Fighting Terror With Terror
“terror, noun… 2: violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion, especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.” -Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror.
In the wake of Hamas’ terroristic October 7 attack, Israel is trying to physically liquidate the organization, as is its right. However, much of Israel’s military effort appears to be aimed at terrorizing the Palestinian people as a means to punish them for supporting – or not stopping – Hamas.
It is easy to characterize Hamas’ attack as terrorism, since they filmed themselves intentionally killing civilians. Hamas attacked military targets as well, but according to Haaretz, Israeli deaths include about 800 civilians and under 400 military and police. Hamas can’t argue that teens shot at a music festival or families burned in their “safe” rooms were collateral damage in attacks on military targets. Also a history of Hamas attacks, from suicide bombers killing people in public buses to launching rockets at random targets in Israeli cities, make it easy to believe that the October 7 attack was no different.
Interpreting Israel’s retaliation in Gaza is more complicated. International law gives permission to kill civilians if those deaths are unavoidable consequences of achieving a military objective. The deaths must be “proportionate”, but the law does not give much guidance (as far as I could tell) on how much “proportionate” means. If Israel can kill the military leader of Hamas, how many Palestinian children is it allowed to kill in the process? One? Ten? Ten thousand?
Deaths
According to an article in Reuters today on Palestinian deaths from Israeli attacks, casualty statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry are considered fairly reliable by outside observers. It reports over 17,000 killed since October 7, with women and children (including teenagers under 18) comprising about 70% of those killed. An Israeli government estimate of over 5,000 Hamas soldiers killed is consistent with these numbers. It is widely believed that many Palestinians, both military and civilian, have not been counted yet because they are buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings or collapsed tunnels.
Injury numbers are harder to come by, but the AP reported on 5 November that 25,000 were injured, at a time when the death toll had reached 10,000. If the dead-to-injured ratio holds, that amounts to something like 60k Palestinians killed or injured so far. That’s about 3% of the population of Gaza.
Israel is obviously killing fewer civilians than they are physically capable of, since they are capable of killing hundreds of thousands out of the Gaza population of about two million. However, several lines of evidence point to a policy of death and destruction that is designed to punish Gazans as much as to hit specific military targets.
Domicide
By 29 November, satellite imagery seemed to show that around 100,000 buildings had been damaged. Recent estimates suggest that Israeli bombing and shelling has destroyed 30-40% of all homes in the territory. Destroyed buildings include the main court, over 300 “education facilities” almost 170 houses of worship, and a sewage treatment plant. The third oldest church in the world, the Great Omari Mosque, and the Rafah museum have all been damaged or destroyed in the bombing. This seems like a lot of damage to kill fewer than 10,000 soldiers.
Experts talk about “domicide,” material destruction so extensive that it makes a large parts of a city nearly uninhabitable, as happened in Aleppo in the Syrian civil war and Mariupol during the Russian invasion. MIT professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal notes that destruction of homes has a somewhat ambiguous status as a war crime (which technically only applies to wars between countries, and the status of Palestine is ambiguous) but not a crime against humanity.
Damage is heaviest around Gaza City and Jabalia refugee camp in the North, where whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Israel ordered people to evacuate northern Gaza and move south of Wadi Gaza in the central strip, but has also been bombing south of the Wadi Gaza. The pattern of destruction in the south would be considered extreme in any other context, but is light compared to what northern Gaza has endured.
Guidelines
Leftist English-language Israeli webzine +972 ran a comprehensive article by Yuval Abraham on Israel’s bombing strategy.
Their article divides the bombing targets into traditional “tactical targets” with military facilities or equipment; tunnels; the homes of militants from Hamas or other violent organizations; and “power targets” (“matarot otzem”), which include public buildings, infrastructure, and high rises. The idea of hitting power targets is, as one source puts it, to “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.”
Each kind of target has a different risk of “collateral damage” to civilians. Because Hamas places their military facilities near or in civilian facilities, including schools and mosques, even clear military targets involves choices about civilian casualties. Destroying Hamas tunnels often involves either bombing civilian structures above them or indirectly destroys civilian structures which are undermined by a tunnel collapsing nearby.
A Hamas commander is a military target, but killing him when he is at home with his family inevitably brings collateral damage and is analogous to assassinating generals in their houses in Tel Aviv or Tampa, Florida (home of US CENTCOM).
With power targets, destroying the civilian infrastructure itself is the goal, which means that Israel can warn civilians to flee immediately before the strike without worrying about the target getting away. According to an anonymous source that had carried out previous strikes on power targets, “They will never just hit a high-rise that does not have something we can define as a military target … But for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city.”
As Abraham notes, “Whereas previously the army’s official procedure was that it was possible to attack power targets only after all civilians had been evacuated from them, testimonies from Palestinian residents in Gaza indicate that, since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.” These include:
- 10 Oct, Babel Building, 10 killed, including 3 journalists
- 25 Oct, 12 story Al-Taj in Gaza City, about 120 people buried under it
- 31 Oct, 8 story Al-Mohandseen, south of Wadi Gaza, estimated 150 people killed
- 9 Oct, 3 buildings and flea market Jabaliya Refugee Camp, killing at least 69
For attacks on military targets, Abraham’s sources claim that in the current war, the bar for military importance has been lowered (for instance, attacking homes of low-level commanders) and the bar for civilian deaths has been raised. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths … as part of an attack on a senior official … to hundreds of civilian deaths”
Abraham notes that this is consistent with official Israeli statements. On Oct 9, a spokesman said “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Air Force Chief of Staff Omer Tishler, confirmed that while attacks had a legitimate military target, entire neighborhoods were attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner” because they served as “terror nests for Hamas”.
Motives
When troops are under fire in populated areas, militaries face tough choices between exposing their troops to danger and killing civilians with indiscriminate attacks on enemy positions. However, much of the destruction in Gaza has occurred in places where Israel did not have ground forces. As of 3 December, 72 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza.
For countries with technologically advanced militaries like the US and Israel, it’s often an option to attack the enemy by remote control. Better to shoot a missile or drop a bomb than to send in your own soldiers where they may be killed. You can even make a humanitarian argument that there will be more collateral damage if your ground forces have to shoot there way into an area rather than just demolishing a building here and there. This argument might be more persuasive if Israel weren’t also sending in ground forces.
The other motive for causing civilian damage is sometimes referred to as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after a Beirut neighborhood extensively bombed by Israel during its 2006 war with Lebanon. As Human Rights Watch reported, “Statements by Israeli officials strongly suggest that the massive IDF attacks in southern Beirut were carried out … against entire neighborhoods because they were seen as pro-Hezbollah.” However, “The death toll in southern Beirut was also low despite the massive destruction … because entire neighborhoods such as the Dahieh were completely evacuated in anticipation of Israeli air strikes.”
The Dahiya Doctrine, as summarized by Ishaan Tharoor, is that “the necessary response to militant provocations from Lebanon, Syria or Gaza were ‘disproportionate’ strikes that aim only secondarily to hit the enemy’s capacity to launch rockets or other attacks. Rather, the goal should be to inflict lasting damage, no matter the civilian consequences, as a future deterrent.”
Siege
The tightening of Israel (and Egypt’s) siege of Gaza deserves its own article, but has to be at least mentioned here. Soon after the October 7 attack, they sealed Gaza, stopping food, water, medicine, and electricity from entering the territory. Since then small amounts of supplies have been allowed in, but essentials like food and water remained in short supply. The Geneva Conventions prohibit starving civilians or attacking “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian populations, such as foodstuffs”.
So far I have not seen reports of mass deaths from the dire conditions prevailing throughout Gaza. However, by late November Gaza had “Child diarrhoea cases about 100 times normal levels” and the World Health Organization was warning that “we will see more people dying from disease than… from the bombardment if we are not able to put back (together) this health system.”
Should that happen, accusations of genocide, unfairly applied since the beginning of Israel’s war against Gaza, could start to have some truth.
Conclusion
As with most aspects of this conflict, opposing narratives each have some validity. Israel has shown restraint and care in not killing as many Palestinians as they could. But so far they have killed about ten times as many civilians as were murdered on October 7. The scale of destruction, the number of incidents with mass civilian death, Israel’s low number of military casualties during the operation, and statements by Israeli leaders all suggest that this isn’t just a war against Hamas. It’s a war against all of Gaza.
“They killed our kids, so we’re killing their kids.” There is a moral difference between shooting a child in your gunsights and destroying an apartment block in which your enemy is hiding, but try explaining that to a parent collecting her child’s body parts from the rubble.
Often the dramatic, initial phase of a disaster is less damaging than the quiet suffering that comes afterwards. Heavy as the death toll is, it appears to be dwarfed (in magnitude) by the damage to the built environment. Even if the war ends soon, it will leave Gazans living in the streets of a hellscape of rubble. What will public health, child mortality, education levels, and mental health look like a year from now or ten years from now?
Top photo: central Gaza Strip, 5 Nov 2023, from +972 Magazine.