The Israeli army has dropped restraint in Gaza and the data shows unprecedented killing
Palestinians bury the bodies of 110 victims of Israeli attacks in a mass grave in the Khan Younis cemetery, 22 November 2023
Yigal Levy writes in Haaretz on 9 December 2023:
After the expressions of international solidarity with Israel faded out, growing criticism began to be heard about the scale of the killing of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defense Forces. Prominent in this regard was The New York Times, which on November 25 published the findings of a comprehensive investigation in which it maintained that the rate at which civilians were being killed in Gaza is higher than it was in the controversial offensives of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. However, besides arguing that the assault on Gaza is extremely intense, the Times did not provide any valid comparative findings that might shed light on the intensity question.
What follows is a comparison between Swords of Iron, as Israel has dubbed the current war, and previous Israeli operations. For the comparative basis to be valid, we will analyze only operations in which Israel attacked Gaza from the air without a land assault, and will compare them to the aerial attacks undertaken during the first three weeks of the 2023 war. Accordingly, we will examine the proportion of Gazan civilians (“noncombatants”) killed to the total number of Gazan fatalities.
That ratio reflects the degree to which the attacking side adheres to the principle of “discrimination,” which is a key tenet of international humanitarian law. The principle holds that the attacking force is obligated to distinguish and differentiate between enemy combatants and civilians, and that it must avoid harming civilians, certainly deliberately. The law recognizes situations in which an attack is permitted against a military target that is situated in a civilian environment, but for these the law introduces another principle: that of proportionality. It holds that such an attack is lawful if the incidental loss of civilian life (“collateral damage”) it may incur is not excessive, in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
It follows that with a high proportion of noncombatants among the total number of those killed, we can conclude that the principle of discrimination was not adhered to, and an unusually high rate will reflect either a departure from the principle of proportionality or a highly flexible interpretation of it.
Limiting the comparison to aerial attacks that are unaccompanied by a ground assault makes it possible to avoid factoring in constraints that can emerge during a ground attack, notably the need for close air support for the troops or the pressure to improvise. In contrast, an aerial attack is generally planned in advance, thus allowing the attacker to enjoy a clear-cut advantage that allows it to conduct operations with relative restraint.
I will compare Swords of Iron to four extensive operations that were based entirely on aerial attacks: Pillar of Defense (November 2012), which lasted about a week; Guardian of the Walls (May 2021), about 10 days; Breaking Dawn (August 2022), three days; and Shield and Arrow (May 2023), five days. The data for each of the four operations is taken from reports of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which regularly analyzes and categorizes casualty data. The center is associated with the Israeli intelligence community. Accordingly, drawing on its data should reduce opposition to the following arguments among those advocating Israel’s policies, even if there are problems with the data and disparities between it and other reports. The figures refer to those killed in Israeli attacks and not by failed rocket launches by Gazans.
Civilian death rates in Israeli air strikes on Gaza
The table shows that in the first three operations, the rate of noncombatants killed stood at about 40 percent of total enemy fatalities. Since during the period between Pillar of Defense and later operations the use of precision munitions increased and intelligence improved, the similar fatality rates leads to the conclusion that its faith in precision weapons has encouraged Israel to target installations in high-density urban areas that would previously have been considered impossible to attack (such as the attack on residential towers in Guardian of the Walls, which was not undertaken in Pillar of Defense). The heightened precision was translated into heightened boldness, not into a reduction in the harm caused to civilians.
However, in the fourth operation, Shield and Arrow, this past May, a slight shift occurred, and the number of civilians killed fell to about a third of all fatalities. This, notwithstanding that in the opening attack, which was aimed at apartments that housed Islamic Jihad activists, 10 civilians were killed.
IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi referred to this shift in his address at the Herzliya Conference of May 2023. His explanation was one of the most detailed ever by an Israeli chief of staff with regard to the subject of harm to innocent civilians. “The ratio of combatants to noncombatants harmed in this operation, is better, relative to [comparable] operations in such a high-density area.” Halevi attributed this to precise planning and improved intelligence capability. Yet it’s precisely this awareness by the chief of staff that is instructive about what is happening in Swords of Iron.
The aerial offensive in the war began immediately after the October 7 massacre. The ground assault was launched on October 27, and from that stage, air strikes were conducted to support the troops. For my analysis of the numbers pertaining to the period prior to the launch of the ground offensive, I will use data supplied by the Gaza Ministry of Health for the period of October 7-26. The ministry is under Hamas control, so its reliability is suspect. At the same time, in response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s assertion that he did not trust that ministry’s reports about the number of those killed, on October 27 the ministry took the unusual step of presenting a detailed list of the names of those killed, along with their age, gender and ID numbers. That report has not been refuted to date.
Furthermore, in the past, various international bodies commented favorably on the Hamas ministry’s level of accuracy, and even Dr. Michael Milshtein, formerly the head of the department of Palestinian affairs in Israeli Military Intelligence, noted, in connection with another report, that “Hamas is an organization of numbers and accuracy.” This data may be revised in the future, following investigations by other organizations, but the initial information is sufficient to indicate the basic picture of the situation, from which we can draw practical conclusions.
According to the data, 6,747 people were killed during the October 7-26 period in Gaza, to which we can add dozens more who had not been identified at the time the numbers were tallied up. As usual, the Health Ministry did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Accordingly, for the purpose of the analysis I will factor in the weight of three groups that can be categorized as “noncombatants”: minors aged 17 and under, men of 60 and above, and women. Some will claim that Hamas recruits minors, but it’s reasonable to think that the number of minors killed (based also on past data) is offset by adults aged 18-59 who were are not involved in the fighting but whom I did not include in this category.
This calculation shows that out of the total of 6,747, at least 4,594 individuals of both sexes who can be categorized as noncombatants were killed – 68 percent of the total. For the sake of caution, let us assume, as Prof. Kobi Michael from the Institute for National Security Studies argues, that errant rockets count for about 10 percent of the total rockets fired by the Gazan forces, and could do injury to their civilians, as was with the case in the strike on the Al-Ahli Hospital. If we reduce accordingly the number of noncombatants killed by Israel, the proportion decreases to 61 percent of the total, which is still far higher than the proportion of 33-42 percent for the aerial attacks in the past.
From an international comparative perspective, too, this is a high figure, considering that in new wars fought during the 20th century (after WWII and up until the 1990s), about half of those killed were civilians – and this includes wars in which the most important component was ground combat, not relatively precise strikes from the air. In light of such a high proportion of noncombatants among those killed in Swords of Iron, we may suspect that the principle of discrimination was not upheld or perhaps that the principle of proportionality was subject to a highly flexible interpretation. Thus, rather than this being a case of “collateral damage,” it was the reverse: Because most of those harmed are civilians, what was produced is “collateral benefit,” in the form of a low number of Gazan combatants killed.
The relatively high number of attacks is not the exclusive explanation for this disparity, given that if the army had exercised the same principles that guided it in the past, and in particular in the way it did in this year’s Operation Shield and Arrow, the civilian casualty rate should have been far lower. So we need to offer other explanations.
The first explanation is that the intensiveness of the attacks came at the expense of the precise planning in which the chief of staff takes pride. Other explanations, less naïve, were put forward in an inquiry conducted by Yuval Avraham for +972 Magazine, published on November 30, based on accounts of knowledgeable individuals within the military. That investigation shows that the army lowered the level of (already limited) caution that characterized it in the past. For example, it attacked such “power targets” as residential towers or public buildings, at the price of inflicting large-scale casualties on the civilians within. The same holds for the increase in strikes at private residences, intended to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a terrorist. Likewise, Avraham maintains, the army greatly increased the rate of collateral damage permitted; according to the IDF Spokesperson, speaking on October 10, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Thus, the rules of proportionality were interpreted more flexibly, so that the bar of caution against harming innocent persons was lowered. The use of artificial intelligence to generate targets at a rapid pace reduced even further the level of caution that in the past characterized human judiciousness.
It follows from these explanations that this is a deliberate pattern of operation. Perhaps that is what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant meant when he said, in the war’s first days, “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against, we will use every means.” Given the association between fighting methods and fatality rates, these methods lend further support to the conclusion that the ratio of civilians killed in the air strikes is higher than usual.
Furthermore, we should bear in mind that the aerial offensive was intended to reduce the risks to Israel’s ground forces when they eventually moved in to undertake the “sterilization” of the combat zone, whether by striking at military infrastructure or by encouraging the civilian population to flee. Since it’s clear to the political decision-makers that Israeli society will not accept over time a high level of risk to ground troops – which translates into a large number of soldiers killed – the motivation for intensive and lethal attacks from the air can be expected.
However, the broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it. The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand. We also need to remember that since the start of the ground offensive, the total number of Gazan civilians killed has approximately doubled. But in the absence of any attentiveness by the political leadership to the voice of the future, it’s hard to expect that the course of the war will be adjusted to address that concern.
The more practical conclusion is that if the army does in fact wish to reduce deaths among Gazan civilians, especially in light of international pressure, in particular that of the Americans, it must already at this stage draw trenchant conclusions about its air-strike policy. This should be done before the army embarks on any deeper inquest into the circumstances of the killing of civilians – an inquest it will need to conduct given the likelihood that an international investigation will be launched, such as those initiated by the United Nations following Operation Cast Lead (Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009) and Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014).
And it’s also possible that the pilots – those who opposed the government’s attempted judicial coup for fear that the overhaul of the legal regime would give rise to an unlawful combat policy that could make them vulnerable to risk of international prosecution – need to exercise their own judgment over the nature of the orders they receive, considering the conclusions that are presented here.
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