Israel’s moral challenge in Gaza – to fight humanely

As if the military difficulties of Israel’s war to destroy Hamas were not daunting enough, the tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers massed around the Gaza Strip are facing another, but equally formidable challenge – a moral one.

How do they wage a ground war against Hamas without inflicting a humanitarian catastrophe on the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians living in one of the most densely populated territories on Earth?

Resolving that dilemma was always going to be difficult.

Military logic dictates that Israel wants as few civilians as possible in the way of its expected street-to-street, house-to-house, tunnel-to-tunnel ground assault on Hamas.

Hamas’ political logic demands that it divert the world’s attention from its barbarous attack on Israeli civilians 10 days ago, killing 1,400 of them, and instead focus international concern on the Palestinian civilians now suffering in Gaza.

That is already happening. On his diplomatic shuttle around the Middle East last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken found Washington’s Arab allies unwilling to condemn the Hamas attack, pressing instead for humanitarian aid to Gaza and restraint by Israel.

Mr. Blinken had been due to fly back to Washington over the weekend, but added a second visit to Israel, in the evident hope of arriving at a shared response to a conundrum that President Joe Biden has framed starkly.

In his first, impassioned response to the Hamas attack, Mr. Biden called it “pure, unadulterated evil.” But in a social media post Sunday, he pointed out that “the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas’ appalling attacks and are suffering as a result of them.”

Mr. Biden has also urged Israel to follow “the laws of war.”

United in shock

As Mr. Blinken arrived in Israel on Monday, it was clear the Israeli authorities were still seeking a way to balance military and humanitarian imperatives – and in fact were being guided more by political calculations.

Since the Hamas attack – the worst such assault, abuse, abduction, and murder of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust – Israelis of all political persuasions have been united in a sense of shock, vulnerability, mourning, and anger.

Jacquelyn Martin/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv on Monday.

Far from an effort to balance the military and humanitarian, the government’s initial emphasis seemed to be on punishment by overwhelming force, launching an unprecedented missile, bombing, and artillery assault on Gaza that has killed 2,750 civilians, according to local authorities, and wounded nearly 9,700.

Israel imposed a siege on Gaza as well, cutting off all supplies of food, water, fuel, and electricity – a violation of international law, as the United Nations, Arab states, aid agencies, and even Israeli allies in Europe reminded the government.

But there have also been signs Israel is not impervious to such reminders of the need to address the plight of civilians as it has ramped up military operations against Hamas.

The siege announcement was followed by a slightly more nuanced policy: it would be lifted, Israel said, if Hamas freed the nearly 200 hostages it is holding. On Monday, Israel said it would resume water supplies to southern Gaza, according to U.S. officials. And in some cases, the Israelis have also been following their traditional policy of giving advance warning to residents of areas targeted by airstrikes.

And last Friday, Israeli planes dropped leaflets in the northern half of Gaza, where most of Hamas’ weaponry and fighters are based, telling its roughly 1 million civilians to move south for their safety.

For Hamas, which issued a counter-order for them to stay put, this was mere “psychological warfare.” For aid agencies, a hasty evacuation was impossible, and a flood of displaced people was bound to worsen shortages of basic necessities in Gaza’s south, as has proved to be the case.

While that remains a real concern, Israel’s initial 24-hour evacuation “window” remained open – and the widely expected ground invasion still on hold – through the weekend.

A sense of humanity

The question now is whether aid supplies, waiting on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border in Sinai, will be allowed into Gaza – and whether a broader humanitarian corridor can be established.

Still, even if that happens, the core problem of balancing Israeli retaliation with the sparing of civilian suffering is not going to go away.

Some civilian casualties are unavoidable in war, especially during a bombing campaign as intensive as the one Israel has been waging in recent days. And, as a powerful New York Times essay by a U.S. military veteran lays out, avoiding such casualties in a full-scale ground offensive is likely to present an even tougher challenge.

Hatem Moussa/AP

Palestinian boys sit on the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat camp in the Gaza Strip on Monday.

On top of the moral imperative to do all they can to minimize such suffering, though, Israel’s leaders have a political spur to do so as well. They know that as the civilian costs mount, the broad international sympathy Israel received after the Hamas terror atrocity is bound to erode.

Additionally, the longer the Israel-Hamas war goes on, and the higher the civilian casualties, the more strongly Iran’s surrogate army, Hezbollah, may be tempted to attack from its bases in Lebanon, to Israel’s north.

There may also be another reason for Israel to try to keep the Gaza war laser-focused on Hamas itself.

It’s Israelis. After last Saturday’s Hamas attack, relatives of a number of the hostages taken into Gaza said that, in their determination to hold on to hope, they were relying on a simple, shared sense of “humanity” with the hostage-holders.

Whether that mood spreads as the Israel-Hamas fighting intensifies will depend on something that may prove especially difficult for many Israelis, still traumatized by the terror rampage.

It will be their ability and readiness to keep two kinds of images in their minds simultaneously, not with a sense of equivalence, but with an equal human value: the horrifying memory of fellow Israelis abducted, raped, and murdered by Hamas terrorists last Saturday, and the terrified faces of Palestinian civilians fleeing Israeli bombs.