As flies to wanton boys

As lines blur between combatants and civilians, new norms of military restraint to protect civilians are imperative

With two wars still raging, there appears to be media fatigue, no longer able to sharpen popular appetites already saturated with a plentiful dose of the grim realities of war, genocide, destitution, and disease. The fate of civilians in wartime becomes monotonous, with people exposed to variations on the dismal themes of death, rape, pillage, enslavement, flight, and exile. Constantly bombarded with images of gore, they become too intellectually lazy to react. However, the Israeli atrocities against Palestinian people are unique, representing the world’s most persecuted people donning the mantle of the persecutors. This situation brings to mind Shylock’s speech, where he threatens to outdo his teachers in villainy from whom he learned it: “The villainy you teach me I will execute—and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.” What is worrying is our complacency, even when Ukraine and Gaza are
on the boil.

With scenes of Israeli army tanks moving towards the centre of Khan Younis city after a night of non-stop artillery shelling and clashes around Gaza and Gaza hospitals struggling to cope with a surge in the number of Palestinians needing urgent care, the cry of the UN special rapporteur howling “massacres of civilians must be stopped” seems futile. At least 16,248 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll stands at about 1,200. Earlier, Shifa Hospital was the site of widespread suffering of Palestinian civilians in the war between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli army claims the militant group uses hospitals as cover for its fighters.

“Any civilian death is a tragedy.” When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was recently asked by US television’s CBS News whether Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinians as it retaliates for the October 7 attack by Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants would fuel a new generation of hatred, he expansively made the above comment. Is Israel keen to minimise Gaza civilian casualties in its military campaign to destroy Hamas?

However hard the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) tried to achieve this, Netanyahu said, “Unfortunately, we’re not successful.” One wonders if Israel is mindful of the fact that the Palestinian civilian inhabitants of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are “Protected Persons” under the Fourth Geneva Convention. They are entitled to extensive protections under the laws of war.

Israel maintains that Hamas has a modus operandi: it attacks Israel either by rockets or through tunnels, forcing Israel to respond. Since it fires its rockets and digs its tunnels from densely populated civilian areas and not from the many open areas of the Gaza Strip, a significant number of Palestinian civilians are killed, an outcome Hamas prefers to cause moral outrage. Hamas knows the media will focus more on the photographs of dead babies than on the cause of their deaths: the decision by Hamas to use these babies and other civilians as human shields.

Much like the Hamas attack that triggered a severe backlash from Israel, the Bush administration unleashed the “war on terror” to kill or capture those responsible for nearly 3,000 civilian deaths in the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. This war spread through most of Afghanistan and the north-western part of Pakistan, in the course of which all the stakeholders—the Afghan government, Afghan paramilitary groups, the Pakistani government, the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and many other insurgent groups—besides the US and its allies conducted military operations leading to civilian fatalities recklessly. From 2001 to 2018, about 2,12,000 people in total, both civilians and combatants—about 147,000 people in Afghanistan and nearly 65,000 people in Pakistan—were killed. The large number of civilian fatalities in that time frame—roughly 38,400 civilians in Afghanistan and 23,300 civilians in Pakistan—indicated that the “war on terror” became, to a significant extent, a war against civilians.

In the other war raging since early 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioners for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified a total of 9,614 civilian deaths during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as of September 2023. Furthermore, 17,535 people were reported to have been injured, with the caveat that the real numbers could be higher. How complicit is the world in civilian deaths, about people whose only crime was to be hounded by the wrong time and circumstances?

It is not really necessary to go very far back in history. In the course of the Second World War, the air forces of Britain and the US carried out a massive bombing offensive against the cities of Germany and Japan, ending with the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Allied bombing, in which German and Japanese civilian populations were
deliberately targeted, claimed the lives of about 800,000 civilian women,
children, and men.

Above all moral nitpicking, where we argue that the Allied bombing in the Second World War was nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, which, according to responsible estimates, accounted for the deaths of some 25 million people, the bare fact remains that far too many died to
pay the price of being born with the wrong nationality.

Even if we argue that the bombing of the aggressor Axis states was aimed at weakening the ability and will of their Nazi and Japanese adversaries to make war and thus was morally less heinous than the murder of six million Jews, the crime of killing innocent civilians does not wash. The overwhelming majority of those killed in conflicts since the Second World War have been civilians rather than soldiers.

By trying to punish Palestinians for the crime of Hamas, Israel must not commit the same mistake.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)