Answer to the article questioning the action of the State of Israel and IDF

Answer to the article questioning the action of the State of Israel and its sword and shield, IDF.

While doing my usual morning routine, reading The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom, I encounter in The Jerusalem Post an article by Seth J. Frantzman “Was Gaza’s destruction, high toll necessary for Israel war on Hamas?”.

My first reaction to the title of the article was the feeling of apprehension. I wanted to ignore this publication completely.  However, as the day was progressing, the name of the article was stubbornly occupying my mind. It bothered me: how the Israeli seemingly politically objective and center-right newspaper, had published a piece with a title like this. At the same time, I kept reminding myself that Israel is a liberal democracy where free press and speech are part of its social and moral fabric. Nonetheless, I decided to read the article.

Seth Frantzman opens the piece with the sentence stating that the debate regarding the Israel aerial bombardment and other military interventions by Israel Defense Force (IDF) in Gaza Strip is growing.

Further, author presents the argument of people who say the destruction of Gaza and high toll of Palestinians casualties is a legitimate answer to the barbaric October 7 attack by Hamas. He uses the number of 67,000 Gazans killed, data provided by the Hamas’s Ministry of Health (MOH) and admits “Some argue that these figures (high death toll in Gaza) are biased because Hamas controls the Health Ministry, there are no alternative numbers that Israel has put out”.

The author notes that the number of civilians casualties in enclave is lower than in other wars. But he has doubts: “This macabre math doesn’t tell us that much because the number of Hamas members killed is an estimate and neither is the overall death toll in Gaza is not known precisely”.

Seth Frantzman is hesitant to accept the argument that Hamas “deserve it” and instead he puts forward a question-was this extent of destruction necessary at all?

The author questions the strategic and tactical effectiveness of Israel Defense Force. He asks why IDF was leaving the areas of Gaza which were already liberated by the Israeli troops from Hamas’s control?  He sees the above as a mistake on Israeli side. He describes the situation when locations of strategical importance in Gaza were changing hands between terrorists and IDF not once but several time.

To justify the meaning of the title “Was Gaza’s destruction, high toll necessary for Israel war on Hamas?” and to put more weight to the article, Seth Frantzman provides examples of the similar conflicts in different parts of the Middle Eastern region and he even mentioned, far in time and distance battles for Berlin and Stalingrad.  He concludes the article saying:” Could it have been waged with less destruction and fewer casualties? It’s likely it could have”.

I would not discuss every argument or criticism of IDF depicted in the article by Seth Frantzman but it is appropriate to point out several things which he overlooked.

From October 7, 2023, to the good part of 2025, State of Israel and its IDF were fighting wars on multitudes fronts.

After October 7, 2023, Israel declared war on Hamas in Gaza.

Before the Operation Grim Beeper, when on September 17 and 18 of 2024 thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies exploded in the hands of Hezbollah militants, Israel had to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon on a daily basis.

The event of October 7, 2023, triggered increase in violence in Judea and Samaria which necessitated the launch of a major counter-terrorist operation by IDF.

Until December of 2024, Syria’s regime of Bashar al-Assad, who on December 8, 2024, escaped to Russia, was engaged into continues fights with Isarel.

At the same time, militant Shia fighters in Iraq, encouraged by Iran, pursued their attacks on Israel.

Yemen Houthi rebels had constantly barraged drones and missiles towards Israel. The rebels had also aimed to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea.

In mid-2025, the Iran’s aggression towards Israel had diminished. The Jewish state, with incredible precision, decimated the Iranian military leadership. US Air Force and Navy’s operation Midnight Hammer destroyed three nuclear facilities in Iran. This had, for a time being, subdued the hostile enemy.   Prior to mid-2025 Israel had to allocate significant number of military personal to fight Iran.

Above are listed seven fronts that IDF faced from October 7, 2023, to mid-2025. Here lays the answer to the Seth Frantzman’s criticism of IDF for not keeping the liberated from Hamas territories in Gaza. Facing multitudes of countries warring with Israel, the senior leadership of IDF had to prioritize the allocation of troops to places in desperate need fpr help.

The study by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy points to the discrepancies in Hamas’s Ministry of Health (MOH) reports of Gaza’s death toll. For a short period at the beginning of Israel Hamas war, Hamas controlled MOH used the existing collection system composed of hospitals and morgues to confirm each death. When the IDF initiated the ground attack into Northern Gaza, many hospitals in the area closed its operations. This led to the introduction by Gaza’s MOH a new methodology to count the deaths in the enclave. It started to use media reports as source of data. This methodology of media reports had consistently produced reduced number of the deaths among adult males, the group of people constituting the fighting force of Hamas. At the same time, this method had overstated the number of killed Gazan’s women and children. These discrepancies can be also attributed to the media reporters’ unwillingness and fear of going into tunnels or reaching the battlefields. The media did not want to trigger retribution from Hamas terrorists by providing truthful, not inflated number of dead Gazans.

Investigation by Henry Jackson Society, a UK think tank, and the work of its researcher, Andrew Fox, has also questioned the methodology of Hamas’s reporting of casualties in Gaza. The study discovered a host of major problems. The investigation of Hamas’s data found “repeated instances of men being misclassified as women” and it found out “that many adults were classified as children”. Hamas’s MOH conveniently omitted close to five thousand natural deaths which happened in Gaza every year.

Would Seth J. Frantzman researched the subject of the reporting of the deaths in Gaza after the October 7 attack with impartiality and if he, with due diligence, followed the action of IDF on all seven fronts, his negativity and skepticism towards the State of Israel and its sword and shield, the Israel Defense Force, might have changed to admiration.