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Israel Bombs Gaza: What Is A War Crime?

Israel Bombs Gaza: What Is A War Crime?

This is a picture of hundreds of potential war crimes, according to some who are accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It is a satellite photo of the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza. Imagine for a moment that you are a senior member of Israel’s Defense Forces, the IDF. This, or a satellite photo like it, is what Israel’s military officials and generals are looking at every day as Israel strikes back at Hamas for its attack on Israel on October 7.

This photo is from Google Earth, and it depicts the houses and apartment buildings and grid of streets before Israel’s aerial strike on Jabalia on Tuesday. Somewhere in that photo is the location of the Ibrahim Biari, the Hamas commander who planned the October 7 assault on Israel that killed 1,400 Israeli citizens, the great majority of whom were civilians.

Israel had intelligence that Biari, along with a number of his Hamas lieutenants, was hiding in a Hamas headquarters bunker. But where is it? Beneath which one of those houses, apartment buildings, streets and parking lots is the bunker that held him and his fellow Hamas fighters?

What do you do if you are an Israeli military official and you determine that Biari’s location is in Jabalia? As you can see by the satellite photo, practically every square inch of Jabalia is occupied by a civilian home or business or street. How do you kill your enemy in such a situation?

Right now, Israel’s army is inside the borders of Gaza, but they have not yet entered Gaza City or Jabalia or any other city or town, so Israel does not have any soldiers on the ground in Gaza they can send into the Jabalia refugee camp to kill Biari, even though on Tuesday, they knew where he was. They know that Hamas commanders, and other Hamas fighters, change their locations frequently in order to confound Israel’s intelligence services which are trying to locate them.

So, if Israel determines Biari’s location on Tuesday, but does not have the kind of special operation forces like the ones we used to kill Osama bin Laden in Jabalia or even close to it, what do they do with that information? If they don’t act on it, they know Biari will move, and they’ll have to get the intelligence to nail down his location all over again. Israel is not just seeking vengeance on this Hamas commander for the October 7 attack. They are trying to prevent him from doing it again.

Somewhere in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or on an air force base in the Sinai desert, a bunch of Israeli intelligence officers and air force targeting specialists sat down with a map like the one above, and knowing Biari’s location, they prepared an airstrike to take him out. Looking at that satellite photo, you can see with your own eyes the dilemma Israel has faced every day since Hamas launched its attack. They can see as well as you or I that no matter where their bombs hit within that grid of streets and houses, some civilians will be killed.

But was ordering and carrying out the airstrike that killed Biari a war crime because it also killed an unknown number of civilians?

The answer to that question is no. Certain facts are involved in determining whether something that happens in a war is a crime. First among them is, who is the aggressor? In this case, it was Hamas with its attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, which was a war crime under international law. When Hamas rocket launchers fired more than 5,000 missiles into Israel, each and every one of them was a war crime. When Hamas terrorists broke through the fence defending Israel from Hamas militants inside Gaza, they invaded a sovereign nation militarily, which is a war crime. When they killed civilians with AK-47’s and RPG-7 rocket propelled grenades or any other weapon, it was a war crime.

So when Israel hits back with rockets and ground troops, is that a war crime? The answer is no, because under international law, any nation attacked militarily has the right to defend itself. How Israel defends itself determines whether its forces are committing war crimes.

If you are a nation like Israel that has sophisticated weapons capable of precision targeting like smart bombs and missiles and 155 mm artillery that can fire smart rounds that are guided to hit a precision target, then you are obligated to use all that technology to the best of your ability to prevent as many civilian deaths as you can. If your troops engage in ground combat with the enemy, in this case Hamas militants, ground forces have the same obligation.

For example, if Israeli forces are being fired at from within a building they can see with their eyes, or with drones, or on satellite imagery, they can fire back with small arms or artillery or even an airstrike to defend themselves. If civilians are killed along with the Hamas fighters who were shooting at them, it is not a war crime.

Similarly, if Israel discovers that a Hamas commander like Biari is in a bunker under a parking lot or a building within Jabalia, Israel’s military is entitled to bring a precision airstrike on that area in order to kill Biari and defend themselves from Biari commanding another assault on Israel. Israel is not allowed, under international law, to “carpet-bomb” the neighborhood or city where Biari is hiding. Israel is obligated by law to use the best intelligence it has and its precision munitions to accomplish its goal.

Israel cannot do what Nazi Germany did to London and Allied forces did to Dresden and Tokyo and then to Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they leveled whole cities with bombers carrying conventional and nuclear weapons.

Here is a photo of what Dresden looked like after Allied bombing in World War II:


Here is a photo of Hiroshima after the U.S. nuclear strike:


Here is a satellite photo of the area in Jabalia before Israel’s airstrike that targeted Ibrahim Biari on Tuesday night. Take special notice of the white L-shaped building with a gray rectangle on top of it at the right of the photo:



It’s difficult to determine how many civilian buildings were hit and destroyed in the airstrike, and it is certain that several hundred civilians lost their lives along with Biari and his Hamas fighters who were in the tunnel complex beneath them.

The contrast between the World War II photos and the two satellite photos above are evidence of the difference between barbarity and what international law now defines as a nation acting in its own defense. Since before the time of Alexander the Great, armies have ravaged and destroyed cities and killed civilians in pursuit of conquering and seizing territory. For thousands of years, that is the way civilization made its way into the future, with mass death and destruction and enslavement of those conquered.

Today, we have the International Criminal Court and a set of international laws agreed to in the U.N. that attempts to police how nations fight wars. But as we can see by what Russia did in attacking Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and what Hamas did in attacking Israel on October 7, 2023, and what both Ukraine and Israel have been caused to do to defend themselves since then, we’ve got a long way to go.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

How Do You Cover A War That Is Occurring 5,800 Miles Away?

How Do You Cover A War That Is Occurring 5,800 Miles Away?

We are talking here of the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital that took place on October 17, and the bombing of a Hamas tunnel complex inside the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza on Tuesday. Thirty years ago, it would have been impossible to report on such occurrences if you were not a major newspaper or television network with a bureau on the ground in the country where it happened. Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult but not impossible. The internet was there, if not as fast, and there was email, but newspapers and network news shows didn’t have much reporting online, and very few if any videos were posted.

Today, of course, is a very different story. News stories about an event as big as a bombing appear nearly instantaneously. Photos from the scene are up on X (Twitter) and YouTube just as quickly, and so are videos. But what do you do with the stories and the photos and the videos that are available now? That’s what this story is about.

Last night, in the early evening, a story came up from something called “Memo: Middle East Monitor,” which says on its banner they’ve been “Creating new perspectives since 2009 covering Africa, Egypt, Israel, Middle East, News, and Palestine.” They headlined coverage of the Jabalia bombing this way: “Egypt condemns Israeli attack on residential square in Jabalia Refugee Camp.” Here is the photo at the top of the story:

I had read several stories online from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press, but nowhere had I seen the site of the bombing described as a “residential square,” which is defined on real estate websites and shows up on maps that identify “squares” like Foley Square and Washington Square, both in New York City, as an open area between buildings in an urban setting.

So, I went to Google Earth and Google Maps, which show maps and aerial images of places around the world differently in subtle ways. Sometimes the resolution of satellite photos is better on Google Earth than it is on Google Maps, sometimes it’s the other way around. And often one or the other will identify the location you’re looking for better than the other. Google Maps, for example, locates the center of Jabalia with a little red squiggle. Google Earth gives you an outline around the blocks covered by the Jabalia refugee camp.

From Google Earth, I could see there are two main areas of the camp. The southwestern part of the camp, where the Jabalia Refugee Camp Market is located, is a jumble of streets and tiny alleys in an area of low, tightly packed structures that look, from overhead at least, like shacks or small cinderblock houses. The area of the camp to the northeast has as its northern border a wide road marked General Beit Lahiya Boulevard, on which the Indonesian Hospital is located. That hospital appears in news stories as “close to” Jabalia, which according to the map, it is.

The northern area of Jabalia is more built up, on a regular grid of paved streets that run between larger buildings that from the satellite photo look like they might be three or four stories. Some of them have what appear to be water tanks on the roof, a common way to distribute water through a multi-story building with multiple apartments in the Middle East. I saw lots of them in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example.

The buildings at the edge of the blast-zone in Jabalia – and I looked at more than 30 photos of them – appear to be three to five stories. You can count the stories from the sides of the buildings that were blown out by the blasts. Several photos, like this one, show three taller buildings in the background that look to be eight stories tall, as shown here:

I started looking on Google Earth for sites that might be described as open areas between buildings, like parks or gathering places or parking lots. There are several of them in the northern area of Jabalia. They show up as tree-filled parks, or dirt lots, or what appear to be paved parking lots.

If you look to the right of the photo, you’ll see a large concrete slab that must be 20 feet across. In the foreground, you’ll see smaller, broken slabs with irregular shapes. They could be slabs of a concrete parking lot that were picked up and thrown away from the center of the crater shown in the photo, which is the largest of four craters that appear in all the different photos.

Here is another photo of this crater from further away. The leaning slab appears at the center of the photo:

It looks to me that the vantage point was a street that formed one side of the square. A damaged taxi is parked on the right, and the yellow CAT earthmover in the foreground looks to have driven on level ground to the position where it appears to be pushing debris to the left.

Tracy pointed out that the slabs could have been floors in apartment buildings, and that is possible. It appears that the men at the top right are standing atop the ruin of a building. The slab could have been the roof of that building that fell from left to right as the building collapsed. Looking further, I found a part of a floor from another apartment building. It is in the right center of the photo, the slab with a little square cut out on its left edge.


If you look above and to the left, you can see the building it may have come from: the little cut-out could have fit around the vertical wall shown in the open front of the building. The slab of floor at the center would have fallen down from the building as the front row of the apartments were destroyed by the blast. But the bigger, irregular slab leaning down into the crater at the center of the photo looks more like it was part of a paved area that collapsed when the blast sent material into the air from the center of the crater at the right.

Which brings up the nature of the weapon used in this bombing. Israel has said that the target was a Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, whom a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces described as an architect of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Biari was said to be hiding in a tunnel complex under the Jabalia refugee camp. Israel made use of what appears to be at least three and possibly four bunker-buster bombs in the attack.

Israel is known to have two types of U.S. supplied bunker buster bombs: The 2,000-pound GBU-31v3, and the 5,000 pound GBU 28, said to have four times the penetrating power of the earlier version they were supplied with. The different types of bunker buster bombs may explain the two sizes of craters. One appears to be 100 feet or more across, and nearly as deep. The other ones are about half as deep and half as wide, as shown in this BBC photo, with the largest crater in the foreground and two more visible in the background:

All of the bunker buster bombs are laser guided, which means they are dropped from a jet aircraft and guided to their target with a laser that “paints” the target from the aircraft. The bomb’s guidance system follows the laser to the target.

The bombs are fitted with a delay fuse, so that the bomb explodes not on impact with a concrete surface, but after it travels through the concrete and into the earth below, so the bomb goes off beneath the surface instead of on top of it. The point of a bunker buster is for the blast to go down and to the side beneath the earth. That’s what destroys bunkers or tunnels. A conventional high explosive warhead on a missile or artillery shell explodes upon impact, and all the blast goes up and out to the sides, producing the kind of craters we have seen in photos of misfired Russian 155 artillery rounds that landed in agricultural fields and left craters about 8 to 10 feet in diameter and about four feet deep.

Some bunker buster bombs have more sophisticated fuses that have accelerometers that can detect delays in the penetration of the warhead and set off the explosion after it has penetrated one or two floors of a building, for example, instead of going off when it first hits a concrete roof. That sort of bomb could have been used in the Jabalia bombing and would have blasted through the concrete floors of apartments before going off when it finally reached the bottom floor and penetrated its concrete slab. Or the bombs could have hit the surface of a parking lot, gone through the concrete and earth, and then exploded several meters below the surface of the earth.

Until and unless an inspection can be made of the site of the bombing, we won’t know whether Israel sent its bombs into what the Middle East Monitor called a residential square, an open area between buildings, or directly into buildings beneath which Israeli intelligence had identified as being above the tunnel they were trying to hit.

This is what you do when you can’t be on the scene. In this case, there has been no reporting from the scene of the explosion that describes the area where the bombs hit. In the case of the Al-Ahli Hospital, we could see that the warhead, whatever it was, and whoever fired it, hit a parking lot and not the hospital itself, and the hospital building was not damaged.

With the Jabalia bombing, we can see the craters left by the bombs, and we can see the damage done to apartment buildings around them, but we cannot know for sure whether the bombs hit a parking lot or directly landed on apartment buildings.

Either way, people were killed. One of them, according to Israel, was the Hamas commander who engineered the massacre on October 7. Other Hamas fighters were killed, too, according to the Israeli spokesman for the IDF. But innocent civilians were also killed in the collateral damage from the bunker buster bombs. Enlarging the satellite photos on Google Earth, I could see cars driving down streets in Jabalia and occasional pedestrians. People live there. They have lives, just like people have lives in Bakhmut and Mariupol and Kherson and Kharkiv in Ukraine, all cities that have been heavily bombed by Russia. And Ukrainians died in those bombings. I remember way back at the beginning of the war in Ukraine covering the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, publishing photos of a bomb crater in an open area between wings of the hospital. One photo showed a pregnant woman being escorted out of the door to the hospital, gripping her bulging stomach with both hands. She died a few days later.

It is a sad fact of these terrible wars that innocent people die. As I cover these wars from thousands of miles away, going over the photographs of destruction and the maps and the satellite photos and details of the weapons and how they work, one of the hardest jobs I have is remembering the human cost of war. The blood of the dead is the most expensive thing in any war, beyond the physical damage left by bombs and bullets. Please remember that with me.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Danziger: They Made The Desert Bloom

Danziger: They Made The Desert Bloom

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Israeli Airstrike Kills 3 Senior Hamas Leaders

Israeli Airstrike Kills 3 Senior Hamas Leaders

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

TEL AVIV, Israel — The militant group Hamas said three of its senior military leaders were killed early Thursday in an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip that also killed at least seven other people.

The Israeli military confirmed carrying out the attack in response to continuing rocket fire from Palestinian militants in Gaza.

The latest strikes appeared to mark a tactical shift on the part of Israel, which until this week had largely refrained from targeting specific Hamas leaders. On Tuesday, Israeli forces made an apparent attempt to assassinate Hamas’ top military commander, killing his wife and infant son in an airstrike. Hamas said the commander, Mohammed Deif, was not present at the time.

Thursday marked a third day of renewed hostilities in Gaza after two weeks of relative calm, during which the two sides had for the most part observed a series of temporary cease-fires while holding indirect talks in Cairo. The negotiations collapsed along with the calm; there was no word on when or whether those talks would resume.

Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, said in a brief announcement that the three men killed in the southern town of Rafah were Mohammad Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar, and Mohammad Barhoum. Witnesses said Israeli warplanes fired a volley of missiles at a five-story building in the Tel Sultan neighborhood, leveling it.

Rafah was the scene of heavy fighting earlier in the Israeli offensive.

The three Hamas men killed were known to be senior members of the Qassam command structure. Attar was the local commander in Rafah, and was believed to have overseen the building of a network of tunnels in the area, and the smuggling of weapons from Egypt. Abu Shamaleh was a commander in southern Gaza, and Israel says he and Attar masterminded the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held prisoner in Gaza for five years before being freed in a large-scale prisoner exchange.

Attar was years ago sentenced to death by the Palestinian Authority for killing a police officer, but that sentence was commuted by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

The death toll in Gaza since fighting broke out on July 8 is now above 2,000. Sixty-seven people have died on the Israeli side, all but three of them soldiers.

Los Angeles Times special correspondent Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

AFP Photo/Thomas Coex

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