The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army”

The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 did not end that day. Over 130 Israelis are still held hostage in the Gaza Strip, many hundreds are in mourning, and the prospect of a similar attack keeps every Israeli family up at night. And yet the ongoing offensive in Gaza, ostensibly aimed at dismantling militant networks and making a repeat of Hamas’s attack impossible, does not promise to deliver any certainty for Israelis or their neighbors. It has dragged on with no end in sight, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now insists that he wants to maintain an indefinite occupation of the Gaza Strip. The staggering Palestinian civilian death toll, which U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said had crossed 25,000 in late February, has even driven U.S. President Joe Biden—a staunch ally who responded to the October 7 attacks by extending Israel carte blanche to retaliate—to press Netanyahu to exercise restraint and to ensure that Israel’s military operations accord with the basic principles of just war and international law.

Israel claims that it is doing everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza—that it maintains complex targeting procedures aimed at ensuring that any military strike is proportionate and does not kill an excessive number of civilians. “The army,” Netanyahu insisted in October, “is the most moral army in the world.” When pressed on the issue of Palestinian deaths in November, Netanyahu said, “Any civilian death is a tragedy. And we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way …. That’s what we’re trying to do: minimize civilian casualties.”

In truth, Israel is not doing that. It has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow to minimize civilian deaths. But even those guidelines are insufficient: an investigation of prior campaigns in Gaza reveals the inadequacy of Israeli targeting guidelines, which do not truly curb civilian casualties. In the latest round of fighting in Gaza, Israel has failed to follow even those restrictions—leading to untold devastation and making a resolution to the conflict even harder to reach.

PIERCING THE FOG OF WAR

Past wars help pierce the fog of the present one. At the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, we have spent years studying soldiers’ testimonies from previous military campaigns in Gaza, in 2008–9, 2012, 2014, and 2021. In those instances, Israel claimed that it was doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. This claim was based on three assertions: that Israel attacks only legitimate military targets, not civilian ones; that Israel operates with highly reliable intelligence, which enables it to avoid harm to civilians; and that Israel executes its attacks with precision, limiting harm to civilians. Our investigation of past wars revealed many reasons to doubt each of these claims.

For one, not all of Israel’s targets in past campaigns can be deemed legitimate military targets. Although some certainly were—such as weapons storage facilities, Hamas headquarters, tunnels used by Hamas operatives, and sites for launching rockets—Israel also struck at a category of targets it called “militants’ houses.” These were mostly civilian homes and apartments that Israel insisted housed members of armed factions, usually Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel often razed entire buildings just because Israeli officials had tagged a single apartment within them as one used by militants. In these cases, neither the militants themselves nor anything that could reasonably be considered militant activity were the intended targets of the attacks; in fact, the militants were probably not at home at the time of the attacks. And yet the mere fact that a militant had resided there was enough for Israel to justify destroying an entire building.

Early in the 2014 operation, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem pointed out that striking the homes of militants is a violation of international humanitarian law since they are civilian homes, not military targets. Thereafter, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) insisted that the militants’ houses were in fact “Hamas headquarters”—as in 2021, when Israeli forces bombed the houses of several Hamas members and destroyed a number of high-rise towers in Gaza. But soldiers who spoke with Breaking the Silence explained that these were in fact ordinary residences, not centers for militant operations. Israel’s distorted targeting rationale ends up razing an entire building just to get at a single apartment, in the process endangering dozens of civilians who have no involvement in the fighting.

These ill-advised methods are made worse by faulty information. Israel’s intelligence has proved itself far from reliable. Between major operations, Israeli intelligence officers study the Gaza Strip and assess whether a particular location can be identified as an enemy target. Once they find a likely target, they come up with “collateral damage estimates”—calculations of the number of noncombatants expected to be killed in an attack—based on civilian population density, the specific weapon the IDF will use, and the kind of structure being targeted. These assessments inform the proportionality assessment made by IDF officers during conflict, which determines whether the military significance of the target is proportional to the expected damage to civilians.

Israel has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow.

One problem with this methodology is that the intelligence available to Israeli officers is often very limited—for instance, the IDF may determine that a location is an ammunition storage facility without knowing what type or amount of ammunition it stores. The military significance of 50 hand grenades, for example, is much smaller than that of 50 rockets, which could be fired toward Israeli cities. With such limited information, the military significance of the target cannot be fully determined, and therefore Israeli forces cannot make credible proportionality assessments. Moreover, intelligence can become outdated swiftly, and Israeli officers do not update the information frequently enough. The function of a particular structure can change, as can its surroundings. A new school may be built nearby, or a public facility could be repurposed. During large-scale conflicts, and to an even greater extent during the current war, Israel warns entire residential areas to evacuate, drastically changing the population density and daily routines in those neighborhoods and in other ones. In these circumstances, prior estimates of collateral damage become especially dubious and cannot be used to assess proportionality.

In 2019, a failure to confirm intelligence regarding a target led to the killing of nine members of the al-Sawarkah family in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza. IDF intelligence officials believed that the complex in which the family lived was a military compound belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “The building where the family lived was on a list of potential targets,” Haaretz reported, “but Israeli defense officials confirmed to Haaretz that it had not been looked at over the past year or checked prior to the attack.” An intelligence officer explained to Haaretz that “mostly there is no significant intelligence activity dealing with a target that already exists, because it is more important to create new targets.” It is difficult to determine the total number of incidents in which civilians were killed or harmed because of the IDF practice of relying on outdated intelligence, but no doubt the pressure that officials now feel to approve attacks has led to many instances of the kind that killed the Sawarkahs.

Even when the intelligence might be sound, Israel’s procedures for the execution of airstrikes do not prioritize the safety of civilians. In previous military campaigns, the imperative to carry out more strikes at a greater pace has led the IDF to grant lower-ranking officers the power to approve strikes that may result in significant collateral damage to civilians. In so doing, the military deprioritized the avoidance of civilian casualties. The frequency of strikes is also made possible by a new artificial intelligence system that generates new potential targets. A system designed to mass-produce targets inevitably compromises accuracy and increases harm to civilians, as evidenced by the staggering death tolls in Gaza in recent months.

In past campaigns, Israel did try in some ways to reduce civilian casualties. It used a tactic known as “roof knocking,” which involves firing a small missile at the roof of a building to warn residents that a more severe Israeli strike is coming. To be sure, the IDF would not use this warning method when an intended target was in the building—it would deem the expected civilian deaths as legitimate collateral damage. The IDF uses roof knocking only when it seeks to target the structure itself and it does not consider the people inside permissible collateral damage.

But even when it uses roof knocking, it still ends up killing civilians. Israeli officials often do not have clear information about the number of residents in a given building, nor do they always care to look for it. One soldier explained that although Israel has the technology to verify the exact location of the residents (by tracking their phones), it very rarely does so because such a procedure would demand too much time and resources and would invariably slow down the pace of the airstrikes. Despite a warning strike, many people may not be able to leave a building or cannot leave it in time—for instance, if they are sick or elderly. People occasionally mistake the warning missile for the attack itself, or think it is a bomb that landed nearby, and do not leave their homes.

In the current war, Israel has significantly reduced its use of roof knocking, claiming that it is stretched too thin to bother with such warnings. Reducing the use of roof knocking is an admission by the IDF that it is less concerned now than in the past about avoiding civilian casualties.

ROOT CAUSE

In the past, Israel did not do enough to distinguish between civilians and militants in Gaza; in today’s war, Israel seems to be doing even less. In fact, The New York Times reported in December that in the current campaign, Israel has expanded its definition of “valuable targets” and its willingness to harm civilians. This is consistent with a recent report in CNN that during the first month of the war Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away from the impact, and that nearly half the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise “dumb” bombs. A campaign waged in this manner only gives credence to the accusations that Israel is as interested in exacting retribution in Gaza as it is in pursuing military objectives.

The examples of the gratuitous killing of civilians in Gaza are already numerous, and further instances of the Israeli government’s relaxed attitude to the deaths of innocents will surely come to light after the war. By leveraging its political and military support for Israel, the United States can persuade Israeli forces to uphold international law in their campaigns and truly do what they can to minimize the deaths of civilians.

There is no quick fix for Israel’s wrongdoings, since they are all symptoms of the same root cause: Israel’s absolute prioritization of “managing the conflict” and deferring any real solution, no matter how many civilians—Palestinian or Israeli—are harmed. It is this attitude that has led to habitual military campaigns in Gaza over the last 15 years, and it is this attitude that allows the Israeli government to plow forward with this war with no clear, attainable objective in sight.

The only genuine way forward is recognizing each other’s humanity and seeking a path for both peoples not based solely on military might. The first necessary step is to end this war now. Hamas must return the hostages, and humanitarian aid must be provided to the people of Gaza. Only then might this catastrophe become a catalyst for change.