The Tragic Asymmetry of the Hamas War
How is Israel supposed to defend its population against an enemy that deliberately embeds its fighters, weapons, tunnels, and command infrastructure in the civilian environment?
International humanitarian law prohibits Hamas from using civilians as human shields and requires combatants to distinguish themselves from civilians. A civilian building does not become permanently immune from attack simply because Hamas places military assets inside it.
Hamas terrorists also do not wear military uniforms, but instead dress in civilian clothing. That is another of its multiplicity of war crimes because it puts legitimate civilians at grave risk.
As for Israel, it distinguishes military targets from civilians and takes extreme precautions to avoid attacks where anticipated civilian harm would be excessive.
Some of the measures Israel uses to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza are advance warnings by telephone and text of imminent military operations in a region. The IDF made millions of prerecorded phone calls and sent millions of text messages warning civilians about impending operations and urging them to leave targeted areas.
The IDF dropped leaflets and used radio, television, social media, and other communications to tell civilians to leave areas where fighting or strikes were expected.
Israel has issued evacuation orders and established designated routes and periods intended to allow civilians to move away from areas of intense combat.
Israel has designated areas for civilian movement and has instituted localized pauses and humanitarian corridors to facilitate evacuation and humanitarian activity.
The IDF commanders canceled airstrikes when civilians are unexpectedly detected near the target or when the anticipated civilian harm becomes greater than initially assessed.
For Israel to undertake extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties comes at a significant cost to its own soldiers. Every warning issued, every evacuation route established, every pause in an operation, and every decision to abort or delay a strike can give Hamas additional time to reposition its fighters, move weapons, strengthen its defenses, or launch another attack. Israel is, in effect, asking its soldiers to assume greater risk to protect civilians, some of which are their enemies, or Hamas terrorists masquerading as civilians.
Hamas has pursued an entirely different strategy. Rather than separating its military forces from the civilian population, Hamas has embedded its fighters, weapons, command centers, and tunnel infrastructure within and beneath densely populated civilian areas. It has used schools, hospitals, residential buildings, and other civilian locations for military purposes, while its terrorists can blend into the civilian population. This precisely creates the battlefield Hamas wants: one in which Israel must choose between allowing Hamas to operate with relative impunity or attacking legitimate military targets in an environment where civilians are unavoidably at risk.
That is the tragic asymmetry of this war. Israel has repeatedly placed the safety of its own soldiers at greater risk to reduce Palestinian Arab civilian casualties, while Hamas has deliberately operated from within the very civilian population it claims to defend. One side warns civilians to leave before attacking military targets; the other has repeatedly placed military assets where civilians are most vulnerable.
Hamas’s strategy is not merely a military tactic. It also creates a propaganda battlefield in which every civilian casualty can be used to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Palestinian Arabs, regardless of the circumstances that produced the casualty. The result is a perverse incentive: the more deeply Hamas embeds itself among civilians, the more difficult it becomes for Israel to defend itself without civilian casualties—and the more useful those casualties become to Hamas’s political and propaganda objectives.
Israel’s obligation to protect Palestinian Arab civilians is real. But so is its obligation to protect Israeli civilians from Hamas. A nation cannot be expected to surrender its right of self-defense because its enemy has chosen to cowardly fight from behind its own civilian population.
