Israel trying to frame Gaza deaths as similar to other wars
Israeli officials say civilian toll, now at 10K, no different than other Western conflicts
WASHINGTON — Fallujah. Mosul. Copenhagen. Hiroshima.
Facing global criticism over a bloody military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has killed thousands of civilians, Israeli officials have turned to history in their defense. And the names of several infamous sites of death and destruction have been on their lips.
In public statements and private diplomatic conversations, the officials have cited past Western military actions in urban areas dating from World War II to the post-9/11 wars against terrorism. Their goal is to help justify a campaign against Hamas that is claiming thousands of Palestinian lives.
In those earlier conflicts, innocent civilians paid the price for the defeat of enemies. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as many as 200,000 civilians perished after the United States dropped atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender. In Iraq, hundreds of civilians were killed in Fallujah as U.S. forces fought Iraqi insurgents, and thousands died in Mosul in Iraqi and U.S. battles against the Islamic State group.
Israel insists it is trying to limit civilian casualties in a war against a terrorist enemy, which began when Hamas killed 1,400 people on Oct. 7 in southern Israel, most of them civilians.
Human rights advocates and many governments in Europe and the Middle East scoff at that. They accuse Israel of committing war crimes in the weeks of airstrikes that have leveled entire city blocks in Gaza, destroying schools, mosques and other seemingly nonmilitary targets.
Israeli officials say they have no choice: Hamas fighters, numbering perhaps 30,000 by Israeli estimates, embed within Gaza’s population of 2.2 million and store weapons in or under civilian sites, daring Israel to launch strikes that fuel outrage. The officials also say Hamas is clearly guilty of intentionally killing Israeli civilians.
President Joe Biden and his aides have been careful not to even hint in public Israel could be violating any laws of war. And the State Department continues to approve sales of weapons to Israel while refraining from making any assessments of the legality of Israel’s actions. Some diplomats are uneasy with that, especially since the department formally pledged this year to investigate episodes of civilian casualties involving American-made weapons.
Israel says it is impossible to defeat its enemy without killing innocents — a lesson that Americans and their allies should understand.
“In any combat situation, like when the United States was leading a coalition to get ISIS out of Mosul, there were civilian casualties,” Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesperson, said in an Oct. 24 interview with PBS, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. Regev said Israel’s “ratio” of Hamas fighters to civilians killed “compares very well to NATO and other Western forces” in past military campaigns.
It is impossible to determine that ratio accurately. More than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza over the past month, 40% of them children, according to the Health Ministry there. It is unknown how many might have been Hamas militants.