What happened to Israeli rules of engagement?
IT CLAIMS to be one of the most efficient, disciplined and “moral” armies in the world, yet it keeps killing and injuring innocent people. Why?
The deadly – and precise – strike on a vehicle carrying aid workers on Monday night in central Gaza was the first to involve Western European and North American aid workers, but the targeted killing of unarmed individuals is far from unique in this conflict.
In March four unarmed Palestinian men were killed while strolling on wasteland by a series of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) drone strikes. In January, two Al Jazeera journalists – Hamza Dahdouh, 27, and Mustafa Thuraya, 30 – were killed in a targeted strike on a car. Just as with Monday’s strike, the vehicles were not posing a threat to the IDF at the time. Israeli hostages have also been gunned down waving white flags as they shouted in Hebrew.
So what is going wrong? Why are so many innocent people being killed using targeted weapons systems?
Critics point to two overlapping factors: poorly defined rules of engagement and a culture of impunity that has been allowed to spread among IDF commanders on the ground.
On discipline, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the IDF’S Chief of Staff, has tried on several occasions to rein in his men but he is constantly undermined by politicians who dehumanise
Palestinians and defend IDF excesses.
“We cannot fight when discipline and our principles are not clear and are not followed,” Lt Gen Halevi said recently. “A commander cannot skip instructions without approval if there is no operational and self-evident emergency reason for doing so.”
But it is the IDF rules of engagement and targeting that are perhaps most worrying. Soldiers who have returned from Gaza have told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that local commanders on the ground are randomly establishing “kill zones” in which anyone who enters is killed without question.
Data also suggest that the IDF may be making little distinction between confirmed combatants and men of fighting age. Data on 150 United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers killed in Gaza, shared recently with The Telegraph, show that a disproportionate number of male workers have been killed. Perhaps many or even all of them were legitimately targeted as combatants but, if so, there is nothing in the data to suggest that was the case. Most appear to have been killed at home.
The fact that so many of these deaths are being caused by drones is especially perplexing. Unlike snipers or lone soldiers, drone operators do not work in isolation and sit in a calm environment miles from the front line. The munitions they use are precision guided bombs, which can be swerved away from a target even as they fall.
The Telegraph interviewed two IDF drone pilots in December. One said of the bombs: “We have two types. One can go down to the metre, meaning we could theoretically take out the driver of a vehicle, leaving the person in the back seat alive... The other has a kill radius of five to 10 metres. Part of our professionality is knowing which bomb to use for which mission. We can move it until the final seconds, and divert it into the sand if necessary. For every strike there must first be a designated abort area.”
According to Israeli media, no fewer than three strikes of this type were used in Monday’s incident. Unnamed IDF officials claimed the convoy had been targeted because Israeli intelligence suggested there was a single “armed person” associated with it, although he was not actually travelling with them in their marked humanitarian vehicles at the time.
There is one further factor that may help explain the behaviour of the IDF: a widespread denigration and disrespect for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat), the body responsible for clearing the movements of aid convoys in Gaza.
Because Cogat was responsible for dealing with the Hamas administration before Oct 7, it is widely regarded as “broken” by many in Israel.
The Telegraph was told of at least one World Health Organisation (WHO) convoy which was cleared by Cogat to carry critically ill patients from a hospital in central Gaza to the crossing with Egypt in December. Cogat had assured the convoy’s leader that they could pass through checkpoints within Gaza without further searches as these had been conducted at the hospital before departure by the IDF and the patients were extremely frail.
However, the convoy was stopped and critically ill patients were searched at gunpoint. The WHO team leader called Cogat officials on a satellite phone but were overruled by a local IDF commander who ignored them.
In the case of the hostages killed, the marksman responsible told an inquiry he had mistaken them for terrorists but could not fully account for his actions given they were unarmed and waving a white flag. In cases involving Israeli citizens and foreign workers, the IDF conducts an investigation. In the case of the men killed in wasteland in March it said that they were in an “active combat zone” and implied, without evidence, at least one may have been involved in fighting.
In the case of the journalists, it altered its story several times before alleging that the two of them had at some point been members of a terrorist organisation. When Telegraph asked about apparent inconsistencies in a document produced to show this, the IDF declined to offer any further comment.