Edited by: Gianna Myrat
The New York Times recently published an article admitting that the Israeli military has allowed an unprecedented number of “collateral casualties.” However, in order to sanitize the “revelations” it claims to reveal, it omits key statistics that have been revealed in the past.
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The December 26 article presented as a “bombshell” revealed that Israel had issued an order allowing the killing of up to 20 civilians for each low-level Hamas target. “The order, which has not been reported before, was unprecedented in Israeli military history,” the article said.
However, in early April 2024, an Israeli media outlet called +972 Magazine had not only published this fact, citing sources within the Israeli military, but revealed much more damning evidence detailing what was to be considered “acceptable” a collateral loss.
+972’s article revealed that the Israeli airstrike that killed Hamas Sujeya Battalion commander Wisham Farat was authorized to kill 100 civilians. Even more shocking was the infamous case of Ayman Nofal, commander of Hamas’s Central Brigade in Gaza, where, according to the sources, “the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians.”
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The +972 report is mentioned in passing by the New York Times, with the caveat that Israel’s military has denied it. However, +972’s research work on this topic did not begin in April. In fact, an article published in November 2023 cited a source who claimed: “The numbers have increased from the dozens of civilian deaths allowed as collateral casualties when attacking a senior official in previous operations, to the hundreds of civilian deaths (current) collateral losses”.
So, while it is very significant that such high numbers of collateral casualties are “unprecedented in Israeli military history, the IDF has consciously written off civilians as collateral casualties for years. Any UN report on Israel’s past military behavior is enough to see what is going on.
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It is not only in Gaza that such a terrifying tactic has been established, it has also happened in Lebanon. When Israel carried out the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, it openly announced that it estimated the total death toll to be around 300, as a result of the razing of some civilian buildings in southern Beirut.
For those who follow the events closely, there is literally nothing new in the article published by the New York Times. On the contrary, while it essentially confirms what has already been said, it does so in a way that tries to entertain the impression, and soften the shame of the murders.
For example, it repeats as proven fact the widely held claim that Hamas deliberately embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields, an Israeli argument that has been widely contested in the past.
What is undeniable, however, is that Israel is using the Palestinians as human shields, as has been amply documented throughout the war and has been an accepted part of Israeli military doctrine.
“From November 2023 onwards, amid global outcry, Israel began withholding ammunition and tightening some of its rules of engagement, including halving the number of civilians who could be put at risk when it strikes low-level fighters who do not pose an imminent threat,” the NYT reports. The question here is, where did this information come from? According to the article itself, the sources are all Israeli soldiers and officials.
The only evidence presented is the words of the Israelis. Has there been any analysis or examples cited to show that the IDF would only kill ten civilians on average for every low level Hamas fighter? Absolutely not, because neither Israel can release this information to the public, nor the names of the thousands of alleged “Hamas fighters” it has targeted.
If we go by Israel’s official figures for the number of alleged Hamas fighters killed, it is rising at a rate that does not match the death tolls accepted by the United Nations. While the official death toll in Gaza is nearly 46,000, with 10,000 missing and presumed dead, it would only make sense if the Israeli way of counting “Hamas fighters” gave a much higher toll.
But accepting a higher death toll in order to lend more legitimacy to Israel’s claims about Hamas fighters would mean the New York Times would face another issue: it would then have to contend with the fact that the killings only escalated in November of 2023.
In addition to all this, +972’s article from April 3 provides much more and in-depth knowledge of the AI systems used by the Israeli military and points out that their targets were extremely inaccurate. The research found that when the Lavender system picked off inferior Hamas targets, the Israeli military would actually use its deadliest unguided munitions because “you don’t want to waste expensive bombs on insignificant people.”
Additionally, +972 noted that while a human must verify AI-selected targets before a hit is ordered, ultimately it comes down to simply making sure the target is male – spending about 20 seconds on average before hitting the trigger. trigger.
Nowhere in the New York Times article does it mention the slaughter of civilians where there is no military target, mass torture, sexual abuse, or the demolition of homes for the sheer vanity of the soldiers. It all comes across as an army slightly overmatched after the Hamas-led attack on October 7.
*Analysis by Robert Inlakesh, political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker based in London
Source: www.zougla.gr
