Gaza, Heroes and Terrorists

In his book on the history of Palestine during the Mandate period, the Israeli historian Tom Segev follows the trajectory of Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian Arab who lived in Jerusalem and was a well-known educator and writer. Shortly before the British entered the city in 1917, Sakakini heard someone knock on his door one night and upon opening it found Alter Levine, a Jewish insurance agent born in what is now Belarus but whose family had emigrated to Palestine at the end of the 19th century. Levine explained to Sakakini that the Turkish police were after him and asked if he would agree to hide him. Sakakini accepted but the police found Levine anyway and both of them were arrested. They were sent to jail in Damascus and might have been executed, but fortunately were eventually released. After this ordeal, they stayed in touch and, despite Sakakini’s opposition to Zionism, remained friends until Levine committed suicide in 1933.

Sakakini was a humanist, deeply influenced by European ideas and a prominent Arab nationalist. Yet twenty years later, during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, this same man, who in 1917 had protected a Jew at considerable risk to himself, was lionizing Arab terrorism against Jews. In a letter to his son, after describing how Arab terrorists had thrown a grenade at a passenger train full of Jewish civilians and the British soldiers escorting them, he concluded by writing: “Who would believe there are such heroes in Palestine? What a great honor it is, my Sari, to be an Arab in Palestine.” This is not because he no longer embraced the humanist ideals that already inspired him twenty years earlier, when Levine knocked on his door and asked for his protection, he just didn’t see the inconsistency with his lionization of atrocities against civilians.

Almost ninety years after the attack described by Sakakini, Hamas committed very similar atrocities, though on a much larger scale. Israel has responded by launching a full-blown assault on Gaza, which resumed a few days ago after the truce negotiated with Hamas faltered. According to Gazan officials, just before the truce, 14,854 had been killed in Gaza. This figure includes both combatants and civilians, but still according to government officials in Gaza, 69% of the victims were children or women. This suggests that the vast majority of the victims, over 10,000 of them, were not combatants but civilians. (As we shall see, if we accept this estimate of the overall death toll, this conclusion is also consistent with the IDF’s estimates of the number of Hamas fighters it has killed.) Despite the fact that in the past the figures provided by the Gazan authorities have later proven almost identical to Israel’s estimates, although the distribution between combatants and civilians has not, many people reject those figures on the grounds that Gazan officials are ultimately responsible to Hamas and therefore can’t be trusted.

Someone recently looked at the data published by the Ministry of Health and found discrepancies which they claimed showed that Gazan officials were fudging the data. For instance, between October 18 and October 19 the total number of fatalities reported by the Ministry of Health increased by 307, but during the same period the number of children that were killed according to the same data increased by 671. The author of that analysis identified other discrepancies about not just the age but also the sex of fatalities. This can only happen if the sex or age of the victims was in some cases revised after their death had been initially recorded. Despite what the author of that analysis seems to think, in and of itself, this doesn’t prove anything, because it wouldn’t be particularly surprising if revisions were made on a day-to-day basis in the middle of a war zone.¹

However, in a report published by the BBC in October, Gazan officials and health care workers claimed that only people who had been identified by relatives in a hospital were counted. Now, while some cases of misidentification by relatives wouldn’t be surprising, to explain the discrepancy I mentioned above it would have to be the case that at least 10% of fatalities recorded during the first 10 days or so of Israel’s operation had been mistakenly identified as adults by their own relatives. Of course, this is not literally impossible, but it seems very unlikely to me. I think it’s relatively safe to conclude from this kind of discrepancy that the figures published by the Ministry of Health are manipulated or that the procedure used to count fatalities is not as rigorous as Gazan officials and health care workers claimed a few weeks ago.

At the end of the day, it’s true that Hamas can’t be trusted and that we have no way to know exactly how many people have been killed by Israel in Gaza (let alone what percentage were civilians), but the problem is that people use this argument to dismiss any concern about the death toll and the lack of proportionality of Israel’s response. In a major propaganda victory for Israel, now it has become impossible to cite those estimates without prefacing them with a caveat such as “according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health”, which has the effect that many people completely dismiss the figure that is provided after that. However, this reasoning is fallacious and it’s transparent that it’s just a way for Israel to counter accusations that it’s not doing enough to protect civilians, which unfortunately most of its supporters clearly don’t realize.

Indeed, we don’t need to rely on Hamas to know that what is happening in Gaza at the moment is a carnage, there is plenty of evidence for this claim that doesn’t require that we take at value what the Gazan authorities are putting out. In particular, just before the truce, 108 UNRWA staff had been killed in Gaza out of a total of 13,000 working in the Strip. That’s a rate of 0.83%, so if we assume that UNRWA employees have the same risk of being killed than other residents of Gaza, it means that more than 19,000 civilians were killed between October 7 and November 24. Of course, it could be that UNRWA employees are somewhat more exposed than other residents of Gaza, but since 99% of them are themselves refugees and before the war 58% of the population of the UNRWA refugee camps were located South of the evacuation line I see no reason to assume their exposure is very different.²

Even if to be conservative we assume they are twice as likely to be killed than other resident, it would still imply that more than 9,500 civilians had already been killed before the truce or more than 200/day. By comparison, even during the worst year of the civil war in Syria, civilians were only killed at half that rate according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.³ So it’s quite clear that, no matter what the precise number of victims is, civilians are getting killed in Gaza at a rate that is unprecedented in recent history and the idea that we are not in a position to know that because we can’t trust the figures that are being put out by the “Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health” is pure sophistry. In fact, as even a US official recently told Congress, it’s quite possible that the figures in question actually underestimate the real death toll and that it will increase as people who are still lying dead under the rubble are added to the tally. I personally think it’s likely that, once the dust has settled and every casualty is accounted for, the death toll will be even higher than suggested by the figures put out by the Ministry of Health.

Other proxies tell a very similar story. For example, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by the beginning of the truce, 48 journalists had been killed in Gaza. By contrast, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, only 7 journalists had been killed in Gaza. According to Israel, at least 761 civilians were killed in 2014. Thus, if we assume that the risk increased in the same proportion for civilians as for journalists in 2023 relative to 2014, it means that more than 5,000 civilians had already been killed in 2023 by the time the truce started.⁴ This would still mean that civilians were getting killed at a higher rate in Gaza between October 7 and November 24 than during the worst year of the Syrian civil war. Even Jake Tapper, who isn’t exactly a pro-Palestinian radical, recently expressed his skepticism on CNN when the IDF spokesman he was interviewing told him the IDF had done “everything possible to safeguard innocent civilians”, replying that it was “hard to believe that, especially when one of our producers lost 9 family members”.

We also know that Israel is using in large quantities much more powerful bombs than Western countries did in urban environments since the Vietnam War and we have a ton of anecdotal evidence such as testimonies from Gaza suggesting Israel is fighting a very brutal war. Again, it’s true that we are not in a position to know exactly how many civilians have been killed and that we should take at face value the numbers put out by Hamas, but it’s pure sophistry to conclude that we aren’t in a position to know that it’s a carnage. It clearly is a carnage and soon it will get even worse as hunger and disease start killing people in large numbers. Even a senior Israeli official recently acknowledged that the overall death toll given by the Palestinian authorities was “more or less” right, though he claims that 1/3 of the fatalities were combatants (even if that were true it would still mean that civilians are getting killed at a higher rate than in any recent conflict in terms of fatalities per day), so we’re in a comical situation where supporters of Israel are denying something that even the Israeli authorities are conceding.

Nor is this the only example of sophistry used by supporters of Israel to dismiss any concern about the damage wrought by the IDF on civilians. It’s been absolutely wild to watch otherwise intelligent people make the dumbest imaginable arguments to defend the IDF’s conduct in the war. For instance, a lot of people are arguing that since Israel doesn’t strike Gaza indiscriminately but picks targets that have some kind of connection to Hamas or another terrorist group, IDF strikes in Gaza are neither immoral nor illegal under international law, but that’s just another obvious fallacy. I’m sure that Hamas is taking advantage from the fact that it’s embedded in the population of Gaza, because it makes it more likely that Israeli strikes will result in collateral damage that can be used for propaganda, but this doesn’t mean that just repeating the talking point about “human shields” is enough to justify any strike. You still evidence that it destroyed a military valuable target and that it was valuable enough to justify the collateral damage on civilians, but people almost never even try to show that it’s the case and instead just shout “human shields” as if that proved anything.

A piece recently published by +972 Magazine, a pro-Palestinian Israeli outlet, illustrates why that point is important:

According to the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, the targets in Gaza that have been struck by Israeli aircraft can be divided roughly into four categories. The first is “tactical targets,” which include standard military targets such as armed militant cells, weapon warehouses, rocket launchers, anti-tank missile launchers, launch pits, mortar bombs, military headquarters, observation posts, and so on.

The second is “underground targets” — mainly tunnels that Hamas has dug under Gaza’s neighborhoods, including under civilian homes. Aerial strikes on these targets could lead to the collapse of the homes above or near the tunnels.

The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.

The final category consists of “family homes” or “operatives’ homes.” The stated purpose of these attacks is to destroy private residences in order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative. However, in the current war, Palestinian testimonies assert that some of the families that were killed did not include any operatives from these organizations.

…

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us.

“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.

Various sources who served in IDF intelligence units said that at least until the current war, army protocols allowed for attacking power targets only when the buildings were empty of residents at the time of the strike. However, testimonies and videos from Gaza suggest that since October 7, some of these targets have been attacked without prior notice being given to their occupants, killing entire families as a result.

…

On the fifth day of fighting, the IDF Spokesperson distributed to military reporters in Israel “before and after” satellite images of neighborhoods in the northern Strip, such as Shuja’iyya and Al-Furqan (nicknamed after a mosque in the area) in Gaza City, which showed dozens of destroyed homes and buildings. The Israeli army said that it had struck 182 power targets in Shuja’iyya and 312 power targets in Al-Furqan.

The Chief of Staff of the Israeli Air Force, Omer Tishler, told military reporters that all of these attacks had a legitimate military target, but also that entire neighborhoods were attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner.” Noting that half of the military targets up until Oct. 11 were power targets, the IDF Spokesperson said that “neighborhoods that serve as terror nests for Hamas” were attacked and that damage was caused to “operational headquarters,” “operational assets,” and “assets used by terrorist organizations inside residential buildings.” On Oct. 12, the Israeli army announced it had killed three “senior Hamas members” — two of whom were part of the group’s political wing.

Yet despite the unbridled Israeli bombardment, the damage to Hamas’ military infrastructure in northern Gaza during the first days of the war appears to have been very minimal. Indeed, intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that military targets that were part of power targets have previously been used many times as a fig leaf for harming the civilian population. “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” said one former intelligence official.

“They will never just hit a high-rise that does not have something we can define as a military target,” said another intelligence source, who carried out previous strikes against power targets. “There will always be a floor in the high-rise [associated with Hamas]. But for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons.”

Indeed, according to sources who were involved in the compiling of power targets in previous wars, although the target file usually contains some kind of alleged association with Hamas or other militant groups, striking the target functions primarily as a “means that allows damage to civil society.” The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.

There is a lot more in the piece, which is very important, so you should read the whole thing.

What is fascinating is that, in my experience, most people don’t even try to deny the factual basis of the article, they just claim that none of what it describes is problematic. But even if you think that the author of that article or his sources made it all up, despite the fact that everything in that piece is consistent with the anecdotal evidence coming out of Gaza, it doesn’t really matter for the point I’m making here, which again is that just because a target has some kind of connection to Hamas it doesn’t mean that it’s morally permissible to strike it. For instance, if you think that the fact that Hamas has some administrative offices in a residential building and that Israel issued a warning to the residents beforehand makes it okay to destroy it even though dozens of families live in it, then you really have lost the plot. What this means is that Israel shouldn’t be able to get away with just making vague claims to the effect that a strike destroyed “assets used by terrorist organizations” to justify strikes that reduced to rubble a whole apartment block, because the “assets” in question could be anything and have essentially no military value, but in practice that is exactly what happens.

This is true even if nobody dies in the strike, because people need a place to live and if Israel continues to do that most of the Strip will soon be uninhabitable, but to be clear there have been many cases where entire families have been wiped out in strikes on residential areas and Israel didn’t offer any justification beyond that kind of vague claims. Israel is on track to destroy most of the housing stock in Gaza and I don’t see how such a level of destruction is compatible with the claim that only buildings that contain a target of sufficient military value are struck. Do I believe that more than half of the buildings in Gaza contained such a target at some point? No, I do not, and neither should you. A lot of people seem to think that we should give Israel the benefit of the doubt and simply assume that it’s not guided at least in part by the desire to inflict collective punishment in retribution for October 7 or the hope that if most of Gaza is made uninhabitable then a large part of the population will somehow be compelled to leave permanently, but that is completely irrational given the more general context of the war.

Not only is Israel’s government full of troglodytes who in many cases have been fantasizing about various forms of ethnic cleansing for decades, but since October 7 several Israeli officials have made comments that more or less suggested they were guided precisely by this sort of considerations. Back in October, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry prepared a “concept paper” that recommended the transfer of Gaza’s population to Sinai, in other words ethnic cleansing. More recently, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper revealed that Israel’s Prime Minister had asked the Minister of Strategic Affairs to come up with a plan to “thin out” the population of Gaza after the war, by creating pressure that would force other countries to accept Palestinian refugees and get Israel rid of them. To be clear, I don’t think those plans are realistic, nor do I think that everyone inside the Israeli government agrees with them, but not everyone in the government has to agree with those plans for that kind of ideas to influence the conduct of the war and they don’t have to be realistic to have very adverse consequences on Palestinian civilians.

This is another topic about which people constantly engage in the worst kind of sophistry to dismiss concerns about ethnic cleansing. In particular, I’ve heard several people explain that Israel couldn’t possibly be thinking about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, since Arab citizens of Israel are not threatened with expulsion. Even putting aside the fact that plans to “transfer” part of the Arab population of Israel have been discussed for decades in Israel, especially in the context of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, this argument is obviously fallacious. During WWII, Romania ethnically cleansed Bessarabia of Jews (in fact it killed most of them), but mostly spared Jewish citizens in Romania proper. Do the people who make that argument think that it means Antonescu's policies in Bessarabia did not amount to ethnic cleansing or indeed genocide? This is absurd.

It’s also clear that, after October 7, people in Israel are not overly concerned by the well-being of Palestinian civilians and that many are in a homicidal mood. During a speech about the war against Hamas, Netanyahu had previously made a reference to Amalek, a city where God ordered the Israelites to kill every person including women and children. Nor is Netanyahu the only Israeli official to have made this kind of allusions. Beyond statements made by public officials, if you talk to people in Israel, it’s impossible to miss the “war fever” that has taken hold of the country since October 7. This is clearly not the kind of environment where you should expect people to care a lot about collateral damage. Interestingly, when you’re talking to them privately, people in Israel tend to be pretty honest about it. I know someone who is currently fighting in the IDF and, a few days ago, he told me this: “Basically no one gives a a shit about Palestinian civilian casualties right now. Absolutely no one.” Meanwhile, if you talk to supporters of Israel in the West, you’d think that IDF planners are waking up every morning thinking only about what they can do to “minimize civilian casualties”.

Critics of the IDF are often accused of assuming that Israelis are uniquely evil, but while this is no doubt true of some people, I think more often than not the opposite is true. It’s defenders of the IDF who are assuming that Israelis are uniquely virtuous, because that’s what you have to assume in order to believe that Israel cares deeply about Palestinian civilians at the moment and is doing everything it can to protect them in that kind of environment. Americans in particular, if they are old enough to remember, need to think about much they cared about Afghan civilians immediately after 9/11 and imagine what it would have been if 40,000 Americans had been killed instead of 3,000 and they had already been involved in a vicious conflict with the Afghans for decades before that. The only reason why people fail to understand that is because they keep hearing dumb propaganda, such as the claim that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”, which is making them blind to what is actually happening.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Israel is literally bombing Gaza indiscriminately, otherwise it would no doubt cause even more damage. But it’s also clear that it doesn’t care much about collateral damage. What is happening at the moment is obvious to everyone except people who don’t want to see, which unfortunately includes a lot of people. Israel is bombing the shit out of Gaza, including civilian targets with only a very tenuous connection to Hamas, to get payback for October 7 by inflicting collective punishment on the population, reestablish deterrence by destroying the Strip to send a message to Israel’s enemies and induce as many people as possible to leave Gaza permanently if they can get away with it. I don’t even think it’s particularly surprising after what happened on October 7, but that’s not a reason to deny it or come up with fallacious arguments to pretend that it’s morally unproblematic. It’s incomprehensible to me that so many people refuse to see that, even though it’s happening right in front of their eyes. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the fact that many people don’t deny it, but just think it’s perfectly justified.

People say that if the West were in the same situation as Israel, it would do the same thing. This might be true if we imagine not just that a Western country had been hit by a terrorist attack on a similar scale, but also that it was part of a decade-long conflict with another people that has resulted in a deep-seated hatred on both sides. However, it doesn’t matter because, as as a matter of fact, the West is not in that situation, Israel has a huge responsibility for creating that situation in the first place and the fact that if the West were in that situation it might behave just as badly doesn’t make Israel’s behavior any less bad. The Israelis also aren’t in the situation of the Palestinians, but I don’t think they care about this, so why should we care that we’re not in the same position as them? If I had grown up in Gaza, it’s quite possible I would have become a terrorist, but I didn’t and this doesn’t prevent me from criticizing Palestinian terrorism. The Israelis, in addition to being in denial about their responsibility for the overall conflict, have this weird expectation that people in the rest of the world should let them do horrible shit without saying anything just because in their position they might have done the same thing. But that’s not how it works.

I don’t think the West should continue to abide this carnage, which there is no reason to expect will help in any way bring about a long term solution to the conflict (quite the contrary), is ruining our reputation everywhere in the world, putting Western assets and persons at risk in the Middle East and might eventually set off a regional conflict that would be extremely detrimental to our interests, but that’s a topic for another day. As a conclusion, I would just like to go back to Sakakini. I’m not exactly a liberal bleeding heart, I’m actually a pretty right-wing person, who believes that violent criminals should more or less be locked up until they’re old and harmless, opposes low-skill immigration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe because it’s socially disruptive and has few benefits, believes that not all cultures are equal, etc. But I’m nevertheless astonished that so many otherwise intelligent and decent people talk about what is happening in Gaza right now with such callousness or indifference. Again, I don’t want to sound cringe here, but real human beings are getting killed or maimed by the thousands and people are talking about them as if they were pieces of furniture while using the dumbest imaginable arguments to justify this attitude.

I remember that, when I read Segev’s book, I was surprised that someone like Sakakini would support indiscriminate attacks against Jewish civilians and couldn’t really understand it. Now, after seeing how many people are reacting to what is happening in Gaza, I think I understand it better. The truth is that, in the “right” circumstances, anyone can probably lose his humanity in that kind of way and not just people who were already unhinged to begin with. I don’t think many of the things Israel is doing right now are morally better than throwing a grenade in a bus full of civilians and I think people are in denial about that. But I also don’t think most of them are fundamentally bad people, just as I don’t think Sakakini was a fundamentally bad person or, as politically incorrect as this may be, that many of the Palestinians who cheered Hamas on October 7 are fundamentally bad people. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t bad to cheer Hamas on October 7 though and it’s also bad to support the criminal campaign Israel is waging in Gaza at the moment.

1. The author of the analysis in questions also misunderstands the nature of the data he is analyzing by assuming that changes to the total number of fatalities reported from one day to the next are the number of people killed during that period, which is obviously not true since many victims no doubt are only identified and counted several days after their death. Some of the arguments in that analysis rests on this mistaken assumption, but not all of them, so I’m focusing on the strongest argument.

2. UNRWA-bashing is very popular among supporters of Israel, so I’m sure that some will argue that, since UNRWA is full of terrorists, it’s to be expected that UNRWA employees are more likely to get killed than other residents of Gaza. But while it’s true that over the years a number of extremists and even people affiliated with Hamas in some capacity have been discovered among people working for UNRWA, this isn’t particularly surprising given that virtually all of them are Palestinian refugees, extremist views are common among Palestinians and a lot of people in Gaza supports Hamas, which is not just a terrorist organization but also a political party that is heavily involved in social work and economic activity in the Strip. So the fact that UNRWA employees are regularly found to have some kind of connection with Hamas doesn’t prove that people working for UNRWA are more at risk of getting killed by Israel than other residents of Gaza.

3. This only includes civilian deaths the SOHR was able to document, but even if I impute the year of death for the additional ~60,000 civilian deaths it believes occurred proportionally to the documented total for each year and add them to the total for the worst year, it doesn’t materially affect this conclusion.

4. In fact, this underestimates the number of civilian fatalities based on that methodology because for 428 men between the age of 16 and 50, the IDF was unable to confirm whether they were civilians or combatants, so I did not include them even though some of them were no doubt civilians.