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By: Alex Safian, PhD
In the wake of horrific mass terror attacks against southern Israeli communities, in which up to 1200 Israelis were murdered by terrorists from Hamas-ruled Gaza, and around 240 were taken hostage, Israel declared war against and began attacking the Islamist extremist group.
Predictably, this has triggered false charges that Israel is employing illegal, disproportionate and excessive force, but more important than the legal question (see here for that) is the practical question: how do Israel’s actions compare to that of other countries at war, especially the United States?
This is an especially relevant question following US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s reported statement to Israeli leaders that Israel didn’t have much longer to eliminate Hamas, and his press conference assertion that Israel must avoid “…further significant displacement of civilians inside of Gaza [and] damage to life-critical infrastructure, like hospitals… I underscored… that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.”
Are Secretary Blinken’s demands, which mean playing into the hands of Hamas and putting Israeli soldiers at much greater risk, in accord which how the United States and US allies have acted in similar circumstances? To answer this question a number of examples will be presented in detail in the following sections, including the liberation of Mosul from ISIS terrorists, which took nine months, involved intensive bombing by US forces — including of hospitals and mosques — and in which up to 40,000 civilians are believed to have been killed. And also the 1993 UN peacekeeping intervention in Somalia, which turned violent, and which was fought mostly by US forces.
It’s worth previewing that here, because in one engagement during that conflict US Cobra helicopters defended a US bulldozer crew by firing anti-tank missiles and 20-mm cannon on a crowd of attacking Somali militiamen and civilians. The United Nations spokesman justified the killing of almost 100 Somalis by noting that, “Everyone on the ground in the vicinity was a combatant, because they meant to do us harm.” US soldiers referred to a “free fire zone” and complained that Somalis “call us killers of women and children when we shoot the very same people who are shooting at us and we kill some of the people that they are using for cover.”
In other words, when they, like Hamas, use human shields. And it’s crucial to note that these engagements involving the United States were far from US territory and in no case were the US homeland or US civilians threatened, a key difference from the horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Despite never treating civilians as combatants, and, as we shall see, acting more humanely than other Western democracies at war, Israel is singled out like no other country. For example, in a truly despicable statement Amnesty International General Secretary Agnès Callamard charged that:
Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, including through unlawful, indiscriminate attacks, has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians including 4,200 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. It also endangers civilians who are being held hostage in Gaza and ignores appeals from Israeli families to prioritize the well being of hostages during their operations.
Amnesty’s statement (1) completely ignores that Hamas is using Gaza civilians as human shields, turning what should be protected places like hospitals into legitimate military targets, (2) takes seriously casualty claims from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, (3) denies Israel’s right to self defense by portraying any Israeli response to Hamas aggression – short of surrender – as illegal, (4) does Hamas’s work for them by cruelly using Israeli relatives of the hostages to pressure Israel to give in to the terror group’s hostage taking.
Here are the details of how other countries and the UN have behaved at war, first the already mentioned cases of the US-led coalition’s fight to eject ISIS terrorists from Mosul and the battles in Somalia, then the US invasion of Panama, Jordan’s reaction to the PLO uprising known as “Black September,” and Saudi Arabia’s reaction to riots by Iranian pilgrims in Mecca.
- The Battle to Free Mosul – Up to 40,000 civilians killed
The Second Battle of Mosul (2016–2017) was a nine-month joint effort by Iraqi Government and local, especially Kurdish militias, with key US and British air support, to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIS), which had taken the city in 2014 and considered it the capital of their caliphate.
By the time the liberation of Mosul began the city’s population had declined to approximately 1.5 million, and it was estimated that ISIS had between 3000 and 12,000 fighters in the city. In other words, in comparison to Gaza, the population was probably somewhat lower, but the number of enemy combatants was far lower than what Israel faces in Gaza, and there was nothing to compare to the Hamas tunnel network.
The plan to liberate the city from ISIS was first to surround it while bombing the bridges over the Tigris River to prevent ISIS fighters from easily crossing between the eastern and western parts of the city. Once that was accomplished the Iraqi coalition would begin a grinding battle to destroy the ISIS forces block-by-block, using an approach of “bite, clear, and hold.”
The Iraqi coalition requested numerous airstrikes from the US and the UK, which inevitably caused heavy civilian casualties because ISIS, like Hamas in Gaza, forced civilians to stay in the densely populated city as human shields.
A PBS report summed up the battle with these words:
Mosul’s Old City was … bombarded by U.S.-led airstrikes. Buildings were pounded into rubble. Rubble was pounded into dust.
Ground troops fought house-to-house. Well, over a year later, the area is still a tangle of debris. Heaps of smashed buildings stand as monuments to the lives destroyed here.
Those lives were destroyed in engagements like the two detailed here:
US Bombing in the al-Jidah neighborhood kills up to 300 civilians
On March 17, 2017 in the al-Jidah neighborhood of West Mosul the US dropped a precision guided bomb to eliminate two ISIS snipers on the second floor of an apartment building, killing up to 300 civilians.
Despite the very high civilian casualties the Pentagon defended the bombing, claiming that it was in accord with the Law of Armed Conflict, because it met the standards of distinction, proportionality and military necessity. It’s worth looking in detail at the reasoning and justifications:
Law of Armed Conflict: The TEA (Target Engagement Authority) approved the strike in accordance with all provisions of the applicable ROE and Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC):
- Distinction. The Coalition attacked a valid military target which consisted of two snipers effectively engaging Iraqi CTS soldiers from a DFP.
- Proportionality. The TEA selected a weapon that balanced the military necessity of neutralizing the two snipers with the potential for collateral damage to civilians and civilian structures.
(1) The TEA selected a GBU-38, a 500-pound class precision guided munition containing 192lbs of explosive material. The GBU-38’s steel case was strong enough to penetrate the roof of the DFP and had sufficient explosive material to neutralize the snipers engaging the CTS soldiers from their DFP in the second floor. The TEA selected a fuse-setting that would neutralize the threat to CTS, while also minimizing risk to collateral structures. The TEA expected the weapons effects for the GBU-38 to be localized to the second floor of the building. Subsequent engineering and weapons analysis indicates that the GBU-38 should have resulted in no more than 16-20% damage to the structure, localized to the front of the second floor or the structure.
(2) The TEA did not know civilians were in the structure or that ISIS had deliberately staged a significant amount of secondary explosive materials in the structure. Based on the information reasonably available, the TEA could not have predicted the compounded effects of the secondary explosives emplaced by ISIS fighters.
- Military Necessity. CTS commanders and the TEA determined that it was a military necessity to neutralize the ISIS snipers in order for CTS to achieve its maneuver objective of seizing the sector from ISIS. If the ISIS snipers were left to continue to engage CTS forces, CTS would incur unacceptable levels of casualties in the seizure of the sector. The seizure of the sector was necessary for CTS to complete the clearance and liberation of Mosul from ISIS.
Had this been an Israeli strike in Gaza under otherwise identical circumstances, one wonders if the Pentagon and the administration, not to mention the media, would accept this explanation.
