The American administration continues to apply immense pressure on Israel to stop its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza, and to pivot to a “diplomatic option” under which it would negotiate with Hamas and agree to a “two-state solution” which would impose on Israel yet another hostile Arab state. This “second state” would present a long and indefensible border to Israel’s east. The administration also looks to Israel to accept Arab administration of a post-war Gaza, to include participation of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The administration states as its motive to justify this pressure by claiming that “too many” people are dying in Gaza, but this conclusion is based on false casualty information and statistics provided by Hamas itself. It is convenient, albeit tendentious and unethical, for the Administration to accept Hamas propaganda as the driving force to pressure Israel to stop defending itself.
In reality, casualties among Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians are unknown and cannot be ascertained, because the published casualty figures are based on Hamas casualty releases, and there are no credible primary confirming sources. To say that these Hamas reports are merely unreliable is to grant them undue credulity. They are propagandistic fiction, as this author discussed regarding a 2014 Israel/Hamas conflict in Fantasy War Reporting.
The veracity of Hamas’ self-reported casualty lists has not improved in the 10 years since. Civilian casualty figures are not nearly as high as Hamas is reporting. Their figures do not report as a distinct group any, much less all, Hamas terrorist fighters who have been killed in battle or in operational accidents. They just include their terrorist fighters, unidentified as such, within Gaza civilian casualty figures. They also do not differentiate between Gaza civilians killed in IDF attacks against legitimate military targets who were unintentional collateral casualties; Hamas combatants disguised as civilians; and civilian noncombatants killed because they were forced by Hamas to serve as human shields, or who served voluntarily in that capacity when directed or demanded by Hamas, which action would convert them from protected noncombatants into unprotected combatants under international law.
The distinguished British military historian Sir Andrew Roberts, who has written voluminous comprehensive biographies of Churchill, Napoleon, King George III, and other giants of military history, as well as several histories of military operations, said this in the British House of Lords regarding the lack of veracity of the number of casualties reported by Hamas in Gaza, as well as the morality of how the Israeli defense forces carry out their operations:
Even if we were to take Hamas’s statistics as accurate, the 27,500 figure, and there’s no reason why we should, if we don’t do that with Putin, we don’t do that with ISIS, if one subtracts the number of Gazans who’ve been killed by the quarter or so of Islamic Jihad and Hamas rockets that fall short, one’s left with a fewer than two to one ratio of civilians to Hamas terrorists killed, of whom there’ve been over 9,000 so far. My lords, war is hell, and every individual civilian death is a tragedy. But as a military historian, less than two to one is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare, where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields, and it’s a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the Israeli defense forces.
This conclusion is further supported by a thorough analysis of the absence of veracity in the casualty figures published by the Hamas Health Ministry, the Hamas Media Office, and the United Nations; this analysis was recently presented by David Adesnik, Director of Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, at the Jewish Policy Center on May 22, 2024.
No national government could rationally base its international policy decisions on a foundation of “too many” civilian casualties, while relying upon this self-reported, unverified, and self-serving Hamas and United Nations propaganda, but many governments, including that of the United States, are doing just that.
The United States itself has a history of sometimes protecting, sometimes failing to protect, and sometimes intentionally, as an affirmative policy, targeting enemy noncombatants during conflicts when it perceives that its own national interests are paramount. The hypocrisy of trying to impose upon Israel an impossible standard which the United States has itself never imposed upon itself, achieved, nor even attempted to achieve, and has sometimes intentionally ignored, is self-evident.
Even if, for the sake of argument, the number of civilian deaths in Gaza reported by Hamas is taken at face value, the discrimination of this administration against Israel based on these numbers of civilian deaths is highlighted by the administration’s silence where Arabs/Muslims have been killed by one another and neither Israel nor Jews were involved. Here are the statistics of the number of Arab/Muslim deaths caused by recent Arab-on-Arab Middle East conflicts that do not involve Israel and Jews, and a notation of the lack of Arab and Western negative reaction to those casualty numbers.
Syria: 306,887 estimated civilians killed by 2022 according to the Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights.
Yemen: 377,000 estimated civilians killed by August 25, 2023 according to Campaign Against Arms Trade, citing UN statistics.
General: >410,000 The seven civil wars in the Middle East between 2016 and 2018 marked an all-time high since 1996. The deadliest year in the Middle East was 1988, when more than 330,000 battle-related deaths were recorded, most of them in the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988). Since 1991, 2014 was the deadliest year, with almost 80,000 battle-related deaths. (OCHA Reliefweb data can be found here.)
There is no gnashing of teeth in Western nations, or even in Arab countries, and certainly not in the United Nations human rights commissions and committees, about the hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians killed by other Arabs in modern Arab-on-Arab Middle East conflicts. No one is arguing that there were “too many” Arab casualties inflicted by other Arabs. Only when Jews are involved, only when Israel is protecting its citizens in a legal war of self-defense, and more than complying with international law in doing so, does the West, including the United States, and the Arabs, in a blatantly discriminatory manner, try to stop Israel from guaranteeing its own citizens’ safety.
The American administration should drop from its diplomatic repertoire “too many civilian casualties” as a false and perverse justification for putting pressure on Israel to end its existential battle with Hamas in Gaza.
Michael S. Goldstein is Arizona State Director of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. He is a 30-year veteran of the United States Navy and of the U.S. intelligence community. His articles appear in American Thinker.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.
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