31 Winter 2025 impending famine in Gaza turned out to have been wildly exaggerated and utterly false. More recently, Israel paused its military operations in Gaza to enable more than 500,000 people to receive polio vaccines.44 Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and to permit humanitarian aid to enter Gaza in the middle of the ongoing war reflects the exact opposite of disproportionality and genocidal intent. Indeed, given Hamas’s candid admissions that it deliberately sacrifices Palestinian civilians, the evidence shows Israel cares far more about protecting those civilians than does Hamas. Israel’s commitment to avoiding civilian casualties, unique among all nations, completely undermines any claim Israel was acting with the intent required to demonstrate a violation of the doctrine of proportionality and international humanitarian law.45 Finally, Israel’s commitment to avoiding civilian casualties stands in stark contrast to other nations, whose armies fighting defensive wars against terrorists in urban environments generally inflict a civilian to terrorist casualty ratio of 9:1.46 However, Israel’s civilian to casualty ratio in Gaza is approximately 1.5 to 1.7 civilians killed for every terrorist eliminated.47 Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian deaths have resulted in a far lower civilian to terrorist casualty ratio than in other conflicts.48 Israel has the same legal right to defend itself as any other country. But the international community demands Israel comply with an unreasonably narrow interpretation of proportionality tailored for Israel only, and that has never been applied anywhere else in the 21st century – not to Russia’s deliberate bombing of Ukrainian civilian targets, or China’s murder of the Uighurs, or Myanmar’s murder of the Rohingya, or Azerbaijan’s bombing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, or Turkey’s bombing of the Kurds, or Syria’s bombing and chemical attacks against its own civilians during the long-running civil war. The war Hamas unleashed on October 7, 2023 has claimed thousands of Israeli lives and many more thousands of Israelis wounded. The war has also tragically cost the lives of many thousands of Gazan civilians. No one knows exactly how many, because Hamas exaggerates the numbers its “Health Ministry” reports. Hamas also includes dead terrorists in its civilian casualty figures. What is known is that Hamas hid behind those unfortunate civilians, using them as human shields. Hamas, as it has done repeatedly for the past two decades, attacked Israel hoping to draw Israeli retaliatory strikes to sacrifice those civilians. Hamas has been clear in its public statements that sacrificing Gazan civilians, including children and the elderly, constitutes a key part 44. Tara John, Jennifer Hauser, Abeer Salman, Eugenia Yosef and Larry Register, “Israel agrees to pauses in fighting in Gaza for polio vaccination,” CNN (Aug. 31, 2024), available at https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/29/middleeast/ gaza-who-humanitarian-pause-intl-latam/index.html 45. John Spencer, “Opinion: I’m an expert in urban warfare. Israel is upholding the laws of war,” CNN (Nov. 7, 2023), available at https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/ israel-hamas-gaza-not-war-crimes-spencer/index.html 46. Press Release, Security Council “Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians, Speakers Stress, Pressing Security Council to Fulfil Responsibility, Protect Innocent People in Conflicts,” SC/14904 (May 25, 2022), available at https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc. htm; see also Susannah George, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Maggie Michael and Lori Hinnan, “Mosul is a graveyard: Final IS battle kills 9,000 civilians,” AP NEWS (Dec. 21, 2017), available at https://apnews.com/article/middleeast-only-on-ap-islamic-state-group-bbea7094fb95483 8a2fdc11278d65460 (In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, for example, 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists); see also Mosul Study Group, “What the battle for Mosul teaches the force,” No 17-24 (Sept. 2017), available at https://www. armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/Primer-on-UrbanOperation/Documents/Mosul-Public-Release1.pdf 47. Ben Wolfgang, “Israel’s war against Hamas posts lower civilian to combatant death ratio than other urban battles,” WASHINGTON TIMES (April 18, 2024), available at https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/18/israelswar-against-hamas-posts-lower-civilian-to-/; see also “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel - reported impact | Day 217,” OCHA (May 10,2024), available at https:// www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-andisrael-reported-impact-day-217; see also Shlomo Cohen and Yaacov Samet, “The genocide claim against Israel doesn’t add up,” THE TIMES OF ISRAEL (June 2, 2024), available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-genocideclaim-against-israel-doesnt-add-up/ 48. Martin Sherman, “Misplaced moral outrage on civilian casualties,” JNS (April 11, 2024), available at https:// www.jns.org/misplaced-moral-outrage-on-civiliancasualties/#:~:text=Likewise%2C%20Kemp%20 praised%20the%20IDF,in%20general%20is%20 1%3A9%E2%80%94 (former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp, stating that the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare in general is 1:9).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=