The IDF makes greater efforts to minimize civilian casualties than any army has ever done

Information on the IDF’s record in minimizing civilian deaths can be found here: “Civilian Deaths in Gaza: Relatively Low,” by Alan Dershowitz, Aish, February 4, 2024:

…The Hamas figures for total deaths do not purport to distinguish combatants from what they consider civilian deaths. They never give the ages of the “children” they claim have been killed, although they regard anyone under the age of 19 as a child, even if they are active combatants. Hamas has recruited fighters as young as 13 to 19. The Hamas figures also do not count the Gazans who were killed by errant rockets launched by terrorists, or Gazans who were killed by Hamas for refusing its orders not to move to safer locations….

Not all the deaths of Gazans, of course, were caused by the IDF. About 20% of the rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from Gaza fall short of their Israeli target and instead land in Gaza, sometimes killing civilians, as happened with the PIJ rocket that misfired and hit the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Hospital. We also know that Hamas has killed Gazans who have tried to heed IDF warnings and flee to safer territory. When one million people in northern Gaza tried to flee south, Hamas tried to discourage the mass exodus by killing civilians who were on the main north-south corridor of Sahal al-Din Street. What is not known is how many people Hamas killed to discourage that movement — dozens, hundreds, or thousands? No one knows.

Nations engaged in genocide do not go to such great lengths trying to reduce civilian casualties, including placing its own soldiers at heightened risk by employing focused ground forces instead of relying exclusively on air and sea bombardments. The ICJ should immediately reject the genocide charges against Israel and initiate war crime charges against Hamas and Iran, both of which willfully try to increase civilian deaths….

Let’s restate that observation even more strongly: the IDF makes greater efforts to minimize civilian casualties than any army has ever done, even to the extent of warning its enemy of where it will next strike. As British Colonel Richard Kemp, who fought in a half-dozen wars and commanded British forces in Afghanistan, has said, “no other army in the world has done this.” And he adds: “The IDF is the most moral army in the world.” It has used ground troops increasingly, even though that creates greater risks for them than do airstrikes from the air and shelling from the sea, in a further effort to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.

To help the world to apply the same standards to the IDF as it does to other armies, our giddy globe should keep the following in mind:

1. The IDF makes enormous efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza by warning of areas, and then specific buildings, that are about to be targeted. Enormous resources are poured into these warnings — six million leaflets, four million messages, 72,000 personal phone calls — to let civilian escape to safer areas.

2. Many civilians in Gaza have died as a result of rockets launched toward Israel by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad that have misfired and fell onto Gaza. About 20% of all the rockets fired so far from Gaza — about 12,500 — land in Gaza itself; the number of Gazans killed as a result is unknown.

3. Hamas has killed Gazans trying to flee from areas that the IDF has told them will be targeted. Some of their bodies have been photographed lying on the north-south corridor of Salah al-Din Street.

4. Hamas does not break down its casualty figures between civilians and combatants, hoping that the media will treat all of the casualties as civilians. And it has largely worked. Many in the media mindlessly report on the “deaths of 27,000 Gazans” without mentioning how many of those are Hamas fighters. Nor do they mention that Hamas counts young males from 16 to 19 as “children” when a great many of them were almost certainly combatants. 

5. Hamas has a vested interest in maximizing Gazan deaths: the more civilians that are killed, the more propaganda points the terror group can score against its hated Zionist enemy. Israel has the opposite interest. It tries always and everywhere to minimize civilian casualties, because of its fundamental decency, and its code of “the purity of arms” — in minimizing harm to civilians.

6. According to the UN, in all the wars fought since World War II, the average civilian-to-combatant ratio is 9:1, that is nine civilians killed for every combatant killed. The Americans did better in Iraq, with a 3:1 ratio, and a 4:1 ratio in Afghanistan. But Israel has in the Gaza war achieved an unbelievable civilian-to-combatant ratio, calculated as follows: 27,000 deaths announced by Hamas. The IDF has said that so far it has killed 10,000 Hamas fighters. That means there have been, up to the first week in February, 17,000 civilians and 10,000 combatants killed, or a 17:10 ratio, which is less than 2:1. No other army has come close to achieving such a ratio. The next time someone begins to protest about “civilian casualties” in Gaza by the “colonial-settler-apartheid genocidal state of Israel,” remind them of this ratio and of how it compares to the civilian-to-combatant deaths in other wars, especially those recently fought in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Americans, and the civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. This should shut them up.