How a “Determination to Prove Israel’s Inhumanity” Leads to Bad War Reporting on Gaza

April 2 2024

In the past two weeks, the Biden administration has approved the transfer of important shipments of weapons to Israel, which include F-35 jets and large numbers of 500lb and 2,000lb bombs. Recent reports by several U.S. media outlets have alleged or insinuated that the last of these are being used recklessly by the IDF, causing massive and unnecessary civilian casualties. These claims, David Adesnik and Mark Montgomery explain, are based on wildly misleading, and sometimes false, characterizations of how these weapons work:

The indictments . . . tend to brush aside that Hamas has spent a decade constructing a tunnel network that is more extensive, built tougher, and buried deeper than those of other insurgent forces, such as Islamic State. Ignoring this key fact, the critics ask why Israel needs to use 2,000-pound bombs if the United States and its allies used them infrequently in urban environments when fighting IS.

Detonated in an open space, a 2,000-pound bomb can reportedly kill individuals standing within a radius of 1,200 feet, or almost a quarter mile. Yet detonated inside a building or under the ground, the same munition may harm people and structures in a much more restricted area. . . . In fact, the U.S. and Israeli air forces can drop 2,000-pound bombs close to their own troops in battle without hurting them. . . . U.S. Air Force officers have also recounted the precise ways they used 2,000-pound bombs to destroy select parts of buildings in Raqqa without bringing down their entire structure or endangering nearby troops.

Put simply, in the absence of appropriate weapons forensics, CNN is accusing Israel of extensive war crimes . . . based on misleading assumptions about the impact of 2,000-pound bombs.

To Adesnik and Montgomery, the root of these journalists’ poor reporting lies in “their determination to prove that Israel’s inhumanity is a principal cause of the devastation” in Gaza.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Gaza War 2023, IDF, Laws of war, Media

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