The author is a teacher. Joe Baron is a pseudonym.
According to the pearl-clutching commentariat, Israel is not doing enough to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza. Over 30,000 civilians are dead, the majority of whom are women and children. To some, these distressing figures – which some suspect are fabricated by Hamas – are evidence of a genocidal assault being carried out by the Israeli military and, by extension, the Jewish people.
Hamas’s actual genocidal attack on the citizens of Israel on 7th October last year, during which they raped and mutilated the bodies of countless young Israeli women, seems almost to be beside the point. The fact that Hamas hides within the Gazan population, using them as human shields and thereby maximizing the number of civilian deaths, also seems beside the point.
Even if the first casualty of every war is the truth, this leaves one incredulous. It’s back to front, upside down, and lost in a labyrinthine web of deceit enveloped in a thick fog of disinformation.
Israel is doing all it can to avoid civilian casualties. According to John Spencer, one of the world’s foremost authorities in urban warfare, Israel’s civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza is lower than in any comparable conflict. Indeed, it is 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians, compared to a global average of 1 combatant to 9 civilians.
In Mosul in 2016-17, when US and UK forces destroyed ISIS, it was 1:2.5. Spencer goes on to say that Israel protects civilians more effectively than anyone else in the history of warfare. It is the only nation that, through phone calls, text messages, and voicemails, warns civilians of any planned assault in an effort save civilian life, even though, in doing so, such forewarnings give Hamas a military advantage.
Yet facts don’t seem to matter. Even though three distinguished academics recently debunked Hamas’s casualty figures, pointing out that, in particular, those concerning women and children are ‘statistically impossible’, many continue to libel the Jewish state with bogus numbers that incite hatred against not only Israel, but the Jewish people.
What about the recent deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid-workers? This is surely proof of Israel’s deliberate targeting of not only civilians, but those selfless enough to help them. Well, no, it’s not. It’s proof that war is hell. Innocent people die and mistakes happen. And this was a mistake, a bad one, for which two senior military personnel have been dismissed.
However, such instances are not unique to the current conflict. Despite David Cameron’s nauseating expositions of North London dinner-party groupthink, he was responsible for the accidental deaths of large numbers of innocent civilians during his 2011 Libyan misadventure. Obama’s drone strike that hit a wedding party in Afghanistan, killing 47 innocents, also springs to mind – exposing Joe Biden, the then Vice-President who now, as President, berates what he inaccurately and outrageously calls Israel’s indiscriminate bombing.
The evidence is clear: Israel does not deliberately target civilians. It goes above and beyond to avoid civilian casualties. But the fog of war leads to mistakes, and such mistakes are rightly investigated and punished, as they have been in this World Kitchen case.
The objectionable behaviour of some aid agencies, however, thickens the fog and makes mistakes, and therefore civilian casualties, more likely. Look at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Among others, the UK and US have suspended funding after thirteen of their employees were found to have participated in the 7 October terrorist attacks. Nine have been sacked.
Sara A-Dirawi, an UNRWA teacher in Gaza, celebrated the rapes, murders, and mutilations on social media. Suhail al-Hindi, the headmaster of an UNRWA-run school and chairman of the UNRWA Gaza Workers’ Union, was elected to the Hamas politburo in 2017. Jawad Abu Shamala, the Hamas minister for the economy, also worked as a teacher in an UNRWA school in Khan Younis.
A former long-serving UNRWA staffer lamented that finding neutral employees is very difficult. UNRWA’s ties with Hamas adds another layer of complexity to the on-going Gaza conflict. How can Israel trust UN aid convoys when they know that they could be working for Hamas?
The UN is an organization that can seem deeply hostile to the only democracy in the Middle East. After 7 October, it took the UN’s body nearly for women’s rights almost two months to condemn Hamas’s use of sexual violence. The UN Security Council is still yet to condemn the atrocities. And, to add insult to injury, a Hamas intelligence centre was found beneath a UN headquarters in Gaza City. How can Israel trust UN aid convoys in this environment?
The same dilemma is caused by the Red Cross’s stance. The Palestinian Red Cross Society (affiliated to the ICRC) is thought by many to have transported Hamas terrorists in its ambulances. Many Israelis, including Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shiraz HaDin-Israel Law Centre, scold the Red Cross for not only this, but also not doing enough to help the Jewish hostages still being held in Gaza. In a letter signed by 1,200 solicitors, Darshan-Leitner said that it’s a ‘decades-old pattern with the Red Cross’, before pointedly highlighting their failure to assist Jews in the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
Amnesty International has also veered into worrying partiality. In a tweet, it described the recent death in an Israeli prison of a convicted Palestinian torturer and murderer as ‘a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life’. The man tortured and castrated a 19-year-old victim.
It appears that many aid agencies and human rights organisations have imbibed anti-Israel narratives. Such enmity indubitably adds another layer of complexity to Israel’s mission to destroy Hamas and minimize civilian suffering. This helps no one, apart from the nihilistic barbarians of Hamas.
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Author: Joe Baron
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