How Israeli forces take big risks to avoid harming Gaza civilians

WASHINGTON – With Israel and Hamas returning to arms Friday after the terror group ended a weeklong pause in the fighting across the Gaza Strip, the Jewish state is again under international pressure to halt its war to eliminate the jihadists who brutally slaughtered more than 1,200 people — including 33 Americans — on Oct. 7.

But how, exactly, can the Israel Defense Forces avoid harming civilians when its enemy hides behind innocents, directing its operations from the most sacred of safe spaces – including hospitals – in violation of the international rules of war?

“[Hamas’] M.O. is deliberately to use the civilian realm for their own human shield protection in the most cynical ways,” IDF Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler told reporters at the Israeli embassy in Washington this week.

“I can show you endless amounts of pictures and videos of how rockets are being manufactured in schools, hosted in schools, shot from schools, mosques and homes. We’ve found rockets and ammunition underneath baby girls’ beds and also in hospitals, sadly,” he added.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby emphasized Hamas’ apparent lack of care for Palestinian civilians Friday, noting that by declining to release further hostages, they stopped humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza.

“The people who suffer the most because of that are the people of Gaza, the Palestinian people,” he said. “So if Hamas truly – as they claim to – do care about Palestinians, they’ll do what they can to come up with a list of hostages that can be exchanged, so that that aid can continue to flow.”

An unfair fight

Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded Thursday that Israel not the restart the fighting until it established a “clear plan” to avoid civilian harm – and threatened to withdraw support should it not comply with “humanitarian law.”

But hours later, Hamas terrorists opened fire at a Jerusalem bus stop, killing three civilians and Blinken’s aspirations in one fell swoop.

Despite accusations that Israel’s forces have caused the deaths of thousands of Gazans in the nearly two-month-old war, Shefler said the IDF is “the leading military in the world” at fighting in dense, urban environments while minimizing civilian casualties.

“For years, we’ve been building capabilities, first out of necessity, and on top of that, because that’s what we believe in,” he said. “That in fighting these kinds of complicated battles, we need to find the best ways to stand up for morals and to our values, and also to the Law of Armed Conflict.”

The problem, however, is that when only one side abides by international conflict standards – or cares about saving civilian lives at all – the law itself can become a handicap.

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“It was probably written in many ways [to support moral fighting], but it was not written to deal with these kinds of circumstances – dealing with terrorist organizations,” Shefler said. “That’s why we’re finding ourselves in a very, very complicated space of a war zone with a deeply embedded terrorist organization within all this [civilian] infrastructure and underneath the ground.”

Footage of the Oct. 7 attack reviewed by The Post shows Hamas terrorists slaughtering children, beheading the dead and encouraging each other to “play with” the bodies.

But the terror did not end there. Until the fighting briefly stopped Nov. 24, Shefler said Hamas was “firing more than 10,500 rockets at Israeli civilians, schools, hospitals, at religious institutions” in Israel each day.

“They did everything that they can with the aim to kill as many civilians as possible,” he said.

Mitigating harm by assuming risk

The terror group’s war-crime strategy makes it nearly impossible for Israel to defend itself without more casualties. But that doesn’t mean they don’t try to avert losses.

“How does one deal with a terrorist infrastructure that is underneath the hospital? We can strike it from the air, but of course that has its implications – and that’s why we chose not to do it,” Shefler said.

The military leader also detailed multiple other creative strategies the IDF uses to mitigate harm to Gazans – from technology use to more rudimentary tactics – putting its own soldiers at greater risk to do so.

For example, the IDF has sent ground forces to clear Hamas hubs hidden in civilian infrastructure and below ground – a strategy the Israeli military has learned as a best practice from previous clashes.

“For many years, we have been building our special forces to be able to carry out these kinds of missions based on very accurate intelligence,” he said. “Going to very, very specific areas to find those arms, those infrastructure that need to be dismantled, sending in these units with Arabic speakers, with medical teams, and that’s how we were able [mitigate harm,]” he added.

The IDF is also open to learning from others’ experiences – and mistakes. For example, Shefler said Israeli leaders have daily contact with the US military, which has been offering advice on close-quarters fighting in urban environments learned from its 20 years fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Israel has also used information sharing as a tactic in culling unintended deaths. In the war’s early days, the IDF used pamphlets to urge civilians to move south to safety ahead of its intended strikes on Hamas in north Gaza.

Since then, the Israeli military has rolled out a texting feature that gives civilians in soon-to-be targeted areas a heads up before strikes are conducted.

“In the beginning, the civilians did not listen to us to leave a house where we know terrorists were [when we told them] we were going to strike, but they learned to trust us,” Shefler said.

Now, Palestinians have learned to trust IDF messages so much that “you can find so many videos of Palestinians standing outside of buildings that they had been told to leave, filming the strike from their own phone standing there because they know that we’re going to hit.

“They also know now to trust when we ask them to move to different areas that they should listen to us, and we hope that that’s another level of mutual learning that is happening how to deal with this really catastrophic situation,” he added.

While the strategy has saved countless lives, it comes as a cost to the IDF, Shefler said. For example, the Israelis gave advance notice to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza ahead of its raid last month, presenting a danger to troops by giving a potential heads-up to terrorists hidden in tunnels below.

“That’s a lot of threats to our forces without using a very important tool: military surprise,” he said, adding that the Israelis had scored a coup by “telling in advance that we’re coming, and then going in and finding that all that infrastructure is there, and not even having one person being hurt – one civilian, one patient or one doctor on the grounds.”

Inside the hospital, the IDF discovered that Hamas had “booby trapped” a vehicle in the center of the facility meant to “kill civilians and to kill the soldiers that would come to the table,” Shefler said.

“Had we [launched a strike] from the air, then it would have exploded. But being on the ground, [we] are allowed to dismantle it and not to allow it to explode,” he said.

It’s another lesson learned from previous experiences in unfair fights.

“Many times when we strike other buildings there are explosives and rockets inside that explode with it and create a lot of collateral damage by themselves,” he said. “So we needed to risk sending our troops being there for a lot of things, risk them dealing with these ammunition, with these booby traps, with the potential of Hamas fighters jumping in from different shafts.”

Still, Shefler admitting there is more Israel can do to prevent more civilians from becoming collateral damage. The IDF spent the week-long pause brainstorming additional ways to mitigate harm, and continues to analyze past operations for lessons learned, he said.

“Can we do better? Always. Can we debrief and learn? Absolutely,” Shefler said. “Can we bring other things that aid the situation? Definitely.”