Hamas, Israel, and the Responsibility for Civilian Suffering and Deaths

Plus: Is the Biden administration signaling a shift in support for Israel?

A child reacts as people salvage belongings amid the rubble of a damaged building following strikes on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on November 12, 2023, as battles between Israel and Hamas continue. (Photo by Mohammed Abed / AFP via Getty Images)

AFTER A SEVEN-DAY TRUCE in which Israel traded convicted terrorists for the freedom of nearly one hundred women and children held hostage by Hamas, the war in Gaza has resumed. Israel remains intent upon realizing its objectives: rescuing all of the remaining hostages, destroying Hamas, and ensuring that Gaza is never again in a position to attack the people of Israel.

But will Israel have the time and the freedom of action to accomplish these goals? A great deal hinges on the position of the Biden administration, which is facing cross-cutting pressures from various constituencies at home and abroad, including staffers in the White House and State Department who have voiced their opposition to the administration’s support for Israel, and in the left flank of the Democratic party. Perhaps as a result, in a coordinated fashion the administration has begun leaning on Israel to alter its tactics.

Following the attack by Hamas on October 7, Israel, in the first phase of the war, used air power extensively to support its ground forces, destroying buildings and tunnels where Hamas fighters were ensconced. Now, with fighting resuming, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on his fourth visit to Israel since the fighting commenced, called for Israel to take special pains to avoid taking civilian life. “I underscored the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south,” Blinken said in a press conference last Thursday.

Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris chimed in, saying in Dubai on Saturday that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.”

And Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking in California on Saturday, warned that a failure to protect civilians would drive Palestinians “into the arms of the enemy.”

In line with these exhortations, Israel has since the beginning of the war been sending warnings—by text message and airdropped leaflets—of areas they intend to attack so residents can evacuate. Such a step has already saved many lives. But the effort to destroy Hamas will still be costly in civilian blood. Hamas, after all, is a terrorist organization whose fighters, in violation of the laws of war, fail to wear uniforms and embed themselves amid civilians and civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals. Dismantling such an organization with minimal civilian casualties is a deeply problematic military undertaking. As Michael Walzer notes in a sharp new essay about the war, minimizing civilian casualties

means targeting as carefully as possible and accepting risks in gathering the information that makes targeting precise. It also requires putting troops on the ground so that they can see clearly enough or get close enough to aim narrowly at combatants. But even if the IDF does all this and accepts the morally necessary risks, it will kill large numbers of civilians.

Compared to more indiscriminate modes of waging war, minimizing civilian casualties entails a far higher casualty rate for the IDF, which has already lost hundreds of soldiers since war commenced on October 7.

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IT REMAINS AN OPEN QUESTION how hard the Biden administration is really going to press Israel. Some staunch supporters of Israel worry that administration policy is about to shift. For example, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is persuaded that the Biden administration is “setting the stage to abandon Israel,” asking it to do the impossible. Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, goes further, mocking Blinken, saying that he is essentially saying to Israel: “we will allow you to kill Hamas terrorists hiding behind civilians, schools, and hospitals provided you do no harm to civilians, schools, and hospitals. We expect you to attack using your magic ray guns, the ones that kill terrorists but damage nothing else.”

Such criticisms seem overdrawn—or, at least wildly premature. In his most recent visit, Blinken reaffirmed Israel’s right to ensure that Hamas is dismantled and never again in position to engage in mass slaughter. We will “continue to support Israel’s efforts to do everything possible to ensure that Hamas cannot repeat the horrors of October 7,” he said. But Blinken did warn that time was running short and that Israel did not have the “credit” of months to carry out its objectives. For an administration that had earlier asserted that Hamas had to be eradicated just as ISIS had been eradicated, this is a clear sign of drift in the wrong direction.

But, again, the humanitarian war-fighting tactics Blinken is calling for are ones that Israel had already put in place, on its own initiative, even before the seven-day truce. Thus, Israel, then as now, had dropped leaflets telling residents of northern Gaza to move to the south away from the danger of combat zones. It facilitated such movements by opening safe corridors along which Gazans could travel (including in the face of fire from Hamas, which in line with its brutal tactics, sought to keep civilians in locations where they would suffer injury and death). In short, the pressure the United States is now exerting may be more designed to mollify discomfited allies and multiplying critics on its left flank than any serious attempt to interfere with Israel’s prosecution of the war. Such bowing to the left may be deplorable in itself, but it is not the sign of a serious pressure campaign.

Indeed, on the very first day that the fighting resumed, Blinken was applauding Israel for having taken the necessary steps to implement his humanitarian recommendations. John Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesman, declared that if fighting resumed, Israel would “continue to find support from the United States in terms of tools and capabilities, the weapons systems that they need, as well as the advice and the perspectives that we can offer in terms of urban warfare.” Once again, this is not the language of a serious pressure campaign.

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WHATEVER THE AMBIGUOUS SIGNALS being sent by the Biden administration, Israel is fighting a war for its existence. If it is to survive, if it is to reestablish deterrence against the powers that would do it harm, it cannot permit a neighbor intent on genocide to remain a threat on its southern border. It is thus an opportune moment to recall how the United States and its allies treated German civilians in World War II when they too were facing an existential threat, Nazi domination of Europe and the world.

Only days after the Nazi bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, the British war cabinet, led by Winston Churchill, settled on the initiation of “unrestricted air warfare.” Concern for civilian life was cast aside so long as military objectives were realized. Those military objectives extended in far-reaching ways. The destruction of more than half of Germany’s urban centers commenced.

That destruction was accomplished by means that have been meticulously documented by the historian Richard Overy in The Bombers and the Bombed. The Allies were methodical, even scientific, in their approach. The British air ministry scrupulously calculated the ratio between bomb weight and the expected death toll among German workers, i.e., civilians. As I noted in 2014 when writing about this subject for the Weekly Standard in the midst of a previous Israel-Hamas conflict,

the unit of measurement [the air ministry] selected was based upon the casualties inflicted by Germany in the November 14, 1940, bombing of the English city of Coventry. The scale went from “1 Coventry” upward, with an attack of “5 Coventries” expected to yield approximately 28,000 German deaths. In the spring of 1942, Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, produced his famous calculation that 10,000 Royal Air Force bombers would be sufficient to “dehouse” one-third of Germany’s urban populace.

A new military-scientific subdiscipline emerged: “incendiarism.” It is “axiomatic,” explained the report of one British defense research division, “that fire will always be the optimum agent for the complete destruction of buildings, factories, etc.” Overy recounts how experts from the National Fire Protection Association in the United States traveled to London to provide advice on how best to achieve “large-scale fire destruction.” As the war progressed, considerable effort was devoted to making certain that targeted cities would be consumed by firestorms of the kind that sucked the oxygen out of the air and killed by the tens of thousands.

A unit in the British air ministry systematically considered the relevant factors for fostering the “essential draught conditions”: the dimensions of beams in the average house in northwest Germany, the materials used in constructing rooftops, the design of staircases, the thickness of floors. The happy conclusion it reached: “a German house will burn well.” Observing Churchill read aloud a memorandum setting forth the possibility of “round-the-clock bombing” of Germany, an American general was later to recollect: He “rolled the words off his tongue like they were tasty morsels.”

Israel has the means to level Gaza and eradicate Hamas without suffering any casualties at all. But it has never engaged in the kind of tactics that were routinized by the Allies in World War II. Even as it has been forceful, it has also exercised restraint. But Hamas has set what Walzer calls an “asymmetry trap,” as Israel rather than Hamas gets blamed for the civilian deaths. For its pains, Israel is being accused of the crime of genocide by pro-Palestinian voices around the world. Never mind that under the laws of war, the onus for civilian casualties in this conflict lies entirely on Hamas, which, just as ISIS did, violates the laws of war in their totality.

Never mind as well that in the face of Israel’s restraint, Hamas remains utterly recalcitrant. It is determined to repeat its lawless behavior. Its spokesman says: “We will repeat the October 7th massacre again and again until Israel is destroyed. . . . We are a nation of martyrs and are proud of it. We’ll sacrifice as many Palestinian lives as it takes.”

Against an enemy that makes such pledges, an enemy that fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian targets, that takes infants and children hostage, that tortures civilians and then executes them, that deliberately places Palestinian civilians at risk of death, Israel is entitled to defend itself.

On that score, the largest truth to keep in mind is that from day one of the war, the Biden administration has had Israel’s back in remarkable fashion, including by massively replenishing the IDF’s stock of ammunition, and by sending an imposing naval armada to the eastern end of the Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah, Iran, and anyone else, from attacking Israel, thereby freeing Israel to devote more military resources to its Gaza operation. It deserves immense applause for these actions, actions that count far more than words, and it deserves further applause for its words, as long as those words continue to express support for Israel in its essential first order task of self-defense: annihilating Hamas.