A video that circulated widely on social media in mid-February 2026 shows a self-identified Israeli soldier broadcasting from inside Gaza during a TikTok livestream with American content creator Jeff Davidson. In the footage, the soldier shows a landscape of near-total destruction — flattened buildings, rubble stretching in every direction — and confirms without hesitation that Israeli forces caused it.

When Davidson confronted him about the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and women, the soldier’s response was: “Yeah, yeah.” He did not deny it. He did not express remorse. He continued. When the exchange escalated, the soldier went further, saying Israeli forces had killed women and children and adding — coldly — that they also rape them.

The Israeli military, after the video spread and international condemnation mounted, said the interview was unauthorized, the soldier had been reprimanded, and military police had opened an investigation. Officials suggested the rape remark may have been meant as a joke. Davidson did not treat it as a joke. Neither did the human rights organizations that documented it, or the hundreds of thousands of people who shared and amplified it.

The video does not exist in isolation. In March 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council concluding that Israeli forces had used sexual violence — including forced stripping, threats of rape, sexual assault, and other forms of gender-based abuse — as part of operations across Gaza and the occupied territories since October 7, 2023. The commission found these acts amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch’s 2025 annual report described the scale of violations attributed to Israel as unprecedented in recent Israeli-Palestinian history, committed with sustained US support.

The soldier in the video was not an aberration. He was a data point in a documented pattern. The fact that he said it publicly, casually, on a livestream — while showing the physical evidence of his military’s work behind him — is the story. Not the statement itself, which investigators had already documented. The story is the impunity. The institutional shock on the Israeli side did not arrive until the international reaction became too loud to ignore.

The IDF opened an investigation. That investigation will not restore a single life.