Israel’s right to destroy Hamas cannot excuse mounting Palestinian deaths

Lubna Elayan was a teenage violin student who wore huge black-rimmed glasses and dreamed of becoming a professional musician and playing in international competitions.

In a Facebook photo montage of her practicing and mugging for the camera in her school uniform, her enchanting smile is infectious. That is, until you read in the caption that Elayan died — along with 45 members of her extended family, including her parents and siblings. They were all crowded together in her home on the outskirts of Gaza City, hoping to escape the Israeli bombing.

A relative’s posts catalog the babies, children, young couples, and elders who died in the rubble.

Elayan’s family is one of an increasing number of extended Gazan families being wiped out by bombs, as reported by media and humanitarian agencies. As Israeli ground forces move south, the number of Palestinian civilian casualties keeps rising at a level that can’t be excused by Israel’s right to decapitate Hamas. Israeli warnings to civilians are confused and inadequate. Palestinians who try to follow them are still bombed in supposedly safe spots.

This is not only immoral, and a potential war crime, but it is strategically foolish. By ignoring pleas to protect Palestinian civilians, including from President Joe Biden, the Israeli government appears determined to follow a tactic that is bound to boomerang.

Why so? Here are three reasons, along with what the White House should do to press Israel to change course.

The death of entire families has become symptomatic of the Hamas-Israel war — on both sides.

Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli communities near the Gaza border, raping, mutilating, shooting, burning, and kidnapping civilians — often killing several generations of one family. The impact on Israel of the murder of more than 1,200 people (the equivalent of around 40,000 Americans relative to the country’s population) has created public pressure to eliminate Hamas, no matter what the cost to ordinary Gazans. So has the taking of 240 Israeli hostages, 123 of whom are still held.

In other words, most (but not all) Israelis are focused on revenge.

According to an investigation by Israeli media outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, the Israeli army has significantly expanded its bombing “of targets that are not distinctly military in nature” compared with previous military assaults on Gaza after Hamas rockets.

“The loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties,” claims this investigation, “and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”

Thus, say the report’s authors, Israel is bombing civilian apartment blocks and private homes — where desperate Gazan families have clustered together — if there is any suspicion that even one Hamas militant may be inside.

Moreover, as over a million Palestinians have fled south on Israeli orders and are sheltering in awful conditions with little food or water, they are receiving confusing Israeli instructions that they keep changing locales to avoid more bombs. The Israeli military posts these requirements on out-of-date maps that must be checked via the internet. Yet with little electricity, most Gazans in the south have no internet service.

This madness guarantees rising civilian Palestinian casualties, which may, in turn, draw the Lebanese militia Hezbollah further into the battle on Israel’s northern front and encourage Iran to expand attacks on U.S. forces in the region.

The mass civilian killings will also make it harder for Israel to ever end its long-running war with Hamas.

So far, according to the Gazan health ministry, more than 17,000 Palestinians have died, and many more may be buried under rubble. An Israeli military spokesman basically verified these figures, claiming 5,000 Hamas fighters had been killed, and that two civilians were killed for each fighter.

The spokesman inexplicably justified this ratio as “tremendously positive.”

But, as the United States learned to its dismay in Vietnam and Iraq, defining victory by the number of slain bad guys while dismissing civilian casualties is a big mistake.

As U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned recently, “I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS.”

“Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” Austin said. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

In other words, bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, and leaving families homeless, jobless, and mourning half their relatives, will only drive their young men to join the next iteration of the Hamas terrorist organization. A study commissioned by former Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal estimated that about 10 terrorists were recruited for every civilian killed.

On Nov. 8, one of America’s most experienced Mideast diplomats, Daniel Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew and former ambassador to both Israel and Egypt, wrote an essay for the Atlantic on why he thought a cease-fire in Gaza was impossible because it would leave Hamas still standing and claiming victory.

“I’m changing my opinion,” he told me recently, citing, in large part, Israel’s continued heavy bombing in southern Gaza. “Israel can deal with Hamas and Gaza without going back to the Middle Ages.”

“They have to fix all their intelligence operations and maintain a watchful eye. They stopped paying attention,” Kurtzer said. “If the cease-fire is broken — if anyone emerges from a tunnel — you respond.” He continued, “You treat this like post-Munich Olympics” — when the planners of the 1972 terrorist attack on Israeli athletes were later assassinated — “which is preferable to leveling the place.”

He added that a precondition for a cease-fire would be the release of all Israeli hostages, with no trade for Palestinian prisoners.

And for the cease-fire to last, Kurtzer said, an Israeli government would have to make a convincing case that it was ready to deal seriously with the underlying causes of unrest in Gaza and the West Bank: the lack of any political horizon leading to some form of Palestinian state. Otherwise, no Arab governments or international donors would be willing to pitch in to help rebuild Gaza, and Israel would be left to manage the destruction.

Sadly, that is too much to hope for from the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its extremist ministers. But it is high time for President Biden to intensify his call for another long humanitarian pause, a huge influx of humanitarian aid, the creation of truly safe zones for Palestinians, and an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

If the Israeli government won’t listen, the next step is for Washington to condition aid and vote for U.N. resolutions on a pause and other humanitarian action. The White House must act before more civilian slaughter drags the United States into another Mideast war.