It’s Important to Minimize Civilian Casualties, but Excessive Caution Leads to More Death on Both Sides

Yesterday, the IDF closed in on the city of Khan Younis, Hamas’s main center in the southern Gaza Strip, beginning what Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi has described as the “third phase” of the operation. Two days beforehand, giving a speech in the United Arab Emirates, Vice-President Kamala Harris declared, “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.” Such comments echo those of other U.S. officials, in what seems like a coordinated effort to hamstring the Israeli offensive in southern Gaza.

But how many “innocent Palestinians” does Vice-President Harris believe to be the right number to be killed? The laws of armed conflict in fact help provide a way of answering that question, as Shlomo Brody explains, through the oft-misunderstood doctrine of proportionality. Moreover, he argues, excessive restraint poses dangers of its own, a lesson Israel might have learned during the second intifada, after buckling to similar U.S. pressure:

In September 2003, the Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin gathered with all of his senior men in a three-story Gaza apartment building. . . . Yet Israel didn’t strike. Fearful of dozens of civilian casualties along with the local and international protests that would ensue, Prime Minister Sharon, at the urging of the army chief of staff Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, called off an attack using a massive bomb to topple the building.

An alternative plan was hastily proposed to shoot a smaller missile to destroy the third floor, where intelligence officials speculated the meeting was taking place.

They guessed wrong. The meeting, it turned out, was on the first floor. . . . Within a few days, sixteen Israeli citizens were dead and another 75 wounded by two Hamas suicide bombers.

Israel’s decision not to act cost the lives of many innocent Israelis. Fears of “disproportionate” accusations led Israel to shirk its primary moral responsibility, which is to protect its own citizens from being murdered by terrorists.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Hamas, International Law, Kamala Harris, Military ethics

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023