The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had caused “unintended harm” to “uninvolved civilians” in two strikes this week on a densely packed Gaza Strip neighborhood, where, the local health authorities said, dozens were killed.It was a rare admission of fault by the military over its conduct of the war. The military said it was targeting Hamas on Sunday when it launched two strikes on the central Gazan community of Al Maghazi, which has been flooded with Palestinians uprooted by war and crammed into homes by the dozen.“A preliminary investigation revealed that additional buildings located near the targets were also hit during the strikes, which likely caused unintended harm to additional uninvolved civilians,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.“The I.D.F. regrets the harm to uninvolved individuals, and is working to draw lessons from the incident,” the statement said.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that over 60 civilians were killed in a 2019 US airstrike in Syria. It dropped a 500-ton bomb on a crowd and then two 2,000 pound bombs. It also reported that the US Army did everything it could to cover it up:
The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.
After the New York Times report, the army mounted an investigation, and said that nearly all of the casualties were military - 52 militants and four civilians. It did admit fault in delays of reporting on the incident.
That's ovcr three years between the airstrike and any public reporting of findings into the incident.
Here, Israel investigated and found indications that it used a larger munition than necessary for the legal attack on militants - and it admitted this mistake within only four days.
And that is not the only official recognition of a mistake given by the IDF on Thursday. It also released a report - not a preliminary report, but results of as full an investigation as possible in a war zone - on the accidental killing of three hostages December 15. That's less than two weeks.
Perhaps the reason that admissions of fault are "rare" is because actual fault is rare by Israel, despite the journalists' desire to find such fault. For example, the New York Times also published an investigation on Israel's use of 2,000 pound bombs based on craters seen from satellite imagery and described how destructive they are. But they described the wrong bomb, as Lenny Ben David reports:
The Times based its analysis on the wrong bomb, a Mark-84, which explodes on impact with little penetration properties. The Times failed to report on a more credible bomb, the BLU-109 “bunker buster bomb,” that penetrates many meters below the surface before it explodes, making it a very effective weapon to destroy deep Hamas tunnels. The craters were the telltale sign of underground voids, such as tunnels, collapsing. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The United States has not previously disclosed the total number of weapons it sent to Israel nor the transfer of 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs.”2One U.S. intelligence officer (retired) told the author, “The crater in the (Times’) image is ridiculously clean for there to have been a target on top of it. The crater is also symmetrical, which would not be the case if the bomb had glided in.”
The BLU-109 would give much less collateral damage since it explodes underground, but the NYT report describes only a bomb that explodes on the surface and sends shrapnel for thousands of feet around - not the craters the Times showed.
CNN made the same error - knowingly. It published a map showing that schools were within the 1000 meter damage zone of a Mark-84 bomb, but in the small print it admitted that the craters were consistent with bombs that explode underground - meaning no damage zone. And the bomb craters are on a straight line, indicating they were meant to destroy tunnels deliberately built near those schools.
Israel is fighting in a battlefield that was deliberately built over 15 years to maximize civilian harm in order to attack the enemy. It is probably the most difficult battle in history for any army that values human life.This is unprecedented.
Israel has dropped far more bombs than the number of people killed. For an urban war zone, this is unprecedented.
Israel has mounted investigations in a highly complex environment and given accurate information on specific incidents within days at a time when there are many attacks. This is unprecedented.
Israel has admitted mistakes within days of events, not years afterwards. I'm pretty sure this is unprecedented.
All evidence points to Israel being the most moral army in history. All evidence points to Israel being the most transparent army in history.
And all evidence also points to a media environment that is ignorant of the realities of war at best, or deliberately misleading about it at worst.
|
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
|
