disproportion and a security centrist who broke with the government prosecuting the most disproportionate campaign in the country's history. We hold both facts at once — because both are true, and because the tension between them is exactly what a serious reckoning with him has to confront.
How a suburb became a strategy
The doctrine was born from frustration. In the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel struggled to stop Hezbollah firing rockets from among civilians in southern Lebanon and in the Dahiya, and it responded by flattening much of that Beirut suburb. The lesson Israeli strategists drew was not that leveling a neighborhood was a failure of discrimination, but that it might be a feature: if the destruction is vast enough, the reasoning went, the population and its patrons will calculate that hosting the fighters is not worth the ruin, and will restrain them. That is the logic Eisenkot and Siboni formalized in 2008. It is a theory of deterrence through devastation, and its defenders are candid about the trade: because the enemy embeds in civilian areas, they argue, only the threat of disproportionate civilian cost can deter — a grim utilitarian bargain offered as the price of security against an asymmetric foe.
The problem is that the laws of war were written precisely to forbid that bargain. The principle of distinction says you may target combatants and military objectives, not civilians and the infrastructure of civilian life; the principle of proportionality forbids force out of scale with the concrete military advantage; and collective punishment — making a population suffer to pressure its leaders — is banned outright. The Dahiya Doctrine does not quietly violate these; it inverts them, by redefining the protected thing (the village, the power plant, the apartment block) as the target, and by naming deterrent civilian suffering as the goal rather than the regretted side effect. That reframing is the whole legal game, and it is why a UN inquiry reached for the word “punish” and why the doctrine has been cited in every Gaza war since.
What makes the present moment sharp is not only the destruction in Gaza and Lebanon since 2023, but the ballot. A doctrine is one thing when it lives in a think-tank paper; it is another when its author stands to lead the state. And yet the honest reading resists the easy line, because Eisenkot's own trajectory cuts against it — the general who theorized disproportion is the politician who left the government over how this war was waged. Both can be true, and holding them together is the point of grading rather than sloganeering. The same discipline runs through our other coverage of this war, from the limits of the self-defense claim to how specific strikes are justified after the fact: name the documented thing, state the law, carry the other side, and let the reader weigh a record rather than a slogan.
A doctrine said out loud is a choice, not an accident
Most alleged war crimes are denied; they are framed as errors, exceptions, the regrettable friction of combat. The Dahiya Doctrine is unusual and important precisely because it is none of those things — it was announced, written down, and defended, in advance, as deliberate policy. That candor is almost a gift to accountability: there is no need to infer intent from a crater when a general has told a newspaper that the crater is the plan. It also raises the stakes of this election beyond Israel's borders. When a potential prime minister of a close US ally is the named author of a doctrine that a UN inquiry called collective punishment, the question is not whether criticizing that is permissible — it plainly is — but whether the doctrine will be disowned, defended, or quietly carried forward by whoever wins. The value of putting it on the record, in his own words, is that it cannot be waved away as a caricature when that question finally has to be answered.
- If the laws of war forbid disproportionate force and collective punishment, what does it mean that a democracy wrote both into an openly published, “already authorized” doctrine — and would any of its allies accept the same doctrine from an adversary?
- The doctrine works by reclassifying civilian neighborhoods as “military bases.” If that relabeling is accepted, is there any civilian target it could not be used to justify — and if it is not accepted, what is left of the doctrine?
- Eisenkot authored the doctrine and then broke with the government applying its logic at its most extreme. Will the man who may lead Israel renounce the Dahiya Doctrine, refine it, or govern by it — and which answer should voters, and allies, be demanding before the vote, not after?
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't writing about an Israeli military doctrine like this antisemitic?
No — and the way this page is built is the answer. Every load-bearing fact here comes from Israeli sources: a general's own interview, a paper from Israel's national-security think tank, the record of a UN inquiry, Israeli polling. Criticizing the military doctrine of a state is not an attack on an ethnic or religious group; treating the two as the same thing is exactly how legitimate scrutiny of a government gets shut down, and it does a disservice to the real fight against antisemitism by cheapening the word. We hold a dual standard on purpose: a state's policies are fair game for criticism, and bigotry against Jews is a lie we refuse — and keeping those two straight is the whole discipline.
Didn't Israel have a right to respond to Hezbollah and to October 7?
Yes — the right to self-defense against attacks like Hezbollah's rockets and the October 7 massacre is real, and nothing here denies it. But the laws of war draw a hard line between the right to fight and the way you may fight: a just cause does not license any method. You can have every right to respond and still be forbidden from collective punishment or deliberately disproportionate destruction of civilian life. The Dahiya Doctrine is a claim about method, not about whether to respond, and it's the method the law governs. “They had the right to hit back” and “this particular way of hitting back is unlawful” are not in conflict — which is the distinction the doctrine is designed to blur.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Gabi Siboni, INSS (2008) — 'Disproportionate Force: Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War' (the doctrine in Israel's own words)
- Dahiya doctrine — origin (2006), Eisenkot's 2008 Yedioth Ahronoth statement, Siboni's formulation
- UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (Goldstone Report, 2009) — the doctrine 'designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population'; and Goldstone's 2011 partial walkback
- The Washington Post (2023) — the Dahiya doctrine and disproportionate force in Gaza
- IMEU — the Dahiya Doctrine and international humanitarian law (Geneva Conventions, Rome Statute)
- The New York Times (2026) — Gadi Eisenkot, leading in the polls against Netanyahu
- Gadi Eisenkot — biography (IDF chief 2015–2019; war-cabinet observer; Yashar party; his son Gal killed in Gaza)
- Black Book Audit — A Right to Defend Itself
- Black Book Audit — Nasser Hospital: Retroactive Incrimination
- Black Book Audit — Israeli Influence