Israel is arrogant, its army is committing massacres, and American military leaders are shocked by the enormity of the price paid by civilians in Gaza
Newsweek
Palestinian civilian casualties have become the focus of controversy in the Hamas war, precipitating global condemnation of Israel. "A staggering and unacceptable number of civilian casualties,"said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "Too many Palestinians have been killed," said Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. President Joe Biden summed up the dilemma on Tuesday, saying that while Israel has received European support in addition to American support, "they are starting to lose support through the indiscriminate bombing that is happening".
The large number of Palestinian deaths has raised accusations of Israeli war crimes and even genocide, on the premise that civilians are being deliberately targeted. Government officials from all over the world and the media emphasized the impression that Israel is attacking hospitals, schools, refugee camps and humanitarian facilities.
Calculating the acceptability of killing any human life creates the heaviest moral dilemmas, and the images of suffering in Gaza have prompted many to demand a ceasefire. But armies must always weigh the cost of civilian lives against any perceived military advantage according to the laws of war.
In an attempt to answer the question of whether such a large number of civilian deaths and injuries is really too many - according to the legal definitions of proportionality - Newsweek spoke to more than a dozen current and retired IDF officers, US Army and intelligence officers, all of whom were able to speak more openly because they were granted the right to anonymity, often criticizing the conduct of the war. Newsweek also spoke to a number of prominent human rights experts and reviewed classified Israeli and U.S. data related to the conflict.
The numbers of victims coming out of Gaza are staggering; the pictures from Gaza are heartbreaking. But based on new and exclusive data on the scale of Israeli attacks, the number of Palestinian casualties, although high, does not seem disproportionate to the type of measures used in international law: not in terms of the number of weapons used by Israel, the number of targets hit, the nature of Hamas resistance or the unique features of the Gaza Strip, with its exceptionally high population density. American military sources agree, many of whom are very critical of Israel's behavior.
What Newsweek found is a more substantial gap between the two countries ' militaries.
Israel focuses on behavior - each individual strike and its compliance with the requirements of international law-while Washington focuses on the results, it is a philosophical disagreement that helps explain the nature of Israel's attacks and the ferocity of public debate.
"Part of the problem, in the end, is Israel's arrogance,"the United States says. An Air Force officer who participated in internal deliberations within the Biden administration and discussions with his Israeli counterparts. Even for us, in private and frank conversations, they referred to Hamas's surprise attack and its brutality, cited the Holocaust, blamed Hamas, pointed to September 11 to justify and the simple fact is that Israel lost the information war because it destroyed so much, even if it could justify each individual attack."
Israel's attack on Hamas is one of the most intense in recent times, taking place in an area of 141 square miles (365 square kilometers), almost twice the size of the city of Washington, D.C. and home to nearly 2.3 million people. According to previously unpublished information, Israel attacked about 25,000 targets in Gaza, from the air, land and sea, using about 140,000 weapons, 60 percent of which were artillery rounds and 40 percent of weapons dropped from airplanes.
"Israel was accurate in its bombing and caused enormous civilian damage," says a senior US military intelligence officer involved in the analysis of the war, commenting on how difficult it was to reach a final verdict.
"We have been subjected to so much criticism, especially in the United States, that the media only assume that the objects hit or damaged were deliberately targeted,"says a second high-ranking commander of the Israeli Air Force. In this way, the narrative builds on the fact that the hospital was a target, or a school, when in fact the target is always Hamas. Even Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu says that it is regrettable that despite our best efforts, we have not minimized the harm to civilians. But did we target civilians or did we try to kill them Absolutely not."
Another retired US military officer, now a senior civilian in the intelligence community, explains: "the IDF has a different culture than in the US or in NATO, and fights with different ferocity . Just because the numbers may be higher than what we are used to seeing does not mean that they are excessive. The conditions here are unique."
On the first night of Israel's retaliation, fighter jets, attack helicopters and ground and naval artillery struck more than 500 targets inside Gaza, including what the Israeli Air Force described as "multi-storey buildings" identified as offices and residences of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials and leaders. The officials say that the IDF was implementing an existing contingency plan, a plan that represented the "maximum" response to a major attack, hitting specific military bases and secret facilities, and focused in particular on the offices and residences of the Hamas leadership. Hamas rocket and mortar firing points, as well as observation and sniper positions were also hit for a total of about 1,200 targets.
According to US intelligence, the Israeli Air Force dropped almost 2,000 bombs totaling more than 1,000 tons of explosives in the 72 hours covered by the current plan. According to the IDF spokesman, 21 high-rise buildings were attacked. After the initial operations, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that 849 civilians were killed and another 4,250 were injured.
As the war progressed, Israeli military officials directed changes in the focus on targeting and relaxed some of the existing rules of engagement given the scope and damage of the Hamas attack, according to both U.S. and Israeli military sources. IDF spokesman Rear Admiral. Daniel Hagari publicly declared that "the installation is on damage, not on accuracy".
A current senior IDF officer who spoke to Newsweek explains: "the real change was that we switched from a limited punitive campaign to the task of eliminating Hamas. This means moving from hitting a few targets here and there to a massive effort to destroy the Hamas military machine. It just can not be compared with other confrontations."
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant toured the Gaza front at the end of the 72 hours, describing the Hamas war as a "large-scale response" that "removed all restrictions" on the bombing. "We are acting accurately and professionally, but not surgically,"said the chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force Brig. The general. Omar Tishler. I'm not talking about one, dozens or hundreds [of weapons]. "We are talking about thousands of munitions,"he said. He said that in previous battles, the Israeli Air Force may have targeted one or two objects at once, while in the current "iron swords" campaign, it was aimed at groups of several targets, known in the United States as target networks. "We have no energy or resource constraints,"Tischler said. "Our relentless machine will continue to work, beating and disassembling, all aimed at reshaping the situation from the ground up."
With the completion of the prepared plan, Israel expanded the scope of its attacks, a lot of new targeting based on Hamas movements and the continuation of additional attacks on Israel. The IDF and US intelligence estimated that Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, had just over 25,000 fighters organized into 24 Battalion groups of 140 combat companies, including infantry, rocket artillery, anti-tank, air defense and engineering units. In addition, the IDF says that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad had another 17,000 fighters for a total of about 42,000 fighters.
For each element, the IDF designated a fixed headquarters and support facilities. As units and fighters dispersed, they then became targets. Northern Gaza, where the initial bombardment was concentrated, was home to two of Hamas ' five brigades, the Gaza City Brigade, the largest with about 9,000 fighters; and the northern Gaza Brigade, with about 4,800 fighters, according to U.S. intelligence.
Tishler and other IDF officials said that in the first week of the war, pilots left their air bases either with specific fixed targets, or in the case of mobile or Dynamic targets, the coordinates of specific targets were passed while the aircraft was in the air. IDF officers who spoke to Newsweek say that in the early days in particular, the focus was already on the damage to the Hamas military machine, even if it was in civilian structures and activities or adjacent to them.
