Warfare in urban environments is almost always highly destructive.
When the Iraqi army retook Mosul from ISIS in 2016 and 2017 with our air support, tens of thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed and an estimated 80% of the Old City.
Vietnam gave us the famous (perhaps apocryphal) line, “We had to destroy the city in order to save it.”
The city in question was Bến Tre, infiltrated by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive in 1968.
We used air strikes, helicopter gunships, artillery and ground troops to extricate the communist forces, and the Mekong Delta town suffered extensive damage, even though the fighting only lasted days.
The old imperial capital of Hue suffered the same fate, but on a larger scale: Communist forces took most of the city and dug in, requiring street-to-street combat over a period of months to take it back.
About half the city was damaged or destroyed.
The lesson is that cities never fare well when they are the locus of combat, whether Seoul or Pyongyang during the Korean War, Manila or Stalingrad during World War II, Vicksburg or Charleston during the Civil War.
Civilians inevitably suffer and die.
This is true of even the most honored military operations: The Allied invasion of Normandy killed 20,000 French civilians as cities such as Rouen and Le Havre were pulverized by our bombardment.
Why would anyone expect Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, to be different?
Hamas spent years and massive resources tunneling and fortifying, making Gaza into a bristling armed camp difficult to subdue.
Sure enough, it has taken a grinding, years-long campaign to substantially reduce Hamas.
Israel’s detractors profess to detect “genocidal intent” in harsh things that Israeli officials have said about Gaza, but these statements have typically been aimed at Hamas.
If Israel wanted to commit genocide against the Gazans, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu wouldn’t have sought to accommodate Hamas for years, in the hopes that a major war could be avoided.
The Oct. 7 attack exposed this as a grievous misjudgment.
It’s hard to believe that any society, having experienced the unspeakable crimes visited on its people that day, would have concluded, “Well, we can’t do anything in response — even recover our hostages — because combat in Gaza will be too destructive.”
Hamas intertwined its military infrastructure with civilian facilities, and made military use of hospitals, mosques and schools.
Its fighters posed as medical personnel and journalists.
Everything was geared to making it as difficult as possible to target Hamas without collateral damage, creating the predicate for denouncing Israel for war crimes.
As military expert John Spencer points out, Israel takes steps to avoid civilian harm.
“It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts,” he writes.
“It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level.”
None of this matters, though.
The ultimate perversity is that Hamas in fact has genocidal intent against the Jews.
Yet it is the war against this cruel terror group that is being used to associate the Jewish state with one of history’s worst crimes.
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