US military’s plea to Israel: Do more to protect civilians in war zone

WASHINGTON – For months, the Biden administration has pleaded with Israel to do more to protect Palestinian civilians, who have borne the brunt of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in the Gaza Strip to destroy Hamas.

But now, on the eve of Israel’s long-threatened major assault on the city of Rafah, the gulf between what the United States is recommending and what Israel appears intent on doing could not be wider.

The Biden administration’s list of suggestions is lengthy. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week that the US wanted Israel to carry out “more precise” operations, and that the 2,000-pound bombs it has been using in densely populated Gaza “could create a lot of collateral damage.”

US officials also want Israel to lean more towards sending special operations troops in to conduct targeted raids of Hamas leaders and fighters, instead of relying on aerial bombing campaigns and tanks.

But the advice all comes down to this: The US wants Israel to move Palestinian civilians out of the way, and to do more to help humanitarian aid get in, before launching any incursion into Rafah. In fact, if it were up to the Biden administration, Israel would not go into Rafah at all.

“We certainly would like to see no major combat take place in Rafah,” Mr Austin said at a Senate subcommittee hearing on May 8. He then linked Israel’s actions in Rafah to future US weapons aid.

At a critical juncture in the Israel-Hamas war, senior

US officials have paused a shipment of bombs

and threatened to withhold more arms deliveries if Israel goes ahead with its plans for Rafah.

The Biden administration has also said Israel must do more to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have died and more than 77,000 have been wounded, according to health authorities in the territory. In addition, aid groups say that 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing catastrophic hunger.

Both Mr Austin and General Charles Q. Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as other senior US military officials, have pointed to past American efforts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan as examples of what they think Israeli forces should and should not do. Of course, civilians died in those operations, but not at the rate that Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

But in recent days, and to the dismay of Biden administration officials, Israel has pressed ahead with its campaign, ordered 110,000 civilians to leave Rafah, conducted airstrikes against targets on the edge of the city, and sent in tanks and seized the border crossing with Egypt.

Lieutenant-Colonel Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said on May 9 that Israeli forces had been urging civilians to move out of the way. Before deploying tanks to the Rafah crossing this week, Israel sent flyers and text messages, and made Arabic media broadcasts telling people to evacuate the area, he said.

“As we have said since day one: Our war is against Hamas, not the people of Gaza,” he added.

Israel has been using large munitions such as 2,000-pound bombs to collapse tunnels and constrict the ability of Hamas leaders and fighters to move around in their subterranean network – as opposed to 250-pound small-diameter bombs, which US officials often highlight. Big bombs, while more effective against the tunnels, pose a greater risk to civilians.

Instead of sending in tanks and conducting razing operations, which have destroyed Gaza City and Khan Younis, Pentagon officials have advised the Israeli military to send in special operations troops for nighttime raids that target specific members of Hamas.

“We would not have been dropping 2,000-pound and even 500-pound bombs in and amongst the civilian population,” Lieutenant-General Mark C. Schwartz, a retired US Special Operations commander who served as the American security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said in an e-mail. “We would have developed a plan to address the internal migration of the civilian populace, ensuring that there was a safe place to go, and not just forcing internal displacement without any provision.”

US military officials have also told their Israeli counterparts, in secure calls and in person, to consider surrounding Rafah – instead of invading it – to cut Hamas militants off from supplies, including food and ammunition.

In such an operation, Israeli forces would first try to move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way, to the north, to the east or even closer to the Mediterranean Sea, a senior administration official said in an interview.

That would be an extremely difficult operation, the official acknowledged. For one thing, it would require an extensive messaging campaign to direct civilians where to go, and when. Those civilians could be attacked by Hamas as they tried to leave, officials said, much as the Islamic State group attacked civilians trying to flee Mosul in the 2017 battle for the group’s last stronghold in Iraq.

Furthermore, senior Hamas leaders are believed to be hiding in fortified tunnels deep underneath Gaza. Israeli and US officials say they believe Hamas leaders are using Israeli hostages as human shields in the underground network.

One Israeli official said in an interview that Hamas leaders knew that Israel would try to avoid harming civilians and was using that to their advantage.

But US officials say Israel is not doing enough. “A key part of the campaign has to be separating the people in Gaza from Hamas,” General Joseph L. Votel, a former leader of the US military’s Central Command, said in an interview. “It’s not apparent to me that they are trying to do that.”

He was the head of Central Command during the campaign against the Islamic State group out of Iraq and Syria. In Syria in particular, he said, US and coalition forces worked to get civilians back into their homes, to restore basic services like water and electricity, and even to get people working again “and engaged in their own communities”, all while trying to target remaining militants in raids.

Asked how Israel could do that in the middle of a bombing campaign, he said: “Perhaps not do a bombing campaign.”

His successor at Central Command, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., said Israeli commanders would eventually need to make a critical decision: whether to encircle the final Hamas stronghold, seal it off so thousands of Hamas fighters and their leaders could not escape or be reinforced, and prepare to fight a prolonged bloody battle to the death. Or Israeli commanders could allow Hamas leaders to flee but then hunt them down, over time, after Israeli security forces seized the city in a fierce but shorter fight.

Using intelligence gleaned from an array of sensors and spies, Israeli commanders could use targeted airstrikes to collapse portions of Hamas’ vast tunnel network and deploy ground forces to methodically clear insurgents block by block, Gen McKenzie said. Special operations forces would target the most senior Hamas leaders, such as Yehia Sinwar, but these types of missions would be dangerous for the hostages.

“They’ve got to get Sinwar,” Gen McKenzie said. “The Israelis can’t declare victory without killing or capturing him.” NYTIMES