In the wake of the terrorist attacks carried out on October 7th by Hamas squads in kibbutzim and towns around the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials were quick to compare the Palestinian militant group to the Islamic State (ISIS), highlighting the appalling torture and murder of civilians, including children and the elderly.
More than 1400 people were killed during Hamas’ initial onslaught, with more than 200 taken hostage. As the country began to fully grasp the magnitude of this unprecedented massacre – not since the Holocaust have so many Jewish lives been taken in a single day – Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Hamas is ISIS” during a media briefing with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He made the comparison again on October 23rd during a meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, adding: “We are in a battle of civilisation against barbarism. Hamas is ISIS. And just as the world united to defeat ISIS, the world has to unite against Hamas.”
Meanwhile, in a recent podcast episode, renowned Israeli news anchor Yonit Levi argued: “When the United States decided to destroy ISIS, it devasted most of Iraq. Is the world a safer place because ISIS is now defeated? Yes. Did innocent people pay with their lives tragically? Yes […] So all of this needs to be taken into consideration when people talk about proportional response. ‘Israel needs to act with a proportional response’. What does that mean exactly?” Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum took the opportunity of a telivised interview to make a similar point: "You can already fell the tide of the press beginning to turn: 'Why are you retaliating?' 'Is this a proportionate response?' Are they kidding me, proportionate response? We are note here to kill for revenge; we are there to dismantle the terrorist insfrastructure that is an existential threat to our country", she said.
“Proportionality”, a term violently criticised in Israel in recent days, is sometimes understood as implying numerical equivalency, as if the Jewish State is unfairly bound to a tit-for-tat response following Hamas’ attacks.
Rather, proportionality, as codified in the Geneva Convention, is a core principle of international humanitarian law (IHL) stipulating that, while it is recognised that in operations against military objectives, civilian casualties are sometimes unavoidable, it is imperative that the various warring parties – states and non-state armed groups alike – take all possible measures to minimise losses among the civilian population. If it is feared that an attack will cause excessive, disproportionate collateral damage to the concrete and direct military advantage expected, it must be cancelled or interrupted.
As military operations around the world are taking place with increasing frequency in densely populated areas, the rule has assumed ever greater significance for the protection of civilians.
Using the war against ISIS as an example to justify an unprecedented offensive that is putting civilian lives at risk, Israel has already caused the deaths of an alleged 7,000+ people in 21 days – the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (which may inflate numbers for propaganda gain). This staggering death toll seems to exceed the bloodiest days of the battle of Mosul, described as “the worst urban battle since the end of WWII”. Back then, the aerial bombardment of the jihadists' stronghold worsened after the election of Donald Trump, who decided to relax the rules of engagement for US warplanes.
Airwars, an NGO monitoring civilian harm from airpower-dominated military operations, including the war against ISIS, told the BIC that its research team would soon start independently verifying hundreds of potential incidents of civilian casualties inside the Gaza Strip.
“As for the scale and the intensity of the allegations, it’s certainly one of the most intense we have seen. The number of munitions reportedly dropped by the Israeli Defence Forces – 6,000 in a week – is much higher than what we have usually seen with other conflicts. As a point of comparison, during the battle of Mosul, the coalition reported firing 5,000 munitions during the whole month of March 2017, which is considered the deadliest month for civilians during that campaign,” Emily Tripp, Airwars’ director, told the BIC.
According to Airwars, between 8,199 and 13,259 civilians have been killed by the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria since 2014. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch pointed out that the high civilian toll suggests that coalition forces have failed to take adequate precautions to avoid and minimise civilian casualties, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. Over-reliance on airpower, which namely stems from the will to prevent excessive casualties among ground troops, usually has the opposite effect on the civilian population.
Another core principle of IHL calls for actors of a conflict to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when carrying out attacks. A rule Russia, for example, openly violated when it repeatedly and purposely targeted civilians and civilian infrastructures such as medical facilities in both Syria and Ukraine.
While there is no confirmed evidence that the Israeli army, unlike Hamas, is deliberately targeting civilians, its use of force inside the Gaza Strip may be seen as disproportionate and causing excessive collateral damage – that is to say, war crimes.
During previous confrontations, the two actors would usually engage in a carefully calibrated exchange of fire, trading just enough rockets and airstrikes to save face in front of their domestic audience while avoiding an all-out war. This paradigm has now changed, with Israeli authorities’ stated aim being the destruction of Hamas, opting for a maximalist approach of the use of force to reach that goal. As a spokesperson for the Israeli army told Le Monde:
“In the past, the idea was to use this force with restraint and maintain a weak Hamas that could run the Gaza Strip. It was a hostile entity, not an enemy. The idea was not to invade the enclave. But when the organisation executed its diabolical plan, it changed the rules of the game. So, Israel is changing its own.”
As Israel wages an unprecedented military campaign in the Gaza Strip – never before did the country use so many bombs and cause the death of so many civilians in so little time – it is seemingly hoping to gather international support by invoking the war against ISIS as a justification. However, the high cost the US-led coalition has had on the civilian population in both Iraq and Syria should serve as a cautionary tale against the excessive use of airpower in densely populated urban areas. Now more than ever, the principle of proportionality and international humanitarian law at large must be upheld to prevent the war on Hamas from turning into a war on civilians.