The Dahiya doctrine, or Dahya doctrine,[1] is an Israeli military strategy involving the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure, or domicide, to pressure hostile governments.[2] [3] [4] [5] The doctrine was outlined by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot. Israel colonel Gabi Siboni wrote that Israel "should target economic interests and the centers of civilian power that support the organization". The logic is to harm the civilian population so much that they will then turn against the militants, forcing the enemy to sue for peace.[6]
The doctrine is named after the Dahieh neighborhood (also transliterated as Dahiyeh and Dahiya) of Beirut, where Hezbollah had its headquarters during the 2006 Lebanon War, and which was heavily damaged by the IDF.
The first public announcement of the doctrine was made in an interview with general Gadi Eizenkot, commander of the IDF's northern front, published by Yedioth Ahronoth in October 2008:[7]
In 2010, Eizenkot formulated his views in writing as follows:
According to analyst Gabi Siboni at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies:
Noting that Dahya was the Shia quarter in Beirut that was razed by the Israeli Air Force during the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli journalist Yaron London wrote in 2008 that the doctrine "will become entrenched in our security discourse".[8]
Some analysts have argued that Israel implemented such a strategy during the 2008–09 Gaza War,[9] with the Goldstone Report concluding that the Israeli strategy was "designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population".[10]
The 2009 United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict makes several references to the Dahya doctrine, calling it a concept which requires the application of "widespread destruction as a means of deterrence" and which involves "the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations". It concluded that the doctrine had been put into practice during the conflict.[11] However, in a 1 April 2011 op-ed, one of the lead authors of the report, Judge Richard Goldstone, stated that some of his conclusions may have been different had the Israeli government cooperated with his team during the investigation.[12] Goldstone's three co-authors—Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin, and Desmond Travers—were strongly critical of Goldstone's statement, releasing a statement standing by the report, claiming that in response to the pressure to change their conclusions "had we given in to pressures from any quarter to sanitise our conclusions, we would be doing a serious injustice to the hundreds of innocent civilians killed during the Gaza conflict, the thousands injured, and the hundreds of thousands whose lives continue to be deeply affected by the conflict and the blockade".[13]
The doctrine is defined in a 2009 report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel as follows: "The military approach expressed in the Dahiye Doctrine deals with asymmetrical combat against an enemy that is not a regular army and is embedded within civilian population; its objective is to avoid a protracted guerilla war. According to this approach Israel has to employ tremendous force disproportionate to the magnitude of the enemy's actions." The report further argues that the doctrine was fully implemented during Operation Cast Lead.[14]
Commentators for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Mondoweiss have noted that the attacks of the Israeli Defense Forces on the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Hamas-Israel war may constitute an extension of the doctrine.[15] [16] Haaretz reported that IDF had dropped "all restraint" in its war: killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure at an unprecedented rate.[17]
Writing in The Guardian, Paul Rogers of Bradford University argues that Israel's goal in the 2023 war is to "corral the Palestinians into a small zone in the southwest of Gaza where they can be more easily controlled", and that the long-term goal is to make clear that Israel "will not stand for any opposition".[18]
Paul Rogers argues that in their using the Dahiya doctrine in the Israel–Hamas war, Israel will fail in its goal of eradicating Hamas, which will come back in a different form, unless "some way is found to begin the very difficult task of bringing the communities together."
Richard Falk wrote that under the doctrine, "the civilian infrastructure of adversaries such as Hamas or Hezbollah are treated as permissible military targets, which is not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: state terrorism."[19]