By Marc Champion
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden dropped the “I” word on Israel, describing its bombing campaign in Gaza as “indiscriminate.” That’s an important claim given the term’s growing use to paint military actions as unlawful, and it didn’t take long for Israel’s habitual critics to jump on it: The US, tweeted former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, had just accused its ally of a war crime.
Whether Biden was correct is morally and perhaps legally significant. Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Convention can be read to define indiscriminate attacks very broadly, including any that, “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life.” On Wednesday, the administration appeared to walk Biden's statement back, with the State Department saying the US had not made a formal determination on whether Israel’s actions are indiscriminate.
The vagaries of international law aside, this is a much more complex question than the apparently high death toll the Israel Defense Forces are inflicting on Palestinians might suggest, because it raises two extraordinarily difficult issues: counting war deaths in real time, and determining what would constitute “discriminate” bombing in modern urban warfare.
I first learned the difficulty of mortality counts on arriving in Romania to cover the aftermath of its 1989 revolution. News reports early in the throes of the fighting ran with an ambiguous and misconstrued state television figure of 60,000 dead. Estimates quickly tumbled to 20,000, then 4,500, and today although we still don’t know for sure the number rests around 1,100. Then came the war in former Yugoslavia, where reporters routinely had to count corpses gathered in trucks and hospitals to confirm or dismiss claims of massacres. Estimates of casualties in Bosnia ranged as high as 280,000 during its 1992-1995 war, falling to around 97,000 when documented afterward.
In Gaza, the Hamas-run health authority (and by now just Hamas) has from the start given a regular tally of those it says are being killed by the IDF, fully aware of just how important this is to eroding the international support Israel garnered after the savage attacks Hamas inflicted on October 7. It is virtually impossible to verify those numbers independently, but that doesn’t mean they can be dismissed, even as systems crumble.
First of all, that’s because during previous IDF incursions into Gaza, the death toll that the Hamas health authority delivered in real time proved to have been remarkably accurate.
Second, the Israeli authorities may pour scorn on the idea of crediting anything that Hamas says, but they also have made no serious effort to rebut the figures.
Finally, the unprecedented casualty rate among UN staff in Gaza and the sheer levels of destruction make clear that the number dying among the Palestinian population at large must also be high.
The next issue is how many of the alleged 18,205 dead as of December 12 have been civilians, and whether that proportion is high or low relative to analogous battles, in other words, whether the high death toll in Gaza is consistent with indiscriminate tactics, or the inevitable consequence of urban warfare. As the UK’s Major General Rupert Jones, deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq at the time of the 2017 siege of Mosul, later told a parliamentary committee: “The idea that you can liberate a city like Mosul or Raqqa without tragically civilian casualties is a fool’s errand.”
Israel's armed forces are adamant they’re doing more to spare civilians than any other military, including that of the US would do, sending text message warnings, dropping maps of strike and safe zones, and “knocking’’ on rooftops with small charges before destroying them. It gets some backing for the claim from military analysts, including John Spencer, an urban warfare specialist at West Point’s Modern War Institute, who has repeatedly pushed back on TV and social media against claims that the IDF is being indiscriminate.
So, what do the numbers say, such as they are?
The IDF affirmed a week ago that reports it had killed 5,000 Hamas fighters to date were roughly accurate. If that’s true, then given Hamas casualty claims at the time, it would imply a ratio of two civilians killed for each fighter. In Mosul, the nearest modern analogue to what the IDF is attempting in Gaza, predominantly Iraqi forces took 252 days to clear the city, which had a prewar population of about 1.4 million, of Islamic State fighters. As many as 10,000 civilians, an unknown number of ISIS combatants, and more than 8,000 coalition troops were killed during the operation. Estimates of ISIS force strength at the start of the battle range from 3,000 to 12,000, so the number of civilians killed per combatant is likely to be fewer than two to one.
The civilian casualties in Mosul didn’t generate the level of international outrage that Gaza has, not least because it was predominantly Iraqis who were fighting to liberate other Iraqis from the tyranny of rule by a terrorist organization, namely Islamic State. Hamas amply earned its designation as a terrorist group on October 7 and its rule also has been tyrannical. However, Palestinians see Israel as an occupying, rather than a liberating, force.
Even the comparison with Mosul may be less than indicative because of the way civilians died. According to the UK based non-profit Airwars, a disproportionate number were killed not by Iraqi foot soldiers, but by mainly US and British jets that dropped thousands of tons of ordinance on the city. Importantly, the more densely populated the district being bombed, the more civilian casualties and Gaza is more densely populated than Mosul.
The dilemma for commanders is that without air power, fighting a determined urban defense is extraordinarily costly in terms of losses to your own troops. The more bombs you drop from the air, the more you destroy defenders, their cover and logistics before putting your own troops at risk. Yet you also kill more civilians, because even precision munitions can’t discriminate between people.
For Russia in Aleppo, Syria, and in Mariupol, Ukraine, the solution to that dilemma was simple: flatten the cities. The Allied bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan toward the end of World War II didn't even attempt to avoid civilians, targeting them in the hope that would break the will to go on fighting. US and British bombers destroyed central Dresden and killed up to 25,000 people over just two days in February 1945 carnage that had little or no impact on the course of the war. The US estimated fatalities from the atom bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 110,000.
So while it’s possible that the IDF is doing more than others have in terms of warning civilians as it hurries to crush Hamas, it may not matter. In such a small area, there are no truly safe havens for non-combatants, so the bar has to rise. The bottom line is that whether or not the IDF’s campaign rates as “indiscriminate” within the always brutal context of urban warfare, it is inhumane and counterproductive. It risks turning the world against Israel, burying the memory of October 7 and radicalizing a new generation of potential recruits for Hamas.