“Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” Kamala Harris said Saturday, while in Dubai filling in for Joe Biden at the UN climate conference.
At this point, I’m not sure anyone seriously believes the Israeli military is especially concerned with civilian casualties in Gaza, where the IDF resumed combat operations after blaming Hamas for the end of a ceasefire that saw dozens of hostages exchanged for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Although each blamed the other for the resumption of fighting, it was widely understood that in fact, hostage-prisoner exchange negotiations simply broke down when neither side would accept the other’s proposals.
Anticipating an Israeli bombing campaign in southern Gaza, Antony Blinken warned Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must “put a premium on protecting” innocents “before any operations go forward” in the south. By its own account, the IDF subsequently hit more than 50 targets in Khan Younis. At least 150 Palestinians were killed and more than 500 wounded across Gaza after the truce fell apart.
Blinken asked Netanyahu to give Gazans some indication of where they might be safe. The IDF published a map that divided Gaza into dozens of tiny zones. Apparently, the Israelis have utilized similar maps since the onset of the war in mid-October. The purpose of publishing a version of the map now, the military said, is to “enable residents to orient themselves and understand the [IDF’s] instructions.” As pretty much everyone watching the conflict quickly pointed out, a lot of Gazans have no way to access the map, particularly given disruptions to internet connectivity blamed on Israel.
The White House wants assurances from Netanyahu that Israel won’t again displace a population the IDF herded south ahead of the Gaza City offensive. 80% of Gazans are now displaced, according to UN estimates. Hundreds of thousands have been bombed in the very areas they were told to shelter. Now, Palestinians in Khan Younis say they’ve been told to go to Rafah, on the Egyptian border, but the IDF has targeted Rafah too.
The death toll in Gaza now likely exceeds 15,000, and while it’s true that estimate comes from the health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, the total number of casualties is, if anything, higher than the semi-official count because scores of dead are buried beneath the rubble. The Biden administration has acknowledged that reality at least once. The idea, floated either tacitly or explicitly by Israeli officials, that the death toll is somehow overstated, is ludicrously incongruent with the scope of the damage. The strip is now a “moonscape,” as the AP put it, in an article which dared to suggest that Gaza might be “uninhabitable” by the time Israel’s done with it.
Blinken told the Israeli government on Thursday that the scorched earth campaign against northern Gaza mustn’t be replicated in the south but… well, suffice to say the IDF hasn’t exactly been amenable to US exhortations thus far. As many as three quarters of the dead are said to be women and children. Some weapons experts and conflict historians say Israel’s tactics have no modern precedent. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” one former Pentagon intelligence analyst told The New York Times late last month, marveling darkly at the pervasive use of large bombs on heavily populated areas.
In the linked article, the Times noted that during campaigns to retake Mosul and Raqqa from ISIS, the US military (which knows a thing or two about killing innocents while firing missiles at Arabs) generally deemed 500-pound weapons to be “far too large for most targets.” On October 31, Israel dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on the Jabaliya refugee camp. Note that the share of women and children killed in this conflict is almost double that witnessed during three previous rounds of Israel-Hamas fighting.
Blinken this week insisted on Israel’s “compliance with international humanitarian law,” and said the Netanyahu government is compelled to “take every possible measure to avoid civilian harm.” The problem: There are no measures Israel can take to avoid civilian harm. The key is the geography. This is an area the size of Philadelphia. There’s nowhere to go.
The White House has apparently seen Israel’s battle plan for the next phase of the fight, presumably in the south, where the IDF is convinced Hamas’s leadership is holed up. The administration is reportedly confident the strategy respects civilian life, or at least contains some guardrails for limiting harm to innocents. Color me skeptical. “Our forces are charging forward,” Netanyahu declared on Friday. “We continue to fight with all our might.”
I assume readers have seen the Times‘s latest reporting on Israel’s intelligence “failure.” Note the scare quotes. As it turns out, the failure wasn’t one of intelligence, but rather of underestimating Hamas’s conviction and wherewithal. Israeli officials were in possession of Hamas’s blueprint for over a year.
As the Times wrote, “the approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named ‘Jericho Wall,’ outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people [but] experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.” Some experts.
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