War crimes are defined by intention, not numbers. You're playing a legally irrelevant number game since Hamas has promised many more October 7s. With this kind of threat level from Hamas + the 150000 rocket Hizbullah threat from the unquiet northern front, IDF tactics are proportionate to what the Geneva Convention calls "in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated". https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml
Living in the geopolitical equivalent of Beverly Hills, you can safely ignore what Thomas Friedman wrote about more than 30 years ago in From Beirut to Jerusalem: the "Hama rules" that define deterrence in the Middle East. His "Hama rules" chapter describes why Assad the elder flattened the Syrian city of Hama, turning its entire center into a vast, cratered parking lot to suppress an Islamist revolt in 1982--with 30000 indiscrimanantly killed. The Israelis, of course, understand these rules of what westerners naively call "proportionate response". The deafening silence that greeted this single deadliest massacre perpetrated by a modern Middle Eastern state on its own citizens compared to the hue and cry against Israel's invasion of Lebanon the same year tells you all you need to know about the soft bigotry of low expectations about Arab behavior vs anti-semitic double standards about Jewish behavior in the geopolitical South Bronx that is the Middle East.
Since 300000 Israeli civilians living near the Lebanese border have been forced out of their homes, Israel, as any state would, must take whatever deterrence measures are necessary to the forced displacement of its citizens triggered by Hamas' Iran-sponsored war to prevent a Saudi-Israeli peace. You have, of course, not considered that IDF tactics in Gaza have a direct deterrent impact on Hizbullah's and Iran's calculations about whether or not to widen the war.
But since you're engaged in morbid accounting, note that Hamas' Death Ministry (misnamed as a Health Ministry):
* Doesn't separately publish combatant deaths, so you have no idea what % of the total number are combatants.
* You credulously take Hamas' figures and names of victims at face value. 123 victims published by Hamas also appeared as killed in 2014. Such bad luck to be twice "martyred" for jihad!
* Hamas fraudulently classifies the 14-17 year old child fighters recruited by Hamas as children when they're clearly combatants.
* Omit Hamas' explicit use of children as human shields in every war since 2006, as explained by Hamas' billionaire leader Ismail Haniyeh from the luxury hotel he lives in in Doha:
"Hamas leader: “We need the blood of the children, women, and elderly”
Hamas official promises attack worse than Oct. 7: “A future liberation battle, and not just Oct. 7”
Hamas leader Haniyeh justifies dead Palestinian civilians: “We need the blood of the children, women, and elderly” to “ignite within us the spirit of revolution” https://palwatch.org/page/34835
But this is a better explanation of the fraudulent numbers game you're playing than I can write:
"What is a ‘proportionate response’?
Israel’s critics are lying about international law.
DR. ERIC R. MANDEL
(November 20, 2023 / JNS)
https://www.jns.org/what-is-a-proportionate-response/
In the Western mind, proportionality in war is simply a numbers game. The side that inflicts more casualties is acting disproportionately, is in the wrong and may even be committing crimes against humanity. This has no basis in international law, but it is useful as a rhetorical weapon.
Israel’s enemies make prodigious use of this numbers game, which is no surprise. After all, when Israel is fighting a terrorist entity that uses civilians as human shields in order to increase body counts, which are then used to manipulate journalists and international leaders, it is fighting an uphill public relations battle.
The “proportionality” argument also involves clear double standards. For example, during the U.S. campaign against ISIS in places like Mosul, where the terror group hid among one million civilians, it took nine months and 11,000 dead civilians to defeat ISIS. Yet there were few accusations of disproportionality in the media or from the international community. They knew ISIS had to be defeated and that civilians would die in the process.
Moreover, if this is all about numbers, then the implication is that Israel should indiscriminately kill 1,400 innocent Palestinian civilians and take an additional 240 hostage. It is unlikely that this is what those who preach about “proportionality” are advocating.
According to Alan Johnson in Fathom journal, the “goal pursued by military action must be proportionate to the ongoing threat faced. Israel’s goal to remove Hamas is proportionate because Hamas now poses an existential threat to Israel.”
He is correct because proportionality has nothing to do with the injury you receive but the goals you hope to accomplish.
So, what is “proportionate” in Israel’s war against Hamas? According to an accurate, non-politicized reading of international law:
When terrorists use human shields and place their entire military infrastructure in civilian structures—a war crime in and of itself—those buildings lose their immunity to attack. The deaths of civilians are legally the fault of the terrorists who use them as human shields, so long as reasonable care is taken to minimize civilian casualties.
According to just war theory, you cannot target non-combatants if there is no legitimate military target. However, it is legal to attack a target if it advances your military goal, even if civilians are present.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, a military must provide water and food to a civilian population, not fuel or electricity.
My analysis is not based solely on legal theories. I have covered previous Gaza wars, interviewed Israeli military ethicists and witnessed the scene in Sderot in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre.
As a result, I know that this is not the first time Hamas has used hospitals as military bases. In 2014, I was with an elite Israeli unit that was fired upon by Hamas terrorists from an UNRWA hospital. They could not fire back because it was marked with a large “H” on the map, and they knew that returning fire could be considered a war crime.
So, they called a military lawyer on the phone. He told them to risk soldiers and get an audio feed from inside the hospital, wait for a drone to film the encounter, and finally, contact the Defense Minister to give the final OK. The IDF found terrorists in the hospital and tunnels beneath but lost three soldiers’ lives because it followed international law.
When former President Barack Obama or U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres tell Israelis not to let their rage overcome their responsibility to avoid civilian casualties, it is nothing but hypocrisy. Obama had no compunction about targeting ISIS terrorists embedded within civilian populations in Syria and Iraq. Guterres leads an organization that enables terror groups like Hamas by condemning Israel more than all other nations combined.
During the 2012 Gaza war, I watched as Israel responded to indiscriminate Hamas attacks against Israeli civilian communities. I saw from a radar command center on the Gaza border how hard Israel tried to avoid the Palestinian civilians being used as human shields at rocket launch sites. I remember leaving the command center and hoping my nation’s army was as ethical as what I witnessed.
The death of any innocent civilian is a cause for sadness. But moral equivalence between the planned, willful massacre, rape and abduction of Israeli civilians and the deaths and injuries of Palestinian civilians purposely placed in harm’s way in order to manipulate the international media is a perversion of just war theory and international law. If Israel cannot attack a Hamas military target because it has civilians nearby, Israel cannot shoot one bullet in its own defense. That is not proportionality, it is a demand for national suicide. Nothing could be less ethical.
Far more German than American or British civilians died during World War II. The RAF estimated that more than half of Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Nuremberg, to name just a few German cities, were destroyed by Allied bombing. We call the American generation that defeated the Nazis the Greatest Generation because, despite that destruction, the Nazis had to be defeated.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their patron Iran are the 21st century Nazis. As the Hamas Charter says, “Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it” and “the Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.” Or, as Iran’s Supreme Leader has said, Zionists (i.e., Jews) must be “uprooted and destroyed,” they are “illegitimate” and a “bastard regime,” they “cannot be called humans,” so “raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.” What more must they do and say before the West believes them?
Let Israel eradicate radical Islam from Gaza for the benefit of the world, including the Palestinians. Sadly, like German civilians during the Second World War, the Palestinians will pay a high price for Hamas’s heinous tactics and ideology. Unfortunately, there is no other choice."
