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Why IDF hitting terrorists in schools made sense before, but not anymore – analysis
If you look objectively and without emotions at the black-and-white letter law of the laws of war, there is no question that there are some circumstances where a military can attack a school or a religious place of worship if enemy forces are using it for military purposes.
This has been Israel’s mantra in explaining to the world why it has the right to target dozens if not some hundreds, of schools and other civilian locations in Gaza: Hamas is using them so Jerusalem can target them.
Of course, there are questions of proportionality, such as that one cannot blow up a school that has one low-grade terrorist while killing 20 civilians.
But the basic principle that the IDF – at least as a matter of law – can kill terrorists in such locations if the proportional balance of terrorists to civilians is reasonable remains unimpeachable.However, the law is only the first prong of analyzing such a military action.
Even if something is legal, the maybe more important question is: is it smart, does it make sense, do the broader benefits outweigh the costs?
If the answer to that question in the war’s early months, and maybe even at least until defeating Hamas in Khan Yunis by early February was an emphatic yes, at some point it probably shifted to a ‘no’, and by May, it probably shifted to an emphatic ‘no.’
Until February, the IDF needed to erase October 7 from Hamas’s and its other enemies’ worldview as a paradigm for a helpless and weak Israel.
The IDF needed to make it clear to Hamas and other enemies that Hamas was defeated as a national military organization, that it could take control of any area of Gaza at will, and that any enemy who made a similar mistake to Hamas going too far could face the same scenes of military defeat and destruction.
In order to do that, the IDF had to defeat Hamas’s two most powerful arms, its northern Gaza battalions and its Khan Yunis battalions.
Also, defeating Hamas in northern Gaza led to a return of over 100 hostages, and there was a real chance that defeating Hamas in Khan Yunis might lead to another hostage deal.
In order to do that, the IDF could not allow Hamas to conceal itself among human shields or civilian locations.
Anywhere in northern Gaza and Khan Yunis where Hamas hid, the IDF needed to attack it, as long as proportionality was followed, even if it meant ancillary civilian casualties sometimes.
The only path forward to defeat Hamas
This was the only way to defeat and take apart Hamas’s battalions.
Also, certainly until December, and to some extent until mid/late March, Israel had strong and consistent US backing and did not yet face significant intervention from international courts.
March saw Israel make a number of errors, such as mistakenly killing seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen organization.
There is an ongoing debate among top defense officials about how necessary or not it was for the IDF to invade Rafah, though most are happy that the IDF took over the Philadelphi Corridor.
In any case, as soon as Israel invaded Rafah, the Biden administration froze some weapons sales publicly, the International Criminal Court Prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a variety of Israeli allies started discussions about sanctions or at least weapons sales freezes.
Why did everything shift so much? It could be Hamas’s Health Ministry reporting 30,000, then 35,000, then 40,000 Palestinian civilians dead and over 90,000 wounded.
Israel can absolutely reduce those numbers by noting that 16,000 or more were probably Hamas and maybe that the number of dead is 5,000-10,000 less, given at least one UN organization admitting in May that they had collected 10,000 bodies less than the death count, so far.
But in the best-case scenario, that means Israel probably still killed 15,000 civilians, and the number could easily be closer to 25,000.
At those numbers, Israel has essentially no allies who will continue to support strikes that kill a mix of terrorists and civilians. Each such strike makes more arms embargoes, war crimes charges, and broader sanctions more likely.
Moreover, it has become abundantly clear that invading Rafah did not break Hamas much more than invading northern Gaza-Khan Yunis. Each time Hamas is attacked, they do lose some forces, but they have a significant number of forces that are just hiding and waiting patiently until Israel’s attention from “mowing the grass” in Gaza fades.
So attacking one more school and killing 20 more terrorists is not really going to make a large difference in the broader goal of getting the hostages back or bringing an end to Hamas’s political identity.
And while the IDF legal division finally started to make some headlines after 10 months, there is still almost no information about its 300 operational probes, nor is there much more about its 135 accelerated criminal and operational probes. Aside from a few indictments from Sdei Teiman, Israel has presented little to the world to assuage its doubts about Israeli justice, even regarding high-profile cases like the mistaken killing of Reuters journalists in Lebanon back in October 2023.
The bottom line is that by May, if not by February, the costs to Israel’s legitimacy of killing mixes of terrorists and civilians – even if legally permissible – have likely shifted to become not worthwhile given the negligible impact that each individual incident has on achieving the war’s broader goals.
The sooner the IDF shifts strategies, the sooner it can start the process of restoring Israeli legitimacy and cutting off the threat of arms embargoes, global war crimes prosecutions, and sanctions.