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An Israeli Government legal analysis published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs inadvertently reveals how mass destruction of civilians in Gaza is built into the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) calculations of legitimate proportionate violence, according to an exclusive Byline Times analysis.
Drawing on two previous investigations, the analysis shows that the Israeli Government’s legal justifications for mass civilian casualties are consistent with an official policy of deliberately using disproportionate force against civilians, which is conducive to genocidal violence.
After six months, the IDF war on Gaza has resulted in the killing of 33,200 Palestinians and the destruction of over 70% of all homes in Gaza, leaving 1.9 million Palestinians displaced. Over 2% of Gaza’s children were killed or injured. Eight out of every 10 schools has been destroyed, along with 84% of all health facilities.
The scale of the violence has caused UN experts to accuse Israel of complicity in genocidal violence. Last year, South Africa launched an unprecedented application to the International Court of Justice calling for the Israeli actions to be recognised as genocide. The court has not yet issued a verdict, but did conclude that the case presented was “plausible” – and urged Israel to take measures to prevent a genocide.
It was only until seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were executed in IDF drone strikes in early April that Israel’s closest allies began to question the IDF’s conduct.
However, so far both the US and UK have largely accepted the IDF’s account that they were a result of grave errors in breach of IDF procedures.
Two major investigations by Byline Times have unearthed evidence that contradicts this narrative. Our reporting revealed that the head of the IDF’s internal inquiry, Major General Yoav Har-Even, had numerous conflicts of interest which raise questions about his ability to conduct a credible inquiry. Not only was Har-Even a participant in the IDF’s “Dahiya doctrine” involving the deliberate use of disproportionate force against civilians in the 2006 Lebanon War, he directly supported the IDF’s war in Gaza from up to February 2024, and is connected to senior Israeli military figures who architected the Dahiya doctrine’s institutionalisation into official IDF policy.
We also exposed how the Obama administration had closely monitored the IDF’s adoption of the Dahiya doctrine, an IDF strategy that justifies countering an enemy by systematically targeting its national civilian population with overwhelming disproportionate force. Obama aides had received credible information that the Dahiya doctrine’s implementation during Operation Cast Lead had resulted in deadly targeting of civilians, and knew that the IDF was incapable of complying with international humanitarian law without significant international pressure. The US Government later colluded with IDF leaders to refute credible evidence of the Israeli military’s complicity in war crimes.
As early as 2010, the US Government was told by the Israeli delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that IDF commanders had considerable leeway in making decisions about proportionality when considering civilian casualty ratios, did not adequately distinguish between civilians and combatants, and routinely created kill zones in areas where civilians had been ordered to evacuate where soldiers could freely shoot “anything that moved”. As a result, even civilian aid convoys had been targeted.
In this context, IDF procedures purportedly created to protect civilians – such as leaflet dropping, roof knocking, warning calls and texts to residents – end up providing a pretext to justify disproportionate violence targeted at civilian areas on a huge scale.
As noted by Larry Lewis, former State Department advisor on civilian harm mitigation, the Israeli Government’s claim that the IDF operates a “gold standard” on civilian protection is “misguided” because: “… the gold standard for civilian harm mitigation is not a checklist of steps but rather an iterative process to learn and adapt. Israel has yet to demonstrate that it has embraced this process. More importantly, the data – not just the staggering death toll, but key attributes of the campaign – suggest Israel’s steps are not working.”
more investigations by nafeez
Leaked Documents Expose how Israeli War Ministers Created IDF Policy of Mass Killing With US Support
US State Department documents show just how involved America is – and how they coached Israeli officials on how to undermine findings and defend themselves
Israeli Aid Worker Inquiry Compromised by Ties to IDF Mass Killing Doctrine
Yoav Har-Even’s direct involvement in supporting the IDF operation in Gaza, despite also being tasked to lead the investigation into the conduct of the operation, is an obvious conflict of interest
‘Legalising’ Criminal Impunity
US support has created a climate of impunity allowing the IDF to categorise mass violence against Gazan civilians as a ‘legitimate’ strategy to destroy Hamas.
The way in which this has led to an inherently genocidal logic is reflected in a new Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing on legal aspects of the conflict in Gaza, published in December 2023.
Set against the background of the Dahiya doctrine, the foreign ministry briefing reveals that the very steps the IDF says it is taking to protect civilian life are being used to justify the disproportionate targeting of them. By defining Israel’s sought-after military advantage at such a high-level – requiring the total obliteration of Hamas capabilities – the obliteration of almost any degree of Palestinian civilian life to achieve this goal can be deemed ‘proportionate’.
The briefing sets out the IDF’s military objectives as follows: “The military advantages that the IDF is seeking include destroying enemy military assets, targeting militants, degrading and denying enemy ability to command and control operations, neutralising underground tunnels and infrastructure used for military purposes, and denying positions (such as sniper, anti-tank and surveillance posts) which endanger IDF ground forces, all of which contribute to the overall objective of securing the release of the hostages and removing Hamas’s capability to attack Israel and its citizens.”
Yet these objectives are so broad and comprehensive, that a proportionality assessment of the permitted civilian casualties incurred in pursuit of them becomes extraordinarily permissive: “LOAC [Law of armed conflict] provides that a proportionality assessment is based on the