‘Pinpointed’

Another day, another macabre collage of images from Gaza, where throngs of dejected locals lingered over dead bodies rolled up in rugs and covered in white sheets.

An Israeli airstrike killed more than three-dozen people at a repurposed school in Nuseirat, where some 5,000 displaced Palestinians were reportedly sheltering. A few hours later, the IDF blew up additional structures in central Gaza.

Daniel Hagari, whose job it is to editorialize around and otherwise explain away a given day’s civilian death toll, said the IDF spent three days tracking a group of militants who were using classrooms at the school complex for training purposes. “The Shin Bet found a solution to separate the terrorists from those seeking shelter,” he said, referring to Israel’s internal intelligence command.

Apparently not. Hagari counted nine dead terrorists. But one AFP image from the aftermath of the strike appeared to show at least 20 dead Gazans. Local officials said twice that many people were killed, including 14 children and nine women.

Apologists for the IDF’s war conduct tend to dispute local tallies of the death toll, but in the presence of photographic evidence, the international community will be forgiven for believing their lyin’ eyes. Maybe Gazan health officials are in the habit of overstating the body count, maybe they aren’t, but it’s hard to make the case that a visibly dead 7-year-old (for example) was a militant. It’s even harder to make the case that she isn’t dead.

Sometimes, Hagari’s remarks come across as a dark version of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. “I wish to complain about this little girl who I saw playing not half an hour ago at this very school.” “Oh yes. What’s wrong with her?” “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her, she’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with her!” “No, no, she’s uh — she’s resting.”

Israel’s in the habit of constructing straw men to justify these sorts of strikes. The argument’s always the same: Well, Hamas deliberately hides among civilians, so Hamas — not Israel — is to blame when civilians are killed.

But nobody ever suggested otherwise. Nobody disputed that Hamas deliberately operates in, around and under civilian infrastructure in order to shield itself. That’s not just a terror tactic, it’s part and parcel of urban combat when you’re outgunned and, relatedly, it’s a tried and true strategy in asymmetric warfare. I can assure you The Continental Army ducked into a few houses every now and again to evade the Redcoats.

If you’re the more powerful combatant in that scenario and you want to keep the moral high ground, you have to exercise restraint. That’s even more important in the social media era: If you aren’t willing to, say, let nine militants live in order to avoid killing 23 women and children at a UN-run school, you’re “hashtag genocide.” In other words, you’re digging your own propaganda grave.

Israel’s deep in that hole by now, and the IDF doesn’t appear to know the first rule of holes: When you’re in one, the first step is stop digging. In this case, that means Israel might consider making an earnest effort to go a week without killing women and children. That’s not a big ask.

Hagari on Thursday claimed the strike on the school was “pinpointed.” And yet, as usual, his remarks made for a ridiculous juxtaposition with bloody footage and visuals from the scene, where the damage looked anything but precise. The Wall Street Journal spoke to Sahar Sa’eed, a twentysomething who arrived at the shelter in Nuseirat after fleeing violence in nearby Al Bureij. “All I saw was blood and body parts scattered in the midst of fire,” she told the Journal.

Another spokesperson for the IDF reiterated that Israel only targeted classrooms where as many as 30 militants were confirmed to be hiding. Again, nobody doubts that. I certainly don’t. What I do doubt, though, is the notion that the IDF took proper account of the likelihood that a strike, no matter how “pinpointed,” would kill more civilians than militants.

I also doubt the IDF’s being entirely rational by now about the incremental security gains from killing nine more randos with rifles. The militants killed early Thursday surely weren’t the type of guys you’d invite to your classroom, but were they likely to end up in the kibbutzim as part of some future attack on Israel? I seriously doubt it. I doubt even more the notion that killing them was worth the lives of the 23 women and children who died with them.

It doesn’t seem to occur to the IDF on some days that for every mother, sister and daughter killed, a son, brother and father picks up a rifle. If you kill nine militants and 23 civilians in a given strike, how many new militants did you create? If it’s more than nine, the net effect is more militants, not less.

Sa’eed — the young woman who spoke to the Journal on Thursday — lost a parent and two siblings in the strike. “It’s a most painful sight,” she despaired. “We thought we were safe.” She has one remaining family member: A brother. They’re both going right back to the same shelter, they told the Journal, “because they don’t know where else to go.”