Israel’s Foreign Ministry released its report on Operation Protective Edge on Sunday. According to the Times of Israel, the Foreign Ministry explained the country’s actions as responding to “an enemy that targets civilians and operates from among its own people.”
The central argument, though, is coherent and persuasive and evidence of the fact that Israel has understood that war is increasingly fought in the sphere of public opinion and that there, too, Israel must strive for clarity.
The report opens with a description of Hamas and its ideology – ” “[t]here is no war going on anywhere, without [the Jews’] finger in it” – and asserts that Israel, searching for three abducted Israeli teenagers (later found dead) in June 2014, “tried to avoid escalation in the Gaza Strip.” It does not dwell on the 10 Israeli brigades sent to operate in the West Bank and the combustible dismantling of Hamas infrastructure there – a move taken in light of the kidnapping and with the then-classified knowledge that Hamas intended to unseat the PA in the West Bank through a series of orchestrated terror attacks. …
The many dozen pages cataloging Hamas’s violations of the laws of armed conflict provide specifics about the known nature of the war. The al-Tawheed mosque in Khuza’a and the Sheikh Hasnain mosque in Shejaiya were used as weapon storage depots and command posts; other mosque minarets were used as sniper nests. Al-Wafa hospital in Shejaiya “was transformed into a sniper post, an anti-tank missile launch site, a weapons storage facility, a platform for operational surveillance devices, and a cover for tunnel infrastructure.” Schools and UN facilities were repeatedly used as cover to enable nearby rocket launches.
The Times also noted that out of the “2,125 Palestinians killed during the war, 936, or 44 percent, were militants,” refuting the oft-repeated claim by Hamas that 1,500 civilians had been killed. Some 791 fatalities—36 percent of the total—were “uninvolved civilians,” with the remaining 428 being men whose status remained unknown. These proportions correspond closely to the results found by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC). According to the ITIC’s report (.pdf), “Of the fatalities who could be identified, about 55% are terrorist operatives, most of them Hamas operatives, and about 45% are non-involved civilians.”
After 2008-2009’s Operation Cast Lead, Hamas regularly claimed that the vast majority of fatalities were civilians, only to acknowledge later, after the infamous Goldstone Report was released, that the majority of those killed were indeed terrorists.
In its report on the foreign ministry report, The New York Times quoted Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, who dismissed the report as having “no value and will not work in changing the facts because the Israeli occupation crimes took place in front of the world’s cameras.” It was reported last year that Abu Zuhri encouraged Gazans to return to their homes even after Israel had targeted the buildings, an essential component of Hamas’ cynical strategy of using human shields.
The foreign ministry report follows a report released last week written by 11 former chiefs of staff, generals, high-ranking officers and politicians from the United States, Europe, and other nations, which concluded that “Israeli forces acted proportionately as required by the laws of armed conflict and often went beyond the required legal principles of proportionality, necessity and discrimination.” Similarly, a March study sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and conducted by five retired American officers observed that “Israel systemically applied established rules of conduct that adhered to or exceeded the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) in a virtually unprecedented effort to avoid inflicting civilian casualties.”
Last week, The Weekly Standard published an in-depth look at the IDF’s legal division, known as Dabla, which issues guidelines for military actions to limit civilian casualties.
[Photo: Israel Defense Forces / Flickr ]