US Doesn't Need to Tell Israel Not to Kill Civilians, its Army Says

Israel does not need to be told by the United States to avoid killing civilians and its armed forces admit mistakes have been made in some of the thousands of attacks on targets in the war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a senior Israel Defence Forces official said.

Tensions between Israel and its main ally have been exposed as the Biden administration has increased pressure on Israeli forces to shift to lower intensity operations as a way to reduce the rate of civilian casualties. President Joe Biden said last week that Israel was losing international support because of "indiscriminate bombing". The Pentagon said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin would discuss steps to mitigate civilian harm in a visit to Israel on Monday.

The IDF official said Israel's armed forces already understood that they should do all they could to avoid killing civilians.

"We don't need the Americans to understand that we don't want to hurt civilians, to get less and less casualties," the official told a briefing at an air base in Israel on condition of anonymity. "I'm saying this to my staff, to my pilots, to my crews every day."

"Unfortunately, we have many casualties. A lot of them are terrorists. We don't really know how many."

Newsweek contacted the Pentagon for comment.

More than 19,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive into Gaza, according to health ministry officials in the territory run by Hamas. When that overall toll stood at around 15,000, Israeli officials said they believed 5,000 Palestinian fighters had been killed—a figure disputed by Hamas.

Israel launched its biggest operation into Gaza in decades after a Hamas raid on October 7 in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage. More than 100 Israeli soldiers have since been killed in Gaza.

Ceasefire Calls

The Palestinian civilian death toll and harrowing images of children dead in the rubble of bombed buildings have prompted international calls for a ceasefire and increased pressure on Biden to take a tougher line on Israel than the strong support he showed in the initial weeks of the war.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that the army will continue its offensive despite foreign pressure in order to destroy Hamas, to get remaining hostages home and to stop Gaza posing a threat. Israeli polls have shown broad support for the war aims despite his personal unpopularity.

The IDF official said Gaza was an incredibly complex environment given the presence of civilians, Israeli forces, Israeli hostages and Hamas fighters he accused of hiding in, and sometimes opening fire from, hospitals, schools and United Nations facilities. He also pointed to the far greater intensity and duration of the attacks than in previous conflicts.

"There were mistakes. We launched thousands of bombs and strikes. And of course, there were mistakes," he said. "Sometimes we do not understand the situation on the ground. Sometimes we miss the targets. Sometimes we had some trouble with the bombs. But we do a bomb damage assessment for any strikes that we do. We have command cells to check our mistakes and improve our abilities."

Israel has bridled at accusations of indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and a legal adviser in the IDF's international law department set out the process for balancing the military requirement of any attack with the potential damage, taking into account the principle of proportion.

"The stress here is that it's something that's assessed by what steps that you take, not necessarily the outcome. So you don't take precautions in order to make sure that there are no civilian casualties. You have to take steps to try and minimize and mitigate it as much as possible. And it has to be feasible. But sometimes things are not feasible," he said.

U.S. National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby told reporters during a press call Friday that U.S. officials have communicated with Israeli officials "about what they're thinking in terms of transitioning from high intensity to what we would consider lower intensity military operations."

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