Armies are not required to risk soldiers' lives to protect enemy civilians ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 16, 2026

Armies are not required to risk soldiers' lives to protect enemy civilians

Much of the legal debate about Israel's conduct in Gaza has focused on proportionality — whether the civilian harm caused by specific strikes was excessive relative to the military advantage gained. A War on the Rocks article by Orbach, Boxman, Henkin, and Braverman makes a crucial clarification that has been largely absent from that debate: under international law, proportionality is assessed strike by strike, not cumulatively across an entire campaign. The scale of destruction in Gaza cannot, by itself, constitute evidence of disproportionality. Each attack must be evaluated against its specific military objective and the foreseeable harm at the moment of decision.

But proportionality and distinction — the two principles that dominate public discourse about Gaza — are not the only ethical considerations governing how armies fight. There is a third, and it is the one Israel's critics most consistently ignore: the obligation to protect one's own forces, and the corresponding right to transfer risk away from soldiers when military necessity demands it.

The Law is Not a One-Way Street

Every major Western military manual incorporates force protection as a legitimate — and legally recognized — limiting factor on the obligation to minimize civilian harm. The operative concept is "feasibility." Additional Protocol I, Article 57, requires that precautions in attack be taken only insofar as they are "feasible," defined in authoritative commentary as "practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations." Force protection is explicitly a military consideration. Precautions that would expose attacking forces to disproportionate risk are, by definition, not feasible — and therefore not required.

The British Army's Joint Service Publication 383, the authoritative UK manual on the law of armed conflict, states this plainly and goes further: it explicitly draws an operational lesson from the Second Battle of Fallujah, noting that commanders may accept greater incidental harm to civilians in order to reduce friendly casualties. The American DoD Law of War Manual establishes the same principle: precautions are required only when consistent with "mission accomplishment and the security of the force." The Australian, Canadian, and German military manuals adopt identical frameworks. No major democratic army has ever accepted the proposition that international law requires its soldiers to absorb unlimited casualties as the price of protecting enemy-controlled civilian populations.

It reflects a genuine ethical principle: military ethics does not operate on a single axis. It requires balancing competing obligations — to minimize civilian harm on one side, and to protect the lives of soldiers on the other. A commander who unnecessarily sacrifices his troops to reduce civilian casualties has made the less ethical choice, because he has spent real human lives on a calculation the law never required him to make.

What Gaza Actually Looked Like

To understand why the risk-transfer argument is not merely legally correct but operationally unavoidable, it is necessary to understand what Israeli forces actually faced in Gaza. Hamas did not simply hide among civilians. Over nearly two decades of governing the Strip, it transformed the entire urban environment into a prepared military battlespace. It constructed a subterranean tunnel network of extraordinary scale, depth, and redundancy, systematically integrated with civilian infrastructure — beneath homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Above ground, it embedded weapons caches, command nodes, and ambush positions throughout the residential fabric of Gaza's cities. Israeli forces reported approximately 14,000 booby-trapped structures in Rafah alone by September 2024.

The tactical consequence of this preparation is that in Gaza, almost any building may conceal a tunnel shaft, a weapons cache, a command node, or an ambush — and fighters cleared from one area can reappear behind advancing units through the tunnel network and re-contest or booby-trap previously secured ground. Classical infantry tactics — clear, hold, move forward — become a mechanism for feeding soldiers into prepared kill zones. An army that insists on dismounted infantry operations without standoff firepower in this environment is not making a more ethical choice. It is using its soldiers as human mine-clearance, advancing them into booby-trapped buildings and tunnel systems so that the rubble is produced by their bodies rather than by munitions. The law of armed conflict does not require this. No military manual endorses it.

The scale of destruction in Gaza that critics treat as self-evident proof of disproportionality is, in large part, the physical signature of Hamas's own military architecture. Preserving those structures was incompatible with neutralizing the threat they contained. This is why the Orbach et al. analysis notes that comparable urban battles — Mosul, Raqqa, Marawi, Nahr el-Bared — produced destruction rates of 65 to 95 percent in their core combat areas, under military forces no one has accused of war crimes for the rubble they left behind.

The Covenant Between Army and Soldier

There is a dimension to this that goes beyond legal doctrine. Every democratic society that maintains an army enters into an implicit covenant with the men and women it asks to risk their lives: the state will send them into danger only for legitimate purposes of national defense, and will do everything within its power to bring them home. This covenant is functional as well as moral. Armies that squander their soldiers' lives unnecessarily destroy the trust that makes military effectiveness possible. Recruitment, morale, unit cohesion, the willingness of soldiers to follow orders under fire, all depend on soldiers believing that their commanders and their government regard their lives as precious.

To risk soldiers' lives not because the mission requires it, but to satisfy the demands of foreign critics or to generate more favorable headlines, is a perversion of this covenant. It treats soldiers as a moral currency to be spent on optics. The argument that Israel should have sent more infantry into Gaza's 14,000 booby-trapped structures — should have accepted more dead soldiers — to reduce civilian casualties and harm to civilian facilities caused by Hamas's deliberate human shielding is a demand that Israel spend its soldiers' lives on a reputational calculation. That is theater, not ethics.

Jenin: The Controlled Experiment

Israel already ran this experiment. In the 2002 Battle of Jenin, the IDF made a deliberate choice to fight building by building rather than use air power, specifically to minimize civilian casualties. The cost was severe: 23 Israeli soldiers killed, including 13 in a single devastating ambush on Salah ad-Din Street when fighters detonated a building they had lured troops into. By any objective measure, this was an extraordinary act of military self-sacrifice. No army was required to fight this way. Israel chose to.

The world accused Israel of a massacre anyway. Palestinian spokesmen falsely claimed hundreds of civilians had been killed. Amnesty International and major media outlets amplified the charge. The United Nations eventually concluded that roughly 52 people died in Jenin, the majority of them combatants.

Israel did not receive any credit for going beyond the law in risking soldiers' lives to reduce civilian harm.

A standard that cannot be met no matter what Israel does is a constraint whose purpose is condemnation, not protection. Israel fighting with maximum infantry exposure and minimum firepower produced accusations of a massacre. Israel fighting with standoff firepower in Gaza produced accusations of genocide. The variable that produces the accusation is not Israeli conduct. It is the fact that Israel is fighting at all.

Israel should therefore optimize for the actual law — which requires balancing civilian protection against force protection, not sacrificing the latter entirely on the altar of the former. Jenin was arguably the less ethical choice, not the more ethical one. Israel exceeded every legal obligation, spent soldiers' lives it was not required to spend, and gained nothing — on the contrary.

Where the Law Places Responsibility

There is a final consideration the "risk transfer" critique systematically elides. Additional Protocol I, Article 51(8) establishes that the defending party bears responsibility for harm caused by its own violations of international humanitarian law. Hamas's use of human shields — embedding military command nodes under hospitals, storing weapons in schools, running tunnel shafts through residential buildings including children's bedrooms, refusing to construct civilian shelters or grant civilians access to its own tunnels — is a grave violation of international humanitarian law, and the civilian casualties that result from it fall on Hamas under Article 51(8).

An attacking force that takes all feasible precautions, warns civilians, adjusts and cancels strikes when civilian presence is detected, and fights within the bounds of proportionality — as the available evidence indicates Israel did, achieving fewer than one death per munition deployed during the war's most intense aerial phase — has discharged its legal obligations. The deaths that result from a defender's deliberate strategy of shielding military assets with civilian bodies fall on the defender. Hamas built its entire military doctrine around the expectation that the world would assign those deaths to Israel instead. The world largely obliged. This is a failure of moral reasoning, not a failure of Israeli conduct.

The risk transfer critique, properly understood, demands that Israel alone among the world's armies accept unlimited liability for an enemy's war crimes. Every military manual says that is not required. The law of armed conflict places responsibility with Hamas. Jenin proved that meeting the critics' demands produces only more demands.

When choosing how to attack, military planners must chose the method that minimizes civilian casualties, all else being equal. But risking lives of soldiers in favor of civilian lives is not international law under any interpretation. And the responsibility for the lives of civilians killed belong squarely with the defending force that uses them as human shields.

The conclusion is not cynicism about civilian harm — the manuals, the law, and Israeli practice all demonstrate otherwise. The conclusion is that the critics' framework was never about civilian harm to begin with.

(h/t Irene)