A fresh hotspot amid the conflict in Gaza

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are accused of deliberately targeting the three-car convoy of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) founder, Jose Andres, last Monday, murdering seven volunteers.

He emphasized that the Israelis were aware of the three cars’ route, schedule, and humanitarian objective as they were all prominently identified as WCK trucks. One of the primary organizations providing meals to the residents of the damaged enclave is the WCK.

Amidst the global outcry, the Israelis expeditiously concluded an internal inquiry and declared on Friday that the attack constituted a “serious violation of the IDF’s rules and operating procedures”. Israel said that three senior officials had received reprimands and two had been removed.

Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the chief of staff of the IDF, had earlier expressed regret for the attack and said it was “a mistake that followed a misidentification” and that it shouldn’t have occurred.

It should come as no surprise that the Israeli “findings” were released a day after US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the phone that “we won’t be able to support you” if Israel did not reverse its path in Gaza.

Is it true that the IDF’s operational protocols were broken by this terrible incident? The IDF has a history of striking hospitals, ambulances, and journalists that are plainly identifiable as such, thus the Israeli mea culpa is meaningless. They haven’t completely said that the assault wasn’t planned even today.

The horrific assault in Gaza has shown how little the IDF has cared about the humanitarian aspects of war. In addition to depriving non-combatants of food and water, they have targeted Hamas leaders by destroying buildings with big unguided bombs, without caring about the immense fatalities and collateral damage. It seems from their operational procedure that eliminating a Hamas commander warrants devastation and collateral fatalities of any extent. It is possible that they mistakenly believed that senior Hamas officials were using the WCK convoy as a means of transportation.

It is quite likely that the Hamas conceals its activities with civilian cover; they may have taken refuge in hospitals and/or utilized ambulances. However, the IDF must undoubtedly be held to a higher standard than Hamas. It does assert that, in order to prevent collateral victims, it complies with international humanitarian law. The issue of appropriate counterforce in an insurgent setting is related to this. Using a completely disproportionate amount of force to eliminate a whole block of apartments and murder innocent men, women, and children in order to target a Hamas cadre is undoubtedly wrong.

Curiously, acclaimed Israeli army historian Martin van Creveld offers insight into Israel’s counter-insurgency strategy. He looked at two strategies for putting an end to an insurgency in a 2005 article. Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria, utilized the first to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a danger to his authority in the early 1980s.

After Assad’s ‘conventional’ methods of detention, torture, and killing proved ineffective, he chose to target Hama, the “head of the snake.” About 20,000 people were killed as the Syrian army encircled the city and used heavy artillery to destroy it. An additional 15,000 were detained and 100,000 were deported as a result. The Muslim Brotherhood organization was suppressed, and over two thirds of the city was destroyed. Although the Assad family’s Islamist opponents were dissuaded by the violence, a democratic revolution in 2011–12 gave rise to an insurgency that has shattered the nation.

Van Creveld compares this to the strategies the British used in Northern Ireland to put an end to the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) rebellion. Early in the 1970s, when the IRA began going on bombing sprees, the insurgency became more intense. Numerous individuals were slain in the rioting and assassinations that followed. On January 30, 1972, after a particularly brutal Sunday, the British changed their strategy. They never fired on rioting or marching crowds again, and they never used airpower or heavier weaponry like tanks in their operations. They also refrained from using collective punishment, such as curfews, home explosions, or neighborhood destruction for military purposes.

He does not state this explicitly, but one crucial point is that in the first instance, the Syrian army was fighting the “other”—the Assad government, and the majority of its forces are made up of the Alawite minority in Syria, who are seldom acknowledged as Muslims by their adversaries in the Sunni community. Despite the fact that the IRA was mostly Roman Catholic, the British, on the other hand, consider Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the UK.

This is the issue in Gaza, where a large number of Israelis disagree that Palestinians should be considered equal members of society. They have deliberately demolished their main metropolitan agglomeration after taking their lands by force, imprisoning a great number of their people, and more throughout the years.

The battle remains in limbo six months after the October 7 terror strike by Hamas. Netanyahu has maintained that he would strike Rafah in order to eliminate the last of the Hamas fighters, but since the city is home to a million refugees, the US has labeled it a “red line.”

Regarding the ongoing conflict, Van Creveld leans more toward the IDF, yet he thinks Hamas, whose only goal is to withstand the IDF’s assault, may emerge as the true winner. The people of Gaza will likely never fully come to terms with their destiny since they will have to endure the long-term effects of this conflict. It is most definitely not the case that Hamas’s political downfall is synonymous with their military defeat.

Interestingly, even at the height of the rebellion in Kashmir, the Indian military deliberately refrained from utilizing assault helicopters and heavy armament.