DAVE GORDON
“We are fighting a just war, with just means,” thundered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the podium of his September 4th Jerusalem press conference. He has repeated this proclamation throughout the past twelve months of war with Hamas, everywhere from his media appearances to his July 24th address to U.S. Congress to his September 24th presentation at the United Nations.
Civilian Casualties
The war, Netanyahu insists, has “the lowest ratio of non-combatants to combatant deaths in urban warfare history.” He added, “We have taken efforts that no other military has taken.” Netanyahu also said Israel has provided Gazans a million tons of aid, 700,000 tons of food, medical aid, and water, among other necessities.
Critics accuse Israel that this war has a had disproportionate number of casualties, and Israel has used excessive force, indiscriminate bombing, and has conducted a campaign to starve the people of Gaza.
An Expert Weighs In
John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, investigated these matters thoroughly. He determined Israel is in the right.
Spencer was embedded with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza three times, last December, February, and July 2024, to “explore the campaign and operation against Hamas from multiple angles, with political and military arms.” Spencer interviewed the prime minister, the military chief of staff, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, “all the way down to soldiers in the field.”
“I believe in not just looking at the data everybody else has, but I have a research methodology of walking the ground, observing, asking the hard questions,” said the foremost expert in urban warfare.
“You really don’t understand the complexity of what the IDF had to face until you see the dense urban terrain. You’re walking on top of hundreds of miles of tunnels. You have a war of this scale, in a context that no military has faced in modern history.”
Spencer’s U.S. Army career spans over 25 years, including serving two tours in Iraq as infantry platoon leader and company commander. Today, he serves as a colonel in the California State Guard as Director of Urban Warfare Training. There, he co-created and instructs the only existing course designed to improve the ability of commanders and staff to coordinate large-scale urban operations. He has advised four-star generals and Pentagon officials and has written two books.
Mitigating Harm
Throughout his Gaza investigations, Spencer observed clear and consistent following of legal requirements, and what is militarily referred to as “civilian harm mitigation steps.” These included evacuating civilians from certain areas by handing out maps of safe areas, real time population tracking methods, and warning shots on roofs. “Harm mitigation at a level that nobody’s ever tried,” he said of the IDF. “It’s been a unique eye opening experience.”
“Of course, militaries have soldiers that do things that are wrong,” Spencer commented. But Israel has a system to hold wrongdoers accountable and to investigate problems that arise.
“If Israel was trying to conduct civilian harm there, nothing shows that. Not [seen with] my on-hand research, or the numbers. Very few people have the understanding of everything that’s come before every large-scale military operation, against a defending an urban enemy.” If Israel was not following the rules of war, Spencer concludes, “Gaza would look a lot worse than it does now.”
Other military investigations, including those led by Col. Richard Kemp (a highly-decorated retired British Army officer and head of the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers) and Major Andrew Fox (a British Army major and war studies lecturer at the Royal Military Academy), have come to identical conclusions, Spencer said.
Over the course of a decade, Spencer’s research has focused on military operations in dense urban areas and subterranean warfare, including Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Ukraine, and Israel.
Consistent Analysis
The charge that Israel’s response has been disproportionate or indiscriminate, is “baseless,” Spencer contends.
Each strike has a “proportionality analysis,” including determining the level of threat or value of the target, how many civilians surround them, whether it is possible to strike without harming civilians , and doing everything reasonable to prevent harm. Israel takes seriously this type of rigorous analysis, Spencer said. “There has been no actual evidence – unless you believe Tik Tok videos – of Israel targeting civilians, or any prohibited target.”
U.S. intelligence confirms this, he said.
Spencer contends that the accusation that Israel is trying to starve Gazans is also “a big lie,” and “the data does not support the claim.” Spencer insisted that Israel “has done everything feasible and reasonable to flood Gaza with food.” There are, however, examples where Hamas intercepted aid, sometimes shooting people to get it, then selling it at a high price. “There’s a lot of evidence showing that as well,” Spencer told Community Magazine.
Public Opinion
Spencer noted that Israel is “horrible at communicating operations to the public.” If he had the ability to change things, he would “assign more resources to winning the battle of narratives on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.”
“Under the social media algorithm-driven confirmation bias, if you had negative ideas about Israel, it’s going to feed you that. Then you’re going to infer what you want.”
Observers both inside Israel and abroad have criticized the length of the war. However, Spencer asserted, “the enemy had 15 years to prepare to defend the area, meaning it’s going to require a lot of force to overtake the enemy.”
Projections for an Israeli Vicory
For Spencer, a win for Israel would look like the following: Hamas is virtually eliminated, Gaza is demilitarized, the hostages are freed – and afterwards would come reconstruction and deradicalization. (Netanyahu has called for something similar, adding to the list the importance of securing of the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land situated along the entirety of the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt – that otherwise would be porous to smuggling.)
Spencer proposed starting with “the inkblot strategy,” also known as “the inkspot strategy.” This is a military strategy for subduing a large hostile region with a relatively small military force. The force starts by establishing a number of small safe areas dispersed over the region. In this case, it would be a small and secure area of Gaza, to bring about more stability in the area.
“Even when I was operating as a junior soldier in Baghdad, we put concrete walls around everything. People don’t like those, but it created safe neighborhoods. And then we found people within each neighborhood to be the security force of that neighborhood.”
Spencer wrote in an August 21 Foreign Affairs column, “[Hamas] is much shakier today that it was on Oct. 7,” owing to the death of hundreds of its leaders, minimization of weapons and units, as well as crushed infrastructure.
Israel’s Ethical Stand
Israel has made significant progress in the Gaza war, despite formidable odds. These include Hamas’s strategy of using civilian shields, storing/firing weapons in places internationally recognized as neutral zones (such as hospitals, schools, and mosques), and booby-trapping buildings where arms are stored. Despite the other side playing dirty, Israel has taken the moral high road, protecting civilians, allowing and even providing humanitarian aid, and putting its own soldiers at risk to protect Gazan innocents. Although, much of the world criticizes Israel, military expects, such as those cited above, give testimony to Israel’s being in the right, and going to extreme lengths to protect innocents.
We pray that soon the war will end, and our enemies will be vanquished.