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Israel’s powerful military machine has carried out what has been described as an unspeakably brutal “massacre,” even a “genocide,” against innocent civilians trapped in the Gaza Strip, but data shows that the campaign to defeat Hamas in the densely populated Palestinian enclave is one of the most careful and surgical operations in recent human history.
The war has resulted in a lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than other high-profile urban battles this century, including some directly involving the U.S.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza reported a death toll Thursday of 33,970, which would mean roughly 20,000 civilians have been killed in the war. Israel says it has killed about 13,000 Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
The civilian versus combatant death ratio is less than 2-to-1 in what analysts describe as one of the most difficult and complex urban warfare operations ever attempted. It’s also far less than the 2016-2017 battle of Mosul, a U.S.-backed operation to defeat Islamic State terrorists who controlled the Iraqi city. About 10,000 civilians and about 4,000 Islamic State militants were killed in that offensive, said John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Even the United Nations, which has routinely lambasted Israel’s conduct in Gaza, has cited data showing that roughly 90% of all wartime casualties are civilians. By that measure, Israel’s offensive has been highly successful. Some observers stress that the actual number of civilian casualties is probably lower than what Hamas claims. The militants have a vested interest in publicly portraying Israel as a ruthless aggressor.
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Regardless of its validity or accuracy, the data from Gaza seems to have had a massive impact on U.S. decision-making and global opinion.
The Biden administration has threatened to change its policy toward Israel because of civilian deaths in Gaza. President Biden underscored that position during a tense phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Administration officials have rejected some of the most incendiary accusations against Israel. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers this month that U.S. officials “don’t have any evidence of genocide” in Gaza.
Analysts say the Hamas data is a direct cause of the growing rift between the U.S. and Israel and is further complicating Israel’s military efforts.
“These figures have had an undeniable impact on Israel’s war efforts. The unsubstantiated numbers provided by Hamas have been regurgitated by the White House, the Pentagon and the media. So they now are taken as fact,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. “The Israelis continue to take a pounding in the realm of public relations, all in furtherance of the Iranian and Hamas objective of slowing or even halting their advance to the final front that awaits in Rafah.”
‘Combat in hell’
The Israeli military is planning an operation to capture the southern Gaza city of Rafah near the Egyptian border, but public outrage, driven primarily by the civilian death toll data, seems to be delaying that offensive. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians are trapped in Rafah, but Israel maintains that the city holds thousands of Hamas fighters.
One reason for the massive influx of civilians into Rafah is that Israel, in the early weeks of the war, went to great lengths to give civilians time to evacuate and to warn residents of impending military operations. To undertake such measures while trying to root out Hamas terrorists who deliberately try to blend in with the civilian population in one of the most densely packed environments on the planet is a uniquely borderline impossible military task.
“I don’t even know how to explain it in words. It’s combat in hell,” said Mr. Spencer, a leading scholar on urban warfare who has tracked the Israel-Hamas war extensively.
“It’s being given an impossible mission but still finding a way,” he said. “But the world said, ‘It’s not good enough.’”
It certainly no longer seems good enough for the Biden administration. After an Israeli strike inadvertently killed seven aid workers with the World Central Kitchen, the White House boiled over with anger.
“If there’s no changes to [Israeli] policy in their approaches, then there’s going to have to be changes to ours,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “There are things that need to be done. There are too many civilians being killed.”
It’s unclear whether a specific number defines “too many.” Early in the war, just weeks after Hamas’ invasion and massacre of more than 1,200 civilians in Israel, the administration conceded that civilian casualties were inevitable if Israel was to crush Hamas once and for all.
“This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it’s going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward,” Mr. Kirby told reporters on Oct. 24. “I wish I could tell you something different. I wish that that wasn’t going to happen, but it is going to happen.”
By the numbers
Civilian casualties are inevitable in urban combat operations, whether they result from airstrikes, ground offensives or a combination of the two.
In World War II, “official casualty sources estimate battle deaths at nearly 15 million military personnel and civilian deaths at over 38 million,” reads a summary from the Defense Department’s Defense Casualty Analysis System.
U.S. forces tried to limit civilian casualties during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though innocent deaths couldn’t be avoided. During the first battle of Fallujah in 2004, about 200 insurgents and 220 to 600 civilians were killed, according to information compiled by Mr. Spencer.
In the second battle of Fallujah, at least 1,000 insurgents and an estimated 800 civilians were killed.
The battle of Mosul had a massive civilian death toll. Backed by U.S. air support, Iraqi security forces mounted a fierce ground offensive on the city. About 4,000 Islamic State fighters and 10,000 civilians were killed, Mr. Spencer said.
Those figures, Mr. Spencer said, show clearly that Israel is being held to an unrealistic standard that virtually no other modern military has had to face.
The idea that there is a better way to conduct the operation, he said, “is not backed up by the history of anybody who has ever had to face this.”
“It’s just not,” he said. “The one alternative people have been advising is not to do a ground invasion, just do surgical strikes. There’s no historical evidence to say you can destroy an army with just raids or surgical strikes.”
Underlying the debate are questions about whether Hamas data should be trusted at all. Although U.S. officials, including Mr. Biden, have cited the unverified figures, some scholars see ample reason to be skeptical.
Abraham J. Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, wrote in a recent analysis that the daily Hamas casualty counts since Oct. 7 average 270 plus or minus 15%.
“This is strikingly little variation,” he wrote in a recent piece for the online magazine Tablet. “There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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