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As the horrors in Gaza motivate protests and spark bitter political debates, Israel's Likud-led war coalition has justified its current strategy using two basic points: first, the need to end Hamas' control of Gaza and capacity to launch future attacks; and second, the stark fact that Hamas uses Israeli hostages and ordinary Palestinians as "human shields."
The first point concerns what the philosophical tradition of just war theory calls a "just cause" or rightful purpose—in this case, destroying a hostile military organization's capacity and will to launch terrorist attacks. The second point concerns the practice commonly used by guerrilla and terrorist groups of refusing to set their warriors clearly apart from nearby civilian noncombatants or—in the language of the First 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Conventions (Article 51 section 7)—using civilians or hostages "to shield military objectives from attacks." The Israeli leadership has claimed that it has to bomb civilian housing and even target hospitals or places near relief supply depots because Hamas fighters are embedded there, or in tunnels below them. They view Hamas fighters as being like a criminal who holds a hostage at gunpoint in front them.
But here is the problem: while this abuse of innocent persons as human shields can justify limited "reprisals" that can, to some limited extent, cause more civilian casualties, the fact that one's enemy is using human shields has never justified totally indiscriminate bombardment. In fact, the Geneva Protocol's central principles, which are now widely considered binding even on states (like Israel) that have not ratified them, were developed in part to repudiate the U.S.' tactic of napalm-burning vast areas of Vietnamese land in which Viet Cong forces were thought to be hiding.
Defenders of the Likud-led coalition's strategy in Gaza have repeatedly claimed that, because Hamas operates in densely packed urban areas, it is "proportionate" to level large parts of Gaza's cities, destroying or severely damaging more than 48,000 structures, and killing at least 35,000 Gazans, with nearly 25,000 fully identified. That argument relies on the sophistry that any tactic that is purportedly "necessary" to achieve a legitimate war aim is also morally okay. If that were really so, then even chemical or nuclear attacks could be rationalized—there would be no legal limit on modes of fighting. As international law expert Oona Hathaway has argued, Israel's armed forces (the IDF) have willfully misconstrued proportionality to make virtually everything in Gaza a legitimate target, no matter how much physical harm and property loss to civilians results.
The same Geneva Protocol classifies wholesale bombardment of cities, towns, and other densely populated areas as "indiscriminate," especially when they group civilian housing with "military objectives" on a massive scale (Articles 51 and 52). What counts as a "proportionate" response rather than overkill is tied to the essential imperative to protect civilians, even when the enemy's use of human shields makes this harder or more costly. International humanitarian law requires even forces fighting with a just cause to "take all feasible precautions in the choices of...methods of attack" to minimize civilian casualties and loss of civilian property (Article 57). Israel's bombardment of Gaza utterly fails this test: dropping a 2000-pound bomb on an eight-story apartment building housing 60 people because intelligence suggests a 30 percent chance that one Hamas fighter is storing rockets on the second floor is a war crime.
Here we can see a key but little-recognized cause of the death toll and massive destruction following Hamas's horrendous attacks on innocent civilians on October 7, 2023: the IDF, like the armed forces of virtually every developed democratic nation on the planet, has become extremely intolerant of casualties among its ranks, insisting on strategies that minimize its own casualties but enormously magnify civilian "collateral damage." It is this tendency, combined with Hamas being embedded amongst civilians, that explains why Gaza's cities are being reduced to rubble.
Since its ground offensive into Gaza began, the IDF has lost 282 members as of May 19, less than 1 for every 120 Gazans killed. Imagine if Israel had started by evacuating as many women, children, and elderly persons as possible, as international law demands. It would have been an enormous and heroic undertaking, aided by old allies and new ones, including Middle Eastern nations that were inching towards normalizing relations with Israel before October 7. Then the IDF could have entered Gaza on the ground, clearing areas and directing artillery and bombs only at buildings from which they were taking fire. On this approach, IDF casualties would have been much higher, perhaps as high as 4,000 to 6,000 by this point in war—but civilian casualties and property loss would have been a small fraction of their current total.
Instead Israel's military commanders insisted on leveling entire urban areas before deploying their ground forces into those areas—no matter what costs that approach imposed on civilians. International humanitarian law requires modern militaries to accept higher losses in order to spare civilian noncombatants; the IDF did the opposite.
In this respect, IDF commanders have simply extended the stance taken by their U.S. and European counterparts. U.S. President Bill Clinton was criticized by just war theorist David Luban and others for relying almost entirely on aerial bombardment of Serbian targets to end mass atrocities in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. In defending this bomb-first approach, Clinton noted that President George H.W. Bush had sanctioned 44 days of bombing in Iraq before the land invasion to liberate Kuwait in 1991. But everyone knew that Clinton choose this approach so that no American service personnel would die. He was unwilling to lose even a hundred U.S. soldiers in a UN mission to stop the Rwandan genocide, which ultimately killed almost 1.1 million people.
More recently, the U.S.-led coalition relied on total bombardment to decimate ISIS forces in Raqqa (their proclaimed capital in northern Syria) before allied Kurdish forces entered that city; and the joint Iraqi-U.S. mission committed similar war crimes to rid Mosul of entrenched ISIS fighters, killing over 40,000 civilians and damaging or destroying around 70 percent of the city. Yet only with Gaza is this problem finally regaining the attention it earned during the Vietnam War.
The obliteration of Gaza is not, as some protesters have imagined, the result of Israeli soldiers being unusually cruel, or Israeli leaders being intent on collective punishment of all Palestinians (although some in Israel's cabinet may fit that description). Nor is it explained simply by Hamas' use of human shields. The main cause is actually our collective selfishness and cowardice as peoples of democratic nations with advanced militaries. We want to achieve vital military goals, but we are unwilling to pay the price in our own blood; we insist on putting virtually all of that price on foreign civilians. Hamas, Vladimir Putin, and the Rwandan génocidaires have all known this, and been emboldened by our perceived weakness.
In the long run, a way of life founded on basic human rights and decency cannot be sustained in this fashion. We have to stop the military tail from wagging the political dog, and insist that our commanders accept the casualties required to fight in ways that prevent enormous civilian losses in the theaters of war. Until then, the horrors exemplified in Gaza will continue.
John Davenport is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Fordham University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
