One of the most important investigations on the Israeli methods of warfare since October 7th, particularly concerning the first couple of months has now been published by Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine. The report provides a detailed and systematic account of the targeting procedures of the IDF. Its sources from within the IDF corroborate various conjectures concerning the IDF’s method for which there was so far mostly indirect evidence from the results:
• Standards for judging the proportionality of an airstrike have totally eroded compared to previous wars. At times there have been non-combatant casualty cut-off values of as high as 20 for the elimination of a single rank and file Hamas militant (i.e. 20 civilian casualties were demt proportionate). The IDF denials sound very general and vague, they just refer to the truism that every decision is made individually. This issue has also been insufficiently addressed by all those defenders of IDF who only pointed at the fact that proportionality does not mean ‘equal number of civilian casualties on both sides’, but could not define their own positive standards of proportionality and could not give a judgement whether the IDF adhere to such a standard.
• Largely there is no prior surveillance of targeted civilian houses to estimate the precise number of civilians in the house as it is common in other wars (Lauren Leatherby of NY Times reported on this issue before, considering it highly unlikely that the rate of airstrikes could be compatible with adequate surveillance of life-pattern).
• The significance of political pressure to proceed as quickly as possible becomes very apparent: If there are not enough targets per day, then bars get lowered for identifying a person as a sufficiently likely Hamas/PIJ militant and a sufficiently worthy target. The pressure to proceed as quickly as possible, because of shrinking international support and growing international pressure for a ceasefire but also with respect to promising soldiers to get home again and to sustain society, is a major theme of the Israeli political discourse often ignored by the international public. However, while more rapid rates of eliminating Hamas militants might therefore be seen as a political advantage, they are no definite military advantage which could factor into proportionality assessments. This is a very different issue from the necessity to proceed quickly during manoeuvre warfare, i.e. with airstrikes to support the advancement of groundtroops which has to be done quickly to avoid losses (still there have been doubts whether e.g. the use of 2,000 pound bombs along the entire frontline when encircling Gaza City was proportionate, cf. the CNN investigation by Tamara Qiblawi et al.).
• Spontaneous actions by individual officers for which there is no accountability play a significant role (for example when some officer/soldier just decided to add 1,200 additional suspected Hamas militants to the list of targets (IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, when interviewed by the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, also pointed out that unlike in the US, where whenever there is an objection by a legal advisor concerning proportionality/necessity/precaution and thereby legality of an airstrike a responsible superior commander has to be involved to decide, in the IDF the officers can always just override the objections of a legal advisor without consulting a superior commander).
We are confronting an entirely novel type of warfare raising new political, ethical and legal questions. The methods of targeted killing are employed at large scale and high intensity in an attempt to achieve a decisive victory largely based on these methods. This is very different e.g. from US practices of targeted killing for example in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia where drone strikes have been used to weaken insurgencies, in the hope of thereby strengthening the stability of a more or less existing government. Still classical manoeuvre warfare had to be used against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Baath regime in Iraq and Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Furthermore the US just like Israel used and use targeted killings to deplete certain groups of terrorist capacities. Furthermore targeted killings have often been part of limited retaliatory strikes—while retaliation in itself a legitimate objective for military actions, retaliatory strikes with the attention to avoid more large-scale decisive defensive actions have been largely accepted internationally in recent decades. Israel has shown that it is neither willing to establish a full occupation of Gaza (many of the troops have been retreated, Hamas was allowed to regain control in many areas, most notably it was able to redeploy their troops into Shifa hospital, Israel is not willing to take the duty of supplying Palestinians themselves at large scale) nor has any plan been established to create a new international or Palestinian administration of Gaza. The numbers of Hamas militants killed (alongside the destruction of Hamas rocket sites and tunnels) thereby remains the only achievement concerning the strategic goal of dismantling Hamas rule. Notwithstanding the question whether this strategy can work, we also see entirely new legal questions coming up when the killing of rank and file militants becomes the primary method of warfare, detached from both tactical goals of securing offensive manœuvres and the stabilisation of any kind of governance. Both the military advantages to measure proportionality and military necessity become hard to define under these circumstances. Conventional legal wisdom (for example concerning the disproportionality of killing rank and file enemy combatants not currently involved in some concrete operation together with their families in their homes) seems to have become completely irrelevant for a military pursuing this kind of strategy. Of course this development and the sometimes bizarre legal justifications do not come out of the blue, they are a response to Hamas strategies given certain technical capacities, building upon the previous evolution of counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism strategies and the recasting and evolution of international law accompanying these developements, particularly the US drone warfare (cf. the works by Bernard Harcourt). Still, Avraham Yuval is very right to point at the “AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” as a new phenomenon, marking a qualitatively new kind of warfare.
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