Israel Must Hone its Strike Campaign in Gaza

REUTERS/Anas al-Shareef

I spent a military career in the war on terror as a US Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC)—the airpower experts who coordinate and call in airstrikes. As a part of both conventional and special operations task forces, I controlled hundreds of airstrikes against terrorist targets across the Middle East. With the rise of ISIS in 2014, I was a key architect of the strike cells that were vital in taking down the extremist caliphate. I helped shape the rules of engagement and was tactical lead for three separate special operations strike cells hunting ISIS and other terrorist groups across Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. I strongly support the imperative for our ally Israel to defeat Hamas. But as an expert in targeting, collateral damage analysis, and strike coordination and control, I am compelled to share my perspective of Israel’s strike campaign in the Gaza Strip.

In the early morning of October 7, 2023, the radical Islamic terrorist group Hamas mounted a gruesome and inhuman attack against civilians in the Gaza Strip. Mainly targeting Israeli citizens, along with other foreign nationals including Americans, the assault consisted of thousands of Hamas terrorists breaching Israeli border security, indiscriminately torturing and gunning down Israeli civilians and entire families both in their homes and at an open-air music festival, taking civilian hostages to include women, children, and the elderly, and surprise attacking Israeli soldiers and police. This coincided with the launch of ~2,200 rockets indiscriminately fired into southern and central Israel. Casualties from Hamas’ brutal raid include 1,200 killed—mostly civilians—and 240 taken hostage, including American citizens. Before the carnage of the morning was even over, Mohammed Deif, commander of the Hamas military arm the Al Qassam Brigades, released a video statement claiming responsibility.

Almost immediately following, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initiated retaliatory strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza. By October 9, the IDF had struck 130 targets in the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, and had laid plans for the complete siege of the region in order to oust Hamas for good. Israel has since escalated their strike campaign, in parallel with a major IDF ground offensive into the Gaza Strip.

The civilian death toll from the Israeli strike campaign has been nothing short of catastrophic. Most recent statistics, tracked by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, puts the overall death toll in Gaza at over 19,000. The majority of deaths are attributed to Israeli airstrikes. While this number does not differentiate between Hamas operatives and civilians, it is estimated that up to 70% of those killed have been women and children, and that children have comprised nearly half of all casualties in Gaza. Verified deaths from the IDF strike campaign as of mid-November include, “doctors, journalists, professors and poets,” as the IDF has targeted, “refugee camps and residential neighborhoods, bakeries and water towers, solar panels and fishing boats, schools and hospitals, mosques and churches.” Numerous reports state that over 100 UN aid workers have been killed since the fighting began—the highest number of UN aid workers killed in any conflict in history—along with dozens of journalists. And it is estimated that over 60% of housing in Gaza has been either destroyed or damaged.

The true count of civilian casualties in Gaza is, for now, obscured in the fog of war. And much of our data currently comes from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is still Hamas-controlled. Even so, the Palestinian health authorities maintain international credibility in chronicling baseline statistics, with many of their staff trained in the US on data collection and statistical accuracy. Accordingly, their numbers have historically been relied on by UN agencies. As well, given that the Gaza Strip has 2.1 million people packed within 140 square miles—at nearly the area of Las Vegas but with more than three times the population and higher population density than New York City—combined with the fact that there was not any effective civilian exodus prior to the Israeli offensive, we can deduce that civilian casualty counts are disproportionately high. US government officials assess that the death toll is likely even higher than current reports. By all accounts, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is extremely dire. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has declared nowhere in Gaza is safe for civilians, and that the crisis is at a “breaking point,” and has become a, “spiraling humanitarian nightmare.”

Reports of high civilian casualty rates from IDF strikes have been acknowledged in direct statements by Israeli officials. In early December, the IDF declared that 5,000 Hamas terrorists had been killed as a result of their operation, “Swords of Iron,” and that approximately two civilians have been killed for every Hamas fighter. In response to this disclosure during a live interview on CNN, IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus commented that a 2:1 civilian-to-Hamas casualty ratio is, “tremendously positive,” in light of Hamas embedding itself within the civilian population. Another IDF official said, “I’m not saying it’s not bad we have a ratio of two to one…hopefully it will be much lower [in the next phase of the war].”

This very clear callousness toward civilian casualties, combined with the reality on the ground in Gaza, has led to global protests against Israel and accusations of war crimes. This carries strategic, legal, and moral considerations. As a ratified party of the Geneva Conventions and therefore adherent to International Humanitarian Law, Israel has both a legal and a moral imperative to limit civilian casualties in any military operations against Hamas. Israel must ensure that its targeting and strike campaigns are guided by the law of armed conflict and the principles of humanity, distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. Humanity holds that civilians shall not be deprived of protection. Distinction dictates that warring parties must, “at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” Proportionality states that attacks are prohibited if they are assessed to, “cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” And military necessity refers to the tempering of offensive actions toward only those that are necessary to, “accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law.” The purpose of this entire set of principles is to balance military necessity versus potential civilian harm in combat operations.

On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, and stated that Israel would, “halt supply of electricity, food, water, and fuel to the region.” He further said that, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. Hamas will no longer exist. We will eliminate everything.” Early in the IDF campaign, Israeli officials warned that they could not even guarantee the safety of journalists operating in the Gaza Strip. “[Because] the IDF is targeting all Hamas military activity throughout Gaza,” and since Hamas intentionally puts their military operations, “in the vicinity of journalists and civilians,” neither would be safe from the Israeli offensive. Former IDF legal adviser, Pnina Sharvit Baruch, made the IDF perspective on the international laws of war clear: “The higher the military advantage, the higher harm to civilians would still be considered proportionate….The only way to defend yourself [in the situation in Gaza] is to use a lot of force and unfortunately harm civilians because there is no other way.” This was not the intent in the principles of the laws of armed conflict. However, the IDF focus has been apparent from the start: their objectives of enacting vengeance for October 7 and destroying Hamas at all costs have overridden any genuine attempts to protect civilians. And while vengeance against Hamas is, by all means, understood, it is the obligation of a professional military force to temper emotion and train its firepower only on the enemy.    

Even given these facts, however, it is a solid legal argument that Israel adheres to international humanitarian law in its strike and targeting operations in Gaza. I lived and breathed these principles as a JTAC and targeting professional, executing America’s strike campaigns in the war on terror. The hard reality is that these laws are ambiguous, and are very subject to interpretation and subjectivity, especially with the defining of military necessity and proportionality. In fact, this has been the decry of many US defense analysts and officials, some of whom have nearly stepped over one another to justify the civilian casualties in Israel’s strike campaign, as they hold that Israeli implementations of, “the law of targeting are well within the mainstream.” One prominent defense analyst recently stated on CNN that the IDF strike campaign has been, “proportional, very discriminate, very precise.” It simply hasn’t.  

The truth is that the US military’s interpretation and application of the principles of the laws of armed conflict are vastly different from Israel’s. In the first two weeks of the IDF strike campaign, roughly 90% of munitions dropped were 1000- and 2000-pound bombs. Further, around 45% of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions that the IDF has deployed, per current counts, have been unguided “dumb bombs.” Most notably, IDF targeting standards, in and of themselves, are markedly different from those of the US military. In perhaps the most ominous example of a complete volte-face from US targeting standards, on October 31 and November 1, the IDF struck the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp using 2000-lb bombs, taking out an entire city block. The strikes killed one Hamas commander, likely some sub-commanders or underlings, and nearly 200 civilians as of last reports. They struck the same camp again this past Sunday, December 17, killing over 100, according to reports. This demonstrates far from any level of discrimination and precision that I was expected to exercise as a US targeting professional. For one, striking a densely populated refugee camp would be out of the question. And even when we targeted within populated civilian areas, we rarely dropped such large warheads because of the increased risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. Most commonly, we utilized 250- and 500-lb bombs and smaller precision guided missiles, many with modified warheads and altered bomb bodies to further limit collateral damage. And dumb bombs were almost never an option.  

In mid-October, confronted on the necessity for warning civilians and giving opportunity to evacuate before strikes, IDF spokesperson Lt. Col Richard Hecth responded, “When they came in and threw grenades at our ambulances they did not knock on the roof. This is war. The scale is different.” The problem with such a statement is that “they” should not include Palestinian civilians. Only after significant international pressure has the IDF initiated some attempt at better protecting civilians from strikes. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari detailed these IDF measures, which include, “1,524,000 fliers dropped from the sky, almost 6 million messages sent to cellphones and 20,000 phone calls.” Yet, even with these processes, Israel has extended wholly unrealistic timelines for hundreds of thousands of civilians, packed in densely populated regions, to evacuate. As well—because of pressure, intimidation, and misinformation by Hamas—civilians often cannot, or do not, evacuate. And even as some have evacuated to avoid being caught in the crossfire or becoming the target of Israeli strikes, the IDF has bombed regions it previously declared as safe havens and urged civilians to evacuate to, most recently in the southern city of Rafah. The IDF sentiment toward killing civilians in strikes against Hamas has been: “We did our diligence. If civilians are still there when we strike…too bad.” This is another stark contrast from the US implementation of the laws of war.

Israel’s targeting operations and methodologies have, historically, been shrouded in secrecy. There is some recent reporting that they have been using an artificial intelligence (AI) system for rapid target generation and vetting in order to provide, “recommendations for targeting homes or areas where suspected Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants,” reside. That is concerning, offhand, but we can’t reasonably verify the nature of the intelligence or data fed into such a system, if it exists, or what weight the AI might carry within the IDF targeting architecture. Still, at the very least, we know that the IDF’s general targeting methodologies mirror those of the US. But with a very key differentiator: the IDF has far higher tolerance for civilian casualties than the US military, even when compared to our most sensitive operations.

In response to international outrage and pressure, justifications offered by the IDF have included the challenges presented in Hamas intentionally operating within densely populated civilian areas and, “conducting command and control from apartment buildings, houses, schools, and other civilian objects.” They cite Hamas’ use of civilians as involuntary human shields, and blame Hamas solely for any civilian casualties from IDF strikes. But as former Director of International Law and Policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dr. Helen Durham, has aptly retorted, “While Hamas moves and hides amongst civilians in densely populated cities, this does not absolve Israel of its duties [to protect civilians].”

Senior Israeli officials have pushed back on calls to hone their strike operations. Publicly and privately, they have pointed to civilian tolls from US wars—specifically the 1945 atomic bombs to end WWII, the battle against ISIS in Mosul in 2016, and the battles in Fallujah previous. In an address to Israelis on October 30, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even cited British strikes on a children’s hospital in Copenhagen during WWII when targeting the Nazi Gestapo. It is, quite frankly, morally objectionable for the leader of a first-world and militarily advanced nation such as Israel to justify high civilian casualty rates by citing tragedies of decades past, which were of a completely different time, context, and (importantly) technological capability. As well, such statements are ignorant of the fact that modern laws of war were born largely from the tragedies and atrocities of WWII. As I stated in my article detailing the truths and myths of US strike cells, “It is a demon of eras long past that the targeting of protected civilians was considered an acceptable and unavoidable cost of victory in professional, law-abiding militaries. Today, this kind of warfare is unthinkable, not only because we have the means by which to wage warfare more precisely but, more importantly, history and current events show us the tragedy wrought from the other path.”

While the US military has not been immune to affecting civilian toll in its modern wars and strike campaigns, it has, quite legitimately, become the most humane military in the history of warfare in regard to mitigation of civilian casualties. To offer perspective, the US-led global war on terror across Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan is estimated to have caused roughly 22,000 civilian casualties over nearly twenty years of war. The current civilian casualty count in Gaza, after two months, nearly reaches that figure. In no small part because of the pure scale of bombardment in addition to a clear disregard for civilian loss. As of November 1, the IDF reported it had dropped at least 10,000 munitions—over just three and a half weeks. To contrast, even during the most intense operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria from 2015 to 2017, of which I was a part, the US military on average dropped 2,000 to 3,000 munitions per month.

Despite US targeting mistakes—and I’ll be the first to concede that we have had many—the US military goes to extraordinary measures to protect civilians. Mitigating the risk of civilian casualties was a core facet of my job coordinating and controlling airstrikes. In all but the rarest of operations, my authorized threshold for risk of civilian casualties, in any given strike, was zero—meaning that the strike would not be approved if there was risk of even one civilian being killed. Further, as a force, the US military continually analyzes and addresses its points of failure. This is exemplified in the recent enactment of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, which was developed after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered an in-depth analysis of US strike campaigns in the war on terror.

The need for Israel to hone its strike operations in Gaza carries not only a moral but a strategic importance. General Stanley McChrystal, former JSOC commander and commander of US Forces in Afghanistan from 2008-2009, warned about high civilian casualties resulting in strategic failure through emboldening and broadening an insurgency. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who commanded the US Central Command in 2014, when I pushed in to Baghdad with the special operations response force to combat ISIS, spoke from hard-earned experience in the war on terror when he recently remarked that, “In this kind of fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” Indeed, the Gazan populace, more than likely, does not view Israel or the IDF as liberators. A Palestinian woman who had recently fled her home in the southern city of Khan Younis, where the IDF bombed a city block to ruins in early December, told reporters, "It is a total destruction. May God take revenge on them."

Additionally, we have rightly condemned Russia and Vladimir Putin for the atrocities born from Russian strike campaigns in both Syria and Ukraine. But the estimated of tens of thousands of civilian casualties resulting, so far, from the Russian incursion into Ukraine have occurred over nearly two years of warfare, and in an area with a population nearly twenty times that of Gaza. We cannot ethically—let alone strategically—turn a blind eye to Israel’s strike campaign in Gaza while standing on false moral high ground in the face of our adversaries. US officials maintain that the United States will continue to stand by Israel as the nation’s, “closest friend in the world.” Israel is the top recipient of U.S. foreign military aid, receiving $3.3 billion annually to include the supply of air-to-ground munitions used in their strike campaign. This is a conversation that must be had.

The Biden administration and senior US officials have signaled the position that Israel is not doing what it should to protect civilians. In October, shortly after the IDF strike campaign ensued, President Biden insisted, “Israel has to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect innocent civilians.” Secretary of Defense Austin stated that he has, “repeatedly made clear to Israel’s leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and strategic imperative.” In early December, based on the scale of devastation that has continued to occur as a result of the IDF strike campaign, Secretary of State Antony Blinken further advised, “It remains imperative that Israel put a premium on civilian protection. And there does remain a gap between…the intent to protect civilians, and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.” On December 12, President Biden warned that Israel was, “starting to lose [international] support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.” And just this past Sunday, Defense Secretary Austin met with Israeli Defense Minister Gallant specifically to discuss, “how to reduce harm to civilians trapped in the battlefield,” while in a press conference on Wednesday, Blinken further emphasized, “minimizing the loss of life and the suffering of civilians,” as a priority in the war in Gaza. In no other terms, Israel’s strike campaign in Gaza has been irresponsible. US officials have recognized this and have openly stated as much. Thus far, however, they have not done enough to affect real change in IDF strike operations.  

In its current war against Hamas, Israel occupies a gray area between borderline compliance with and outright violation of international humanitarian law. We can stand by Israel’s right to defend its people and its homeland, and the very real necessity to defeat Hamas, while also doing far more to influence change in IDF targeting operations and the acceptance of high civilian casualty rates. Calls for the humanitarian revision of the military actions of Israel are no more antisemitic than valuing Palestinian civilian lives is pro-Hamas. This overriding current of rhetoric is the definition of logical fallacy, and only blinds us. We can seek peace for both Israelis and Palestinians—I believe it is a moral, ethical, and strategic imperative.

In my career hunting America’s enemies with airstrikes, it was my job to be calculated and precise in targeting our enemies while compassionate and vigilant in safeguarding the civilian populace. I call for the same on part of the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces, for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians. When the dust settles, we must know that we are better than the enemies we stand against .    

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Wes J. Bryant is a retired master sergeant and former special operations joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) in the elite special warfare branch of the US Air Force. He is coauthor of the book Hunting the Caliphate: America’s War on ISIS and the Dawn of the Strike Cell, a first-person account written alongside the former ground force commander of Iraq, Major General Dana J.H. Pittard. In 2014, he was a key member of the special operations response force sent to Baghdad to combat ISIS, and led the team that established the first strike cells to later take down the caliphate. As a senior targeting professional, certified by the US Central Command as an advanced collateral damage estimation analyst, he led three separate strike cells combatting ISIS and other terrorist entities across Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Wes is now an author and analyst with focus on foreign policy, counterterrorism, and extremism, and works as a defense technologist innovating advanced, next-generation solutions for US warfighters. You can follow him on Facebook, X, and Instagram @wesjbryant or visit his site at wesjbryant.com.