Israel's bloody military campaign in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians. In the face of global criticism, Israeli officials have defended themselves with history, citing several notorious places associated with death and destruction.
In public statements and private diplomatic conversations, Israeli officials have pointed to past examples of Western military operations in urban areas, from World War II to the war on terror after 9/11. The aim is to help justify actions against Hamas that have killed thousands of Palestinians.
In these past wars, innocent civilians paid with their lives as the victors defeated their enemies. In order to force Japan to surrender, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as many as 200,000 civilians . In Iraq, U.S. forces' battle with local insurgents has killed hundreds of civilians in Fallujah, and the fight against Islamic State has left thousands dead in Mosul.
Israel insists it is trying to reduce civilian casualties in a war against its terrorist enemies that began when Hamas killed 1,400 people , mostly civilians, in southern Israel on October 7.
Human rights advocates and many governments in Europe and the Middle East scoffed. They accuse Israel of committing war crimes during weeks of airstrikes in Gaza that have leveled entire neighborhoods and destroyed schools, mosques and other buildings that did not appear to be military targets.
Israeli officials say they have no choice: According to Israeli estimates, the number of Hamas militants may be 30,000. They mix among Gaza's 2.2 million people and store weapons in civilian buildings or underground, provoking Israel to bomb these buildings. , causing anger. Israeli officials also said Hamas was clearly guilty of intentionally killing Israeli civilians.
U.S. President Joe Biden and aides have been careful not to suggest in public that Israel might violate any laws of war. The U.S. State Department continues to approve arms sales to Israel without conducting any assessment of the legality of Israel's actions. Some diplomats are uneasy, especially since the State Department formally pledged earlier this year to investigate civilian casualties linked to U.S.-made weapons.
Israel says it is impossible to defeat an enemy without the loss of innocent lives, an experience Americans and their allies should know all too well.
"In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, which was a perfectly legal target," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech to the nation on October 30. "But the British pilots got the wrong target and they bombed a nearby children's hospital. I remember 84 children were injured or burned to death. It was not a war crime. People did not blame the British for doing this." (In fact, the bombing took place in 1945 and destroyed a school; 86 children and 18 adults are believed to have died.)
Netanyahu also said that the British bombing "was a legitimate act of war, a legitimate action that brought tragic consequences. People did not say to the Allies, 'Don't destroy Nazism because of these tragic consequences.'" .
Israeli officials also mentioned that during the occupation of Iraq, the United States fought against insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, and cooperated with Iraqi government forces to combat the Islamic State terrorist organization in the Iraqi city of Mosul from 2016 to 2017. battle.
After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, during US Secretary of State Blinken's visit to Israel , Israeli officials privately mentioned the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
"There will be civilian casualties in any battle, such as the U.S.-led coalition's battle to drive Islamic State out of Mosul," Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said in an interview with PBS on October 24. He also said Israel's "ratio" of killing Hamas militants and killing civilians "compares very well with that of NATO and other Western militaries (in past military operations)."
It is impossible to determine this ratio accurately. According to the health department in the Gaza Strip, more than 10,000 Gazans have died in the past month, 40% of whom were children. It was unclear how many may have been Hamas militants.
The fighting in Mosul was bloodier than the previous battle in Fallujah, killing as many as 8,000 civilians and possibly thousands of Islamic State militants. Much of downtown Mosul was destroyed. Echoing Israel's current assertions, U.S. officials said at the time that Islamic State militants used civilians as human shields and even embraced civilian deaths as a way to undermine outside support for U.S.-Iraqi military operations.
During the months-long fighting, Iraqi commanders on the ground frequently asked the U.S. military to conduct aerial bombardments of densely populated areas, but in some cases were rebuffed by U.S. officials who said the strikes could lead to war crimes.
But tragedy is inevitable. In March 2017, the US military launched an airstrike against two Islamic State snipers on top of a building in Mosul. It was later discovered that the airstrike killed more than 100 civilians hiding in the building . Pentagon investigators concluded that the civilian deaths were caused not by the 500-pound bomb dropped by the United States but by booby traps placed inside the building by Islamic State militants who deliberately drew U.S. firepower to the building. building.
‘Disproportionate blow'
Questions over whether Israel violated the laws of war have intensified. Last week, Israeli warplanes dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs (one of the largest bombs in Israel’s arsenal) on the Jabaliya neighborhood, killing dozens and injuring hundreds (most of them refugee families) ). After dropping the bomb, the Israeli military said it was trying to kill a Hamas commander who helped plan the October 7 attack. The next day, Israeli forces bombed the area again.
“Israel dropped several large bombs on densely populated refugee camps in the complete foreseeability that this would kill a disproportionately large number of civilians and therefore constitute a war crime,” Kenneth Ross, a former director of Human Rights Watch, wrote online Executive Director, now a visiting professor at Princeton University.
The U.N. human rights office said it was "gravely concerned by these disproportionate attacks that may amount to war crimes." Jordan has recalled its ambassador to Israel, citing an "unprecedented humanitarian disaster" in Gaza.
The law of armed conflict provides that incidental casualties and injuries to civilians and damage to objects must not exceed the direct military advantage gained. The Geneva Conventions, formally adopted in 1949, are the widely accepted basis for international humanitarian law and the code of war to prevent governments from inflicting mass casualties of the kind seen in World War II.
Israeli officials say they have been wrongly accused of violating the laws of war before. In 2009, a U.N. panel investigating Israel's invasion of Gaza issued a report concluding that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes, adding that Israel had carried out "deliberately disproportionate strikes aimed at punish, humiliate and intimidate civilians.”
The panel's leader, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, later publicly rejected some of the report's key conclusions about Israel , saying that as more evidence emerged he concluded, "In fact, There is no policy of intentionally harming civilians."
In his later explanation, Goldstone gave the example of a family of 29 who died when their house was bombed. He said the attack was ordered based on "an incorrect interpretation of drone imagery by an Israeli commander" who was later investigated.
Israeli officials said they had taken extensive measures to protect civilians, including distributing leaflets, making radio and television broadcasts and even calling residents before attacks to urge them to leave dangerous areas.
But according to a senior IDF legal adviser, these practices are not used when military operations require surprise, such as when a strike targets a Hamas leader who may quickly escape.
In exchanges with their Israeli counterparts, U.S. military officials have discussed lessons learned from fighting in Iraq and Raqqa, the Islamic State's headquarters in Syria.
In some cases, U.S. forces informed many civilians to leave cities well in advance of fighting.
For example, before the U.S. Marines attacked Fallujah in November 2004, many Iraqi civilians went to Baghdad or a concrete factory outside Fallujah to escape the fighting after receiving assurances that they could return. U.S. forces destroyed much of Fallujah, but most of the Iraqis killed were insurgents.
“The United States did a lot more to avoid civilian casualties in Fallujah than Israel is doing now,” said Josh Paul, a recently departed State Department official who worked in Fallujah in 2004 and 2005.
For Gaza's two million residents, there is nowhere to escape.
“Hamas has been building facilities underground in Gaza for more than (15 years)".
This leaves Israeli commanders with constant problems with the presence of civilians at or near targets. Israel's military legal advisers say that in these cases, commanders make personal judgments before ordering a strike, assessing the potential loss of life and determining whether the target is worth the cost.
There is no generally accepted formula for making this unusual calculation. One benchmark that Israel considers relevant is a “(United Nations investigation)" into civilian deaths during the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians from Serbian forces.
The UN investigative report did not find NATO responsible for war crimes, noting that "a human rights lawyer and an experienced combat commander are unlikely to assign the same relative value to military advantage and non-combatant casualties," even Military commanders with different backgrounds will make different judgments.
The report proposed a vague standard: the judgment of a "wise military commander."
American Bombs and the Laws of War
The scale of the Israeli airstrikes, as well as statements by Israeli military officials that the operation was aimed at destruction, not precision strikes, have made many around the world suspicious of Israel's approach. Israeli leaders have said the goal of the Gaza operation is to root out Hamas, an open-ended goal that has been privately criticized by some Biden administration officials.
Given these issues, and the fact that Israel purchases most of its weapons and ammunition from the United States, calls are growing for U.S. officials to determine whether Israel is using these weapons illegally.
Biden administration officials said earlier this year that they would take more steps to hold governments that purchase U.S. weapons accountable for killing civilians. In August this year, the “U.S. State Department sent a telegram to embassies and consulates abroad announcing a new plan" : (U.S. officials) would investigate such reports...
Although Blinken has said Israel should do everything it can to reduce civilian casualties, the State Department has so far not opened an investigation into any war crimes that Israel may have committed.
Blinken said on October 20 that “there will be ample time in the future to evaluate how these actions will be implemented.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller sidestepped a question about whether to launch an investigation after Jabaliya's death last Wednesday, saying only, "We are not making that assessment at this time."
The State Department declined a request for an interview.
In 2016, the “State Department's legal office circulated a memo internally saying (U.S.) officials" may have committed war crimes by selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which the Saudi-led coalition used to carry out airstrikes in the war in Yemen. “caused massive civilian casualties"...
“The Israeli airstrikes we have seen so far should raise serious questions among those at the State Department about how U.S. weapons are being used,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a director at the International Crisis Group. senior consultant.
The Israeli Defense Ministry stated that as of November 1, the Israeli army had dropped at least 10,000 bombs in the three and a half weeks of war. By comparison, the U.S. military dropped about 2,000 to 3,000 bombs per month during the heaviest battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from 2015 to 2017, according to a RAND Corporation report . During the battle for Raqqa, there was only one month in which the number of bombs dropped reached 5,000, which was August 2017.
“The tempo of the bombing of Gaza is beyond imagination,” Finucane said. "The United States has conducted heavy bombing raids on Raqqa and Mosul. That was strictly regulated, but even that resulted in massive civilian casualties."
Paul, a former State Department official, had long worked in the State Council’s Political-Military Bureau, which handles arms sales. He resigned last month, citing reasons he believed it was unethical for the United States to support Israel's air strikes on Gaza and provide Israel with lethal weapons aid. Paul said there has been no real discussion within the administration about the use of U.S. weapons in airstrikes that kill civilians, and there is no way to influence policy from within.
He also said that "in practice, and in legal interpretation, there is no established legal standard for what constitutes the misuse of U.S. weapons."