In the months since Israel launched its offensive into Gaza in the wake of the brutal terrorist attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, the Israeli government and military have inflicted a catastrophic level of civilian harm on the Palestinian population.
The ongoing situation has strategic and moral implications for the U.S. and demands an immediate withdraw of offensive military assistance to Israel.
As a special operations Joint Terminal Attack Controller throughout America’s war on terror, I led high-value targeting and strike operations against terrorist entities in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The nature of the reckless and disgraceful IDF campaign in Gaza is a world apart from U.S. targeting and civilian harm mitigation standards.
I reviewed thousands of incident reports and tens of thousands of individual data points from several dozen credible organizations, as well as the Israeli military itself, as a part of a nonpartisan task force analyzing Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Our report, submitted to the Biden administration and briefed to Congress, establishes compelling and credible evidence of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and U.S. military best practices, utilizing U.S.-provided munitions. It shows how the Israeli military has demonstrated a “systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law, including recurrent attacks launched despite foreseeably disproportionate harm to civilians.”
The U.S. has also caused civilian harm, to be certain. However, most incidents of civilian casualties from modern U.S. strike operations have been unintentional — meaning the U.S. did not know or assess that civilians were in the target area prior to striking. But in many of the strikes that have killed civilians in Gaza, Israel has cleared strikes despite understanding beforehand that high numbers of civilians were at risk.
In addition, U.S. incidents of civilian casualties have not approached the extremely high numbers of civilians killed in single attacks seen in the Israeli campaign, where civilian deaths often number in the dozens — even hundreds — per attack.
In efforts to justify the scale of civilian harm in Gaza, some will find any way to shift responsibility from Israel. West Point military historian John Spencer is among those, claiming that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history.” He states that the it is fighting a war unlike any other, ever, and that it is different from those the U.S. has fought because it is against an enemy that embeds itself in the civilian populace.
But Spencer is by no means a targeting expert. He did not spend an entire career coordinating and controlling strike operations in the war on terror, as I did. And he was clearly not paying attention when my teammates and I were hunting ISIS across the dense urban sprawls of Iraq and Syria. ISIS they routinely used civilians — often their own wives and children — as human shields. Spencer’s assertions are a combination of ignorance and, at the very least, a deliberate twisting of facts.
International law states that any civilians who remain in a combat zone, whether willingly or unwillingly, must be protected anyway. Yet while warnings and evacuation directives have been employed, the IDF has given no attention to their actual effectiveness. This is a critical component of international law, which states that feasible precautions include “effective advance warning of a planned attack.”
Further, the Palestinian populace has not been able to truly evacuate but has simply been herded back and forth between “safe zones” that the IDF establishes and then bombards. Since hostilities began in October, over three-quarters of the territory in the Gaza Strip has been designated as various evacuation zones. The April 1 strikes that killed seven foreign aid workers with the World Central Kitchen took place within a known humanitarian aid corridor, even after the organization had shared their convoy’s location with the Israeli military.
Israel’s frequent use of high yield munitions — namely U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs — has also been a major contributor to the high civilian death toll. Spencer has cited the use of such bombs in the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq as justification for Israel’s use, but those conflicts took place decades ago and still did not come close to inflicting the level of civilian harm seen in Gaza. Further, modern U.S. strike operations have seen very little use of the 2,000-pound bomb.
Although Israel has touted its increased use of precision-guided, low-explosive-yield weapons as evidence of an effort to better safeguard civilians, the only thing “precise” about the Israeli strike campaign is that it continues to precisely target civilians. On May 26, for instance, utilizing U.S.-provided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs, Israel killed 45 civilians and injured 249 in strikes on a refugee tent encampment in Rafah. The GBU-39 is made to inflict as little collateral damage as possible to surrounding areas, but its intended use as a precision weapon with low-collateral damage is negated when a target area is saturated with civilians.
Spencer states, against obvious and corroborated evidence, that the civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1:1, citing this as “historically low” for urban warfare. He declares far higher ratios of civilian deaths from U.S. combat operations and mischaracterizes the U.S. campaign against ISIS. But Israeli officials have previously admitted to what appears to be at least a 2:1 ratio. According to the most recent statement from Israel's military,14,000 Hamas fighters have been killed or captured, against the Gaza Ministry of Health's current count of more than 38,000 Palestinians killed since fighting began.
Even so, should we ever quantify an “acceptable” level of civilian harm? As Rutgers law professor and renowned expert in international law Adil Haque points out, “The fact that your adversary is breaking international humanitarian law does not change your obligations” to protect civilians.
Israel’s campaign has only grown more brutal against the Palestinian civilian populace. In early June, Israel carried out a reckless hostage rescue in the Nuseirat refugee camp, bombarding the tightly populated area with strikes and incurring a death toll near 300, with many women and children found in the rubble. In the Nuseirat refugee camp earlier this month, Israel struck a United Nations-run school known to harbor thousands of refugees, killing dozens. On Saturday, Israel conducted strikes in a designated humanitarian safe zone, killing 90 and wounding 300 just to take out two Hamas leaders. And just yesterday, the IDF struck yet another UN-run school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing dozens more civilians.
According to Larry Lewis, former chief analyst for the Department of Defense Joint Lessons Learned and renowned expert in civilian harm mitigation, we do not yet have a real idea of the total death toll in Gaza. Israel does not track civilian harm, and the fog of war must settle for the world to truly take account of all the missing people and bodies buried beneath rubble.
What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was pure evil, but what Israel’s military has been doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza ever since, knowingly and repeatedly, is no less evil. If we justify the devastating level of civilian harm that Israel has inflicted under the rationale of defending their homeland, then we must, in turn, justify Hamas’s inhuman acts against Israeli civilians as their only recourse against those they perceive as their oppressors. I can justify neither.
History has seen this scenario play out, and it always ends in tragedy. Israel’s horrific campaign in Gaza endangers any chance for long-term strategic success in the region, degrades the effectiveness and legitimacy of the Israeli campaign against Hamas, and discredits the moral leadership of both Israel and the United States.
There must be a reckoning — for the sake of both Israel and the Palestinian people. There is simply no other way to color this conflict and the U.S. role in it. Either we care about safeguarding civilians in war and upholding strict standards of precision warfare and the humane treatment of civilian populations, or we do not.
Wes J. Bryant is a retired master sergeant and former special operations joint terminal attack controller in the elite special warfare branch of the U.S. Air Force. He is coauthor of the book “Hunting the Caliphate: America’s War on ISIS and the Dawn of the Strike Cell.” For more on the topic, visit www.wesjbryant.com.
