Nongovernmental organization Breaking the Silence published a report on May 4 that included 60 some testimonies by officers and soldiers about alleged indiscriminate fire by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during Operation Protective Edge in July-August 2014. The publishing of the report instantly triggered a spontaneous protest by enlisted soldiers and reservists who wanted to present their version of the events. Posted to social networks, their testimonies gathered momentum and were linked by the hashtag #MyTruth.

In their rebuttals, the soldiers and officers contradicted the claims that civilians had been indiscriminately targeted during the operation.

Matan Katzman, who fought during the operation and now participates in the My Truth initiative, posted the following to his Facebook page: “By telling war stories, I don’t think of myself as some cool guy, a hero or a person that’s more moral than others. There are stories that are a thousand times more important. I’m also not looking for attention, nor do I need any. I’m doing this because I’m proud of my military and of the soldiers that fought shoulder-to-shoulder with me and of whose morality I am sure. I won’t allow a small minority to smear them anonymously.”

The Breaking the Silence report comes amid others that have been published in the wake of the operation. A January B’Tselem report and a February investigation by the Associated Press news agency also looked into the casualties in Gaza and the allegations that most of them were civilian. Whereas the B’Tselem report and the AP investigation were based on Palestinian accounts, the Breaking the Silence report, by contrast, is based on first-hand testimony by IDF soldiers and officers who took part in the fighting. This is why the report elicited so many charged reactions from those who took part in the fighting. They now seek to dispute the way the IDF was being portrayed, namely as a military that did not uphold high moral standards — "purity of arms" — and unnecessarily hurt civilians.