Marty Levine
July 31, 2024
Last Sunday’s Haaretz Gaza War update included a comment, attributed to the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, that screamed at me. It said:
We know for certain that it was a Falaq rocket that had a 53 kilogram warhead (about 117 pounds). It’s a Hezbollah rocket, and whoever launches such a rocket into an urban area wants to kill civilians – wants to kill children” – IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, quoted by Oded Yaron
The comments were made in the aftermath of the killing of 12 Druze children in the occupied Golan Heights while they were playing soccer on Saturday afternoon. Israel’s military and political leadership placed responsibility for this on Hezbollah and their Iranian backers. They wanted the world to know that the horror of this moment was purposeful and a sign of the inhumanity of those they are fighting against.
It was an atrocity. Those children were the collateral damage in the ongoing, tit-for-tat war taking place in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon at the same time as Israel continues to pummel Gaza, day after day. It is a marker of how weapons of great power are used, seemingly, with little concern for who they may fall on.
This particular statement struck me because it came from Israel’s military leader after almost ten months of fighting in Gaza. It struck me because it came at a time when Israel has been accused by international organizations of causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths through the illegal use of powerful bombs and missiles.
This particular bomb weapon carries less than 120 pounds of explosives and Israel’s military leadership knows that that it cannot be used in a densely populated area without knowing it will kill civilians no matter how precisely it may be targeted. And he was saying this as the leader of a military that has used much larger weapons in the very densely populated areas of Gaza.
In early June Israeli forces bombed a school in Gaza that was being used as a shelter by families who fled from areas where the fighting was thought to be more intense. Here’s how NPR described the outcome of that strike:
Israel’s army said it was targeting a group of militants inside two classrooms at a U.N. school in Nuseirat, a central Gaza refugee camp. But the 2 a.m. strike killed at least 32 people, including seven children…
The weapon that caused this outcome was a US-made “GBU-39B Small Diameter Bomb, or SDB…an extended range all-weather, day or night 250-pound class, guided munition.” This is a weapon more than twice the size of the one that killed 12 children on that Golan Heights soccer field.
Since October 7th Israel has fiercely defended its need to defend itself and justified its continuous bombardment of Gaza. Its leaders and its US supporters have demanded that the US continue to provide them with the weaponry they wish to use, including bombs with payloads of up to 1,000 pounds of high explosives. They have argued vehemently against the calls for a cease-fire and a weapons embargo. They have said that weapons of such mass destructiveness are needed and can safely be used in densely packed Gaza. They have called those who challenge their actions “useful idiots” and antisemites.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to great lengths as he spoke to the US Congress last week to explain the morality of Israel’s offensive as contrasted to the evil of Hamas and Hezbollah. He stated:
The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. But at the same time, Hamas does everything in its power to put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. They fire rockets from schools, from hospitals, from mosques. They even shoot their own people when they try to leave the war zone. …What monstrous evil.
For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, it’s a strategy. They actually want Palestinian civilians to die, so that Israel will be smeared in the international media and be pressured to end the war before it’s won.
Ignored is the fact that Gaza is a very densely populated area as described by AP.
Gaza has a population density of about 14,000 people per square mile (5,500 per square kilometer). That’s about the same as London, a city brimming with high-rise buildings, but also many parks. Gaza has few open spaces, especially in its cities, due to lack of planning and urban sprawl.
While Israel strongly asserts that they take extraordinary measures to warn civilians of impending attacks and gives them sufficient time to flee, they have ignored that there is no place to flee.
…as NPR has reported many times in the past months, there isn’t a place in Gaza that is, quote, “out of harm’s way.” More than 80% of the Gaza Strip has been placed under evacuation orders or designated as a no-go zone by the Israeli military, according to the U.N. And even, quote, “humanitarian areas” have been hit repeatedly by airstrikes as recently as yesterday.
It is in this context that Halevi’s comments seem so important. Why is it that Hezbollah’s use of a relatively small weapon means that they have intentionally killed civilian children while Israel’s using much larger weaponry does not?
Prime Minister Netanyahu may be correct when he speaks about how far Israel goes to warn civilians that they intend to bomb the place where they are living. But he seems to be very comfortable ignoring the reality that they have no place to flee to. He seems very comfortable with the reality that his own military leader pointed out to the world, that he is using weapons that cannot be used in a place like Gaza without causing civilian harm.
But the results as seen by outside observers seem to challenge the accuracy of Israel’s claims. Here’s the conclusion of an in-depth analysis by Guardian reporters:
Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war, they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
And yet as a nation, we seem comfortable being the suppliers of weaponry that can only result in more civilian deaths. Hezbollah’s missile, killing 12 children, is an atrocity. But damning that while putting our heads in the sand as many more die with weapons bought and paid for by our tax dollars is an atrocity as well.
You can change this. Call your Congress person and your Senators and tell them: No more weapons for Israel now!
