Civilian casualties in the Israel-Gaza War and the risks of a wider war

Richard Haass looks at the resumed Israeli offensive against primarily civilian noncombatants in Gaza in a new post. Haass is extremely well-informed. And it’s worthwhile to see what long-time foreign policy analysts have to say, even if they often seem far too polite in the language they use.

Up to now, much of the Israeli military effort has relied on attacks from the air and from a distance that minimize the likelihood of Israeli casualties. Unfortunately, such attacks also tend to maximize the chance of Palestinian civilian casualties. A refusal by Israel to adopt a more patient, measured, and targeted approach would generate many more such Palestinian casualties.¹ [my emphasis]

Casualties and bombing

This is a polite way of saying that Israel doesn’t want to focus its military campaign explicitly justified as intended to destroy Hamas onto sending ground troops into Gaza to ground fighting with Hamas forces and going into those infamous Hamas tunnels to engage in direct combat. If their actual goal is to kill or capture the Hamas military forces and actually fully dismantle their military operation in Gaza, they would basically need to do that.

Israel’s military has the reputation of being particularly “casualty averse” with their own soldiers. As Yagil Levy noted in a study of Israel’s approach, it is normal for democracies to be more casualty-averse than countries whose leaders are not so directly accountable to their publics:

Israel mirrors a global phenomenon that can be termed the force-casualty tradeoff (hereinafter FCT): the increasingly insistent domestic demand that casualties be limited, leading democracies to use excessive force that reduces the risk to which their own soldiers are exposed. While the use of excessive force often increases the opponent’s noncombatant fatalities, democracies tend to favor their soldiers’ lives over those of enemy civilians. This, however, may contradict other democratic imperatives that demand respect for noncombatant immunity; hence the need to legitimize the deviation from the proscribed liberal norm.²

That phenomenon is what Haass is referencing when he writes about Israel’s willingness to “minimize the likelihood of Israeli casualties” by relying heavily on the approach we see them taking now in Gaza of massive bombing in civilial areas that will “tend to maximize the chance of Palestinian civilian casualties.” Haass was delicate enough in his piece not to specify that this means killing a large number of civilian noncombatants instead of the kind of targeted military action that would more directly achieve their stated objective.

“The U.S. has provided Israel with large bunker buster bombs, among tens of thousands of other weapons and artillery shells, to help dislodge Hamas from Gaza, U.S. officials said.”³ (Wall Street Journal) One of the two reporters on the byline is Nancy Youssef, who has a strong record reporting on national-security affairs. She was one of the best reporters on the Iraq War, when she was with McClatchy Newspapers.

Israel was using such bombs already a month ago:

Israel used at least two 2,000-pound bombs during an airstrike on Tuesday on Jabaliya, a dense area just north of Gaza City, according to experts and an analysis conducted by The New York Times of satellite images, photos and videos.

Hospital officials said that dozens of civilians were killed and hundreds wounded in the strike. Israel said it was targeting a Hamas commander and fighters, as well as the network of underground tunnels used by Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, to hide weapons and fighters.

Israel’s use of such bombs, the second largest type in its arsenal, is not uncommon, and the size is generally the largest that most militaries use on a regular basis. They can be used to target underground infrastructure, but their deployment in a dense and heavily populated area like Jabaliya has raised questions of proportionality — whether Israel’s intended targets justify the civilian death toll and destruction its strikes cause.⁴ [my emphasis]

This assumes that civilians are not part of the intended death toll. Since Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced at the beginning of what he called a “complete siege” of Gaza in October also explained, ““We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”⁵ - it’s hard to take any claim from the current Israeli government that they are not seeking to kill civilians seriously.

Eighty-three countries, including the United States but not Israel, have signed a commitment to refrain “as appropriate, from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas” because of their likelihood of harming civilians.

“Israel’s continual bombardment of Gaza, including this Jabaliya strike, magnifies this concern many times over,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.⁶

The following is - I think - Haass’ way of saying that Israel is committing serious war crimes and they need to stop doing it, and that that it is the US interest

It is relevant here that in a recent phone call the Pope is said to have warned Israeli President Herzog that Israel should not respond to terror with terror. If true, this was a most unfortunate equation of what Hamas did on October 7 and Israel’s response. The former intentionally set out to kill civilians for a political purpose, the latter has not. But the Israeli response is problematic all the same, as the priority of going after Hamas has overwhelmed all other considerations. This raises not just a host of ethical and legal issues, but political and strategic ones as well. [my emphasis]

At this point, though, it is a real stretch, or just diplomatic fluff to sanitize something awful, to say that Israel has not “set out to kill civilians for a political purpose,“ given what they have actually been doing in Gaza since the temporary ceasefire and now again after it.

Yagil Levy also provides some history:

[W]e see a clear pattern: the ratio of fatalities for Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians in Gaza increased from one Israeli soldier to six civilians in the first Intifada (1987–1993), to one to eighty-four in the 2009 offensive, with sharp increases at two interim junctions.

He puts this in the context of the famous War on Terror (aka, Global War on Terror or GWOT) declared by the Cheney-Bush Administration, which produced also in Israel “modified ethical code of conduct in the fight against terror, an alternative to the code that risked combatants to reduce the risk to enemy civilians.” He argues that this major shift in willing to inflict civilian casualties “began with the 1973 War and continued with the First Lebanon War, in 1982.”

Levy also notes that a shift to a higher tolerance for inflicting civilian casualties on the Other Side (Palestinians) parallel the rise of more right-wing, religious-fundamentalist parties and the fall in influence of the more secular Labor Party, which was “the dominant party … for close to fifty years” after 1948. But he describes other social factors in Israel and the relationship of Israelis to the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) during that time.

This is a December 1 discussion also featuring foreign-policy-analysis terms from the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution⁷:

The threat of a widening war

As a sign of the pressure from international concern over large-scale civilian casualties in the current war, Richard Haass also observes:

At a minimum, the resumption of large-scale military operations would galvanize regional and international opposition to Israel and lead to demands for an open-ended ceasefire. It would also create a context in which it is hard to imagine either the Palestinian Authority stepping forward to assume a role in Gaza or the Saudis reviving their bid to normalize relations with Israel. The potential for a widening of the war would increase as well, although there are some interesting reports that the Saudis are trying to use their financial muscle with Iran to discourage any such widening.

So things like this are happening:

An American warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack Sunday in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said. Yemen's Houthi rebels later claimed attacks on two ships they described as being linked to Israel, but did not acknowledge targeting a U.S. Navy vessel.

The attack potentially marked a major escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war.⁸

Murtaza Hussain comments:

[I]t’s very, very clear that Israel is not behaving in the way that [Secretary of State] Blinken is portraying them as behaving or… This good cop bad cop attitude that the U.S. is taking towards Israel is really not very convincing, even on those terms. It’s clear that Israel is engaging in tactics which we condemn very thoroughly when done by Russia or Syria or other countries that we’re opposed to. But when we’re seeing them in real time by [a] U.S. ally, we’re getting at very minimum defense from the U.S. administration of Israeli actions.⁹ [my emphasis]

Hypocrisy is not new in international politics. We could even say that to a large extent, international diplomacy runs on hypocrisy. But with the Russia-Ukraine War, the US and its NATO allies are backing Ukraine’s claims that virtually any Russian killing or mishandling of civilians is evidence of genocide while simultaneously trying to pretend that Israel’s war against Gazan civilians is based on intent as pure as driven srow. I mean, Bibi Netanyahu publicly criticized his Defense Minister’s “human animals” comment, didn’t he?

Jeremy Scahill characterizes the situation this way:

JS: And it really seems like every time Blinken goes to the region or goes to Israel, it’s then followed by an intensification of Israeli military tactics. And you know Blinken has been trying to publicly sell this talking out of both sides of the mouth from Washington. On the one hand giving full-throttled support to Israel and on the other hand saying, well, we want to try to put some guardrails on Israel’s operations. And one of the things that Blinken said is:

Antony Blinken: But Israel has the most sophisticated — one of the most sophisticated — militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men women and children.

JS: All we’ve seen from Israel since this started was the opposite. We’ve seen that Israel clearly wants to maximize the terror being felt by civilians in Gaza. And part of it seems aimed at saying we’re gonna force them through merciless bombing to somehow overthrow Hamas. But it shows a kind of fundamental misunderstanding of the lens of history that many Palestinians are viewing this through and also the history of Hamas itself.

The risk of external intervention by Iran or others will depend in part on how strongly their publics react to continued killing of civilians in Gaza. Even autocratic monarchies and authoritarian theocracies has to pay attention to public opinion. And the Arab and Muslim worlds have viewed Israel’s policies as a serious problem since 1948.

When it comes to diplomatic signals - what other countries understand by the signals the US sends - the continued provision of the bunker buster bombs while Israel uses them on civilian areas is equivalent to a loud shout. The ritual public statements that Israel should really be a little more careful about the number of Palestinian civilians they kill are the equivalent of cynical whispers.

Spencer Ackerman recently wrote:

The 1948 nakba [expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence] killed 15,000 people and displaced 750,000. But it looks like now the death toll has crossed 15,000, and the number of displaced people – people who have no home to return to – is estimated at 1.7 million. The prospect that Palestinian suffering now numerically surpasses the nakba is simply unbearable.¹⁰

Unbearable for many people. Obviously not yet unbearable for the Biden Administration.

Meanwhile: “Hundreds killed in strikes as offensive shifts to southern Gaza.“¹¹

Israel's military has ordered more areas in and around Gaza's second-largest city of Khan Younis to evacuate, as it shifted its offensive to the southern half of the territory where it says many Hamas leaders are hiding.

Heavy bombardments were reported overnight and into Sunday in the area of Khan Younis and the southern city of Rafah, as well as parts of the north that had previously been the focus of Israel's blistering air and ground campaign.

Many of the territory’s 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israeli forces ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the 2-month-old war.

With the resumption of fighting, hopes have receded that another temporary truce could be negotiated. A weeklong cease-fire, which expired on Friday, had facilitated the release of dozens of Gaza-held Israeli and foreign hostages and Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

“We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and it’s impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on Saturday night. [my emphasis]

But for now, the heavy bombing of civilians is clearly meant to substitute for “the ground operation.”

And Juan Cole has a question: “Did Israeli PM Netanyahu start Bombing Gaza Again to Stay out of Jail and Appease Fascists in his Cabinet?”

Although Biden hailed the four-day “humanitarian pause,” it did almost nothing for ordinary people in Gaza since the aid allowed in was a fraction of what was needed and Israeli troops shot at people trying to return to the debris of their homes. It was an opportunity to bury the dead in mass graves and to discover the decomposed remains of preemies at now-defunct hospitals closed down by Israeli troops, who forced nurses and physicians to leave behind their charges.

Biden did not tell us, and nor did the sorry excuse for “news” in the US that the “pause” was voted against by the Jewish Power faction in the Israeli cabinet and that the exchange of Hamas hostages for Israeli ones was viscerally opposed by that bloc as well as across the board on the powerful Israeli far right because violent Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank feared the release of “terrorists” who would return to their homes and pose a threat to the invading squatters [h/t BBC Monitoring]. Since Israel only agreed to release women and minors, those Israeli squatters must be real snowflakes.

Jewish Power leader and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir [h/t BBC Monitoring] branded the released Palestinians “terrorists,” and attacked Netanyahu for agreeing to their release. Ben Gvir has been convicted of support of a terrorist organization and of racist incitement in the past and his party was on the US State Department terrorism watch list. So I guess, you know, he fancies himself an expert on who is a terrorist. [my emphasis]

Yes, you read that right. Israel's National Security Minister Ben Gvir is a nasty piece of work:

[From Feburary:] Ben-Gvir … has been convicted on at least eight charges,including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, compiling a criminal record so long that, when he appeared before a judge, “we had to change the ink on the printer,” Dvir Kariv, a former official in the ShinBet intelligence agency, told me. As recently as last October, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with him, or even to be seen with him in photographs. But a series of disappointing elections persuaded Netanyahu to change his mind.¹² [my emphasis]

Lately, Ben-Gvir has been handing out guns to aspiring terrorists and murderers among “community security squads” (vigilante groups). The Biden Administration at least pretended to strongly object to this, but quickly reached a deal to allow the action to continue.¹³

1. Haass, Richard (2023): Legacy (December 1, 2023). Home & Away (Substack) 12/01/2023. (Accessed: 2023-03-12).

2. Levy, Yagil (2012): Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy. New York & London: New York University Press.

3. Malsin, Jared & Yussef, Nancy (2023): U.S. Sends Israel 2,000-Pound Bunker Buster Bombs for Gaza War. Wall Street Journal <https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-sends-israel-2-000-pound-bunker-buster-bombs-for-gaza-war-82898638> 12/01/2023.

4. Koettl, Christoph et al (2023): Israel Used 2,000-Pound Bombs in Strike on Jabaliya, Analysis Shows. New York Times 11/03/223. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/world/middleeast/israel-bomb-jabaliya.html> (Accessed: 2023-03-12).

5. Fabian, Emanuel (2023): Defense minister announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food or fuel. Times of Israel 10/09/2023. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/> (Accessed: 2023-03-12).

6. Koettl, op. cit.

7. Israel and Gaza: Where do we go from here? Brookings Institution YouTube channel 12/01/2023. (Accessed: 2023-27-11).

8. AP & Scharf & Avi (2023): Pentagon: U.S. Warship and Multiple Commercial Ships in the Red Sea Have Come Under Attack. Haaretz 12/03/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-03/ty-article/pentagon-u-s-warship-and-commercial-ships-in-the-red-sea-have-come-under-attack/0000018c-3077-dc03-a9ec-3c7f413f0000> (Accessed: 2023-27-11).

9. Scahill, Jeremy & Hussain, Murtaza & Rabbani, Mouin (2023): Two Months That Shook the World: The First Phase of the Gaza War. The Intercept 12/02/2023. <https://theintercept.com/2023/12/02/intercepted-gaza-war-israel-hamas/> (Accessed: 2023-03-12).

10. Ackerman, Spencer (2023): Meanwhile, in The West Bank. Forever Wars 11/27/2023. <https://foreverwars.ghost.io/meanwhile-in-the-west-bank/> (Accessed: 2023-27-11).

11. O'Donoghue, Saskia (2023): Israel Hamas war: Hundreds killed in strikes as offensive shifts to southern Gaza. Euronews 03/12/2023. <https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/03/israel-hamas-war-israel-widens-evacuation-orders-as-offensive-shifts-to-southern-gaza> (Accessed: 2023-27-11).

12. Margalit, Ruth (2023): Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of Chaos. New Yorker 02/20/2023. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos> 02/20/2023.

13. Bar-Eli, Avi (2023): U.S. Threatens to Stop Supplying Guns After Ben-Gvir Gives Them Out at Political Events. Haaretz 10/28/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-28/ty-article/.premium/u-s-threatens-to-stop-supplying-guns-after-ben-gvir-gives-them-out-at-political-events/0000018b-77eb-d1da-a1bb-7ffb96dc0000> (Accessed: 2023-27-11).