Israel is fighting a humane ground war – just ask experts

Contrary to Hamas’s lies, the IDF is keeping casualty figures at historic lows by the standards of urban warfare

A psychological phenomenon known as the “illusory truth effect” dictates that statements are more readily believed when they are repeated many times, regardless of their credibility. Remarkably, this applies even if the subjects know the statements to be false. Such repetition, which has long been the mainstay of the propaganda techniques beloved by demagogues, has become common among our supposedly credible broadcasters, leaders and diplomats, who repeat lies invented by Hamas and even base policy upon them.
Such repetition has made the falsehoods deeply familiar to the public. Number of Palestinians dead? 30,000. Proportion of women and children among the casualties? 70 per cent. Adjective to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza? Disproportionate. Crime of which Israel is guilty? Genocide. But none of this is true.
Rather than swallowing such easily disprovable claims, it would be better to rely upon the verifiable evidence of experts like John Spencer, the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare. Chair of urban warfare studies at the United State Military Academy at West Point, he served as an infantryman for 25 years, including two combat tours in Iraq. Israel, he says, protects civilians more effectively than anyone else in the history of warfare.
Spencer recently visited Israel and Gaza – including the IDF’s civilian harm mitigation unit – to observe the facts on the ground. “All available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels,” he concluded.
Warfighting is an ugly business and soldiers are soldiers. But overall, the IDF’s actions have been deeply humane, Spencer said, moving civilians out of harm’s way to an unprecedented extent and deploying “technologies never used anywhere in the world” to preserve life. This has included 70,000 telephone calls, 13 million text messages and 15 million voicemails warning people to evacuate by designated routes to safe areas.
Giant speakers have been dropped by parachute that begin broadcasting warnings once they touch the ground. Military maps have been handed out and tracking technology has been used to keep people safe. “Ironically, the careful approach Israel has taken may have actually led to more destruction,” Spencer pointed out, since by assisting Hamas it likely prolonged the war.
The credible casualty figures stand testament to these efforts. Gaining exact data is impossible, but the true ratio, Spencer concluded, is about 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. By comparison, when Britain, the US and other allies destroyed Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, the ratio was about 1 to 2.5; and according to the UN and the EU, the global average is 1 to 9. “Given Hamas’s likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1,” Spencer wrote. “Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”
What madness has possessed us? We would never dream of trusting data from the Kremlin or Islamic State. The statistics coming out of Gaza are obviously bogus. A paper by three distinguished academics, published this week, found that “the casualty figures concerning women and children are statistically impossible”, at one point even involving “the statistical equivalent of the resurrection of over a thousand men”. The 70 per cent figure has been decisively debunked.
Yet this very misinformation is still used by the UN, White House and the media. The BBC even relied upon it to supposedly disprove Israel’s claims to the contrary. “The BBC ‘factcheckers’ and other western media could easily have determined this for themselves, using publicly available information,” the academics lamented.
The illusory truth is all around us. How shameful. It is incumbent on people of conscience to dispel it whenever we can.