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At around 5pm on Monday, Israeli warplanes criss-crossed the Syrian border, struck an embassy building in Damascus, killed senior Iranian military leaders with the kind of pinpoint precision, and sent Israeli warplanes flying across the Middle East. was feared and respected by the military.
Hours later, the same Israeli military rained missiles on aid convoys on the Gaza Strip coast road, a failed operation that left seven foreign aid workers dead and Israel’s reputation in ruins. Its leaders were forced to admit a series of fatal mistakes and misjudgments.
Many wonder how one of the world’s best-equipped and best-trained militaries was able to carry out a dangerous attack on foreign soil and then stumble to such a tragic outcome in Gaza. This raises difficult questions – particularly how the Israeli military enforces the rules of engagement in Gaza. war with Hamas.
Israeli officials blamed the attack on the World Central Kitchen aid group on complex battlefields with a mix of combatants and civilians, factors common to war. It was night so visibility was poor. And because of the moving target, commanders had only minutes to make a decision.
The Damascus raid was a mirror image, a carefully planned and precisely timed operation against stationary targets, likely approved at the highest levels of the Israeli military and government.
Details provided by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards suggest that Israel had information up until the moment of the attack. These include the time the ambassador and other civilians left the building and the time key Iranian commanders were there to meet with Palestinian militants to discuss the Gaza war. .
In contrast, Israeli and US military analysts said the Israeli explanation did not fully explain the events that took place along the Gaza coast on Monday night. The mistaken killing of the aid workers was a predictable outcome of the fire-first style of engagement that the Israeli military has employed in military operations since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, several people said.
“The accuracy was very high, so it wasn’t a question of accuracy,” said Yagir Levi, a professor at Open Israel University and an expert on the Israeli Defense Forces. “This action was taken after careful consideration of the circumstances, and is not a matter of negligence.”
“In Gaza,” he continued, “the Israel Defense Forces are committed to killing as many Hamas fighters as possible. It goes against the principle of respecting the
Professor Levy said that to prevent aid from being damaged or stolen in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, armed locals with ties to extremists often direct aid supplies. This raises the possibility that some of the passengers could become legitimate combat targets for the Israeli military, which uses drones to monitor the convoy.
Israeli forces attacked the World Central Kitchen convoy after it delivered supplies from the pier to the warehouse. The three vehicles were on their way back when the IDF launched three attacks. Two of the vehicles were destroyed, and the third car had a large hole in its roof next to a sticker identifying it as belonging to World Central Kitchen, a charity founded by chef José Andres. It was open.
Andres said the military would have known the workers’ locations because they were in contact with them. “This wasn’t just an unlucky situation where, ‘Oh,’ we dropped a bomb in the wrong place,” he told Reuters.
Lieutenant General Helj Halevi, the Israeli army’s chief of staff, said on Tuesday: “This was a misidentification at night during wartime, under extremely complex circumstances.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “do everything in our power to prevent something like this from happening again.”
Some have likened the episode to an accidental US drone strike in Afghanistan in 2022 that killed 10 innocent people, including seven children. As in Gaza, the attack was based on aerial video imagery. The incident comes after a suicide bombing killed at least 182 people, including 13 American soldiers, as the United States desperately retreats from the country.
Under intense pressure to avoid further attacks, the U.S. military believed it was pursuing terrorists who might detonate another bomb imminently. Instead, nine Afghan aid workers and their families died.
“We had just lost a soldier to a bomb, and there was a fear that there would be another bomb,” said John Nagle, a professor of war studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. danger. The desire to protect the military outweighed the decision to protect civilians. ”
In contrast, Professor Nagl said the attack on the Damascus embassy was “perfectly executed”. He said that the Israeli side “controlled the time and location of the action, and the location of the action was fixed. The difficult part of the mission was not the military operation, but the intelligence gathering.”
Israel still faces international fallout from the attack, which severely damaged Iran’s Quds Force, the external military and intelligence arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Syria and Iran both expressed anger, and U.S. officials expressed concern that the move could prompt retaliatory attacks against Israel and its U.S. ally.
But the failed Gaza attack triggered a wave of global condemnation against Israel, which was already increasingly isolated diplomatically. In the UK, the family of one of the slain aid workers, John Chapman, said in a statement: “He died trying to help people and was subjected to inhumane treatment.”
This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have accidentally attacked civilians. In December, he accidentally shot and killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza City, sparking outrage in Israel. In January, Israeli tanks opened fire on a convoy of Partel, Gaza’s largest telecommunications company, killing two technicians, the company said. The Israeli military said it was investigating the incident but has not announced any conclusions.
Given the rapidly increasing death toll in Gaza, these incidents only add to the pressure on Israel. More than 32,000 people, many of them children, have died in the six-month war, according to health officials in the Hamas-controlled enclave. The Gaza Health Ministry tally includes both civilians and combatants.
Professor Nagl said the Israeli military is tightening its rules of engagement (the conditions under which soldiers are allowed to fire), especially since the number of Hamas fighters among civilians has declined since fighting began in October. He said he thinks it should be done. Israeli experts said the IDF should learn how to better identify targets.
“We successfully identified tens of thousands of targets,” said Michael B. Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and former spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. IDF will investigate, conclude how and why the error occurred, and draw lessons to help prevent similar errors in the future. ”
But Oren and other Israelis pushed back on suggestions that the Damascus attack was a useful comparison.
“Outside Gaza, for example in Syria, Israel faces far fewer complexities,” he said. “Target identification and elimination becomes much easier, and there is much less room for human error.”
Netanyahu’s former national security adviser and current critic Uzi Arad echoed the comparison, saying the fighting in Gaza was “so intense” that Israeli soldiers even opened fire on each other. I denied it. “Mistakes happen,” he said. “The situation is always changing. It’s not static. It’s very dynamic.”
Arad, who is also a former employee of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad, said all measures should be taken to prevent such mistakes, but suggested they were inevitable in a battlefield like Gaza.
Amos Harel, a military columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, acknowledged that the war in Gaza was difficult, but said the deadly attack on the convoy was simply a result of attrition.
“When you’ve been fighting this long, you’re going to make more of these mistakes and problems,” Harrell said. “It can never be justified, but this is the price of continuing war under such extreme circumstances.”
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