Nearly three months into Israel’s war in Gaza, the casualty data that has emerged is deeply troubling to me as an expert in close air support and targeting.
Israel was wholly justified in responding to Hamas’s inhuman attack on Oct. 7, 2023, in which the terror group tortured and gunned down hundreds of people and entire families. But its aggressive campaign across the Gaza Strip has slain almost 22,000 people, up to 70 percent of whom have been women and children, with the majority of deaths attributed to Israeli airstrikes.
If these figures are anywhere near accurate, civilian loss from Israel’s strike campaign is completely at odds with the standards that my colleagues and I followed for years, including during major urban offensives against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
I spent a career as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) in the U.S. Air Force — the airpower experts who coordinate and call in airstrikes. In 2014, I was a key member of the special operations response force sent to Baghdad to establish the strike cells that helped bring down the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. As a senior targeting professional, certified by the U.S. Central Command to conduct collateral damage estimation and analysis, safeguarding the civilian populace from airstrikes was a core aspect of my job. And while the United States may not be perfect in this realm, the reality is that the Israeli military has demonstrated a far higher tolerance for civilian casualties than the U.S. military, even when compared to our most sensitive operations.
In early December, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated that, thus far in the course of its campaign in Gaza, approximately two civilians had been killed for every Hamas fighter. IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus defended that ratio on CNN, calling it “tremendously positive” in light of Hamas embedding itself within the civilian population.
A modern, first-world military should never view a 2:1 civilian-to-combatant death ratio as acceptable, let alone remotely “positive.”
This ratio exceeds that of the U.S. operation to destroy ISIS’s de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria, which itself became a cautionary tale for civilian harm in dense urban fighting. There, airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition killed more than 1,600 civilians during months of bombardment, according to an Amnesty International report. The U.S. military has argued that Amnesty’s civilian death count for Raqqa is significantly overestimated and can be considered a worst-case approximation. Even so, given that Raqqa was the last ISIS stronghold in Syria and harbored thousands of ISIS fighters, we can assess a civilian casualty ratio nowhere near that of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Yet the civilian casualty rates in Raqqa were still considered unacceptable by U.S. standards and became a significant driver of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response reforms.
The differences between Israeli and American-led air wars goes further.
Nearly half of the munitions Israel has dropped in Gaza since Oct. 7 have been unguided bombs, and Israel has regularly used bombs weighing as much as 2,000 pounds within densely populated refugee encampments and near besieged hospitals. This is almost unheard of in U.S. airstrike planning.
First, refugee encampments and hospitals are protected sites within U.S. targeting methodology. Intentionally striking in, or even within close proximity to, these areas is almost never on the table.
Second, unguided bombs can miss their intended target by dozens of meters. The only time we used them was in areas with little possibility of civilians being present, such as to destroy a weapons cache.
Further, the size of most bombs we dropped in urban areas rarely exceeded 500 pounds — even then, we most often chose warheads with smaller blasts and less fragmentation that were designed to limit collateral damage.
And in all but the rarest of strike operations, my authorized threshold for risk of civilian casualties was zero, meaning that strikes would not be approved if there was risk of even one civilian being killed. The IDF continually carries out strikes in locations where high risk of civilian death is well understood.
The justifications Israeli officials have offered for high civilian casualties include Hamas’s use of civilians as involuntary human shields. However, in U.S. strike operations, such excuses are never an option. Regardless of how the enemy is conducting itself — how embedded within the civilian populace they are or how many civilians they are intentionally surrounding themselves with — this never absolves us of the obligation to protect civilians.
Sadly, many U.S. defense analysts have nearly stepped over one another to legally and morally justify the high rates of civilian casualties in Gaza.
In an interview on CNN in December, a prominent defense analyst from the U.S. Military Academy irresponsibly insisted that the IDF strike campaign has been “proportional, very discriminate, very precise.” I can state, without reservation, that it simply has not shown any of these qualities.
Just one example of what has, unfortunately, become many in the course of Israel’s strike campaign in Gaza includes the IDF’s deliberate and continued targeting within densely populated refugee camps, even while knowing that these areas have not been successfully evacuated by civilians. Such strikes demonstrate far from any level of discrimination and precision that I was expected to exercise as a U.S. targeting professional.
I can recount watching our enemies maneuver in real time, or tracking a terrorist cell for weeks to a specific location, yet not being able to strike because we assessed that civilians were potentially within the strike radius. Although it is frustrating to be constrained from striking an enemy when we see him plainly in our sights — this is the humane way to conduct warfare. It is one of the major qualities that separates us from our enemies and, importantly, it is what the international law of armed conflict was created for.
Since October, members of the Biden administration — including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — have repeatedly spoken against Israel’s strike campaign, acknowledging the devastating scale of civilian loss in Gaza. Yet the administration has, thus far, failed to effect any meaningful change on the part of Israel’s strike operations, and continues to send arms and munitions. Israel is the top recipient of U.S. foreign military aid, receiving $3.3 billion annually, including the supply of air-to-ground munitions used in their strike campaign.
This is a conversation that must be had, as our actions demonstrate that we are complicit in the massive civilian toll in Gaza. And this carries strategic, legal and moral considerations.
In my career hunting America’s enemies with airstrikes, it was my job to be calculated and precise in targeting our enemies while being compassionate and vigilant in safeguarding the civilian populace. We can stand by Israel’s right to defend its homeland, and the necessity to defeat Hamas, while also doing far more to influence change in its targeting and strike operations in Gaza.
A call for the humanitarian revision of the military actions of Israel is no more antisemitic than valuing Palestinian civilian lives is pro-Hamas. This overriding rhetoric is the definition of logical fallacy, and only blinds us.
Wes J. Bryant is a retired master sergeant and former special operations joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) in the elite special warfare branch of the U.S. Air Force. He is coauthor of the book “Hunting the Caliphate: America’s War on ISIS and the Dawn of the Strike Cell.”