Whitewashing

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Derek Gregory

Regular readers will remember my series of commentaries on Israel’s punitive and reckless assault on Gaza during the summer of 2014 (see, for example, here, here and here).

In the debates over what Israel called ‘Operation Protective Edge’ – and over later modern military violence more generally – questions of law have come to the fore: partly because law is now closely implicated in the conduct of military operations (‘operational law’), as Craig Jones‘s wonderful work has demonstrated, and partly because its legitimating narrative requires (and indeed rests on) militaries investigating their own alleged breaches of international law and their rules of engagement.

B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories has now published Whitewash Protocol: the so-called investigation into Operation Protective Edge. It’s a complex, forensic investigation, but here is one of the key findings about the Israeli military investigation of its own actions:

The MAG [Military Advocate General’s Corps] examined only several of dozens of almost identical attacks that took place over the fifty days of hostilities, time after time ending with terrible human tall. Given these recurring results, one cannot accept the MAG’s position, that those responsible for these attacks could reasonably base their assessments of the anticipated harm to civilians on assumptions that were repeatedly proven unfounded, and debunked by their own actions or the actions of their colleagues – at a heavy death toll.

The interpretation adopted by the MAG has a far reaching implication that applies to all strikes carried out during the operation: It absolves every level of officials involved in the attacks – from the prime minister, through the MAG himself through to the persons who ultimately fired – of the duty to do everything in their power to minimize harm to civilians. In fact, the MAG sets the bar very low in terms of what is required of those responsible for the attacks – including senior military officers and the MAG (who are not under investigation in any case) – by doing no more than examining what they claimed to know prior to the attacks, while entirely disregarding the question of whether their assessment was reasonable. In doing so, the MAG utterly overlooks the issue of what those responsible for the attacks should have known, including the obligation to learn from their own experience.

And the reason this matters is made plain in the summary:

The fighting during Operation Protective Edge was brutal and violent. Israel implemented a policy of air strikes against homes, which killed hundreds of people, including entire families. Tens of thousands of people were left homeless, losing all they held dear. Genuine, effective investigations are needed not just for the sake of achieving justice for the victims and their loved ones. They are needed as a deterrent to forestall future actions of this sort and to avert further losses. When nothing is investigated, when the consensus is that everything done during the fighting was moral and legal – the stage is set for actions such as these, or even worse, to recur. There was no accountability after Operation Cast Lead, only whitewashing. Now, after Operation Protective Edge, there is no accountability either, only whitewashing. This is not a theoretical legal issue: we are talking about human lives.

The full report can be downloaded as a pdf here. It needs to be read in conjunction with B’Tselem’s report from May 2016, The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism available here.

Yael Stein, B’Tselem’s Research Director, writes:

In his response to the report, the [Israeli military] spokesperson said that B’Tselem is waging a “delegitimization campaign” against the military law enforcement system. Yet this system cannot be considered legitimate until it ensures justice for victims and unless its investigations seek to uncover the truth and hold those responsible accountable…. What may appear at times to be an independent, efficient law enforcement system is in fact a mechanism for covering up suspected offenses and protecting the real culprits.

To be sure, the IDF shoots more than the messenger…

The Platform Edge

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Derek Gregory

I should have drawn attention to these two further, vital resources in my post on Black Friday, Israel’s assault on Rafah during ‘Operation Protective Edge‘.

First, Forensic Architecture‘s wider collaboration with Amnesty International (in association with the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights/Palestinian Centre for Human Rights) has produced The Gaza Platform:

The Gaza Platform is an interactive map of attacks by Israeli forces on Gaza between 8 July and 26 August 2014.

It enables its users to explore a vast collection of data, collected on the ground by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), as well as Amnesty International, during and after the conflict.

Produced through a year-long collaboration between Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International, the Gaza Platform is a new gateway to this precious, first-hand information: it not only gives access to a large quantity of otherwise dispersed data, but helps make sense of it.

The Gaza Platform is the most comprehensive public repository of information about attacks carried out during the 2014 Gaza conflict to date. At the time of its launch on 8 July 2015, it featured over 2,750 individual events, recording the deaths of more than 2,200 people, including 1,800 civilians and 600 children. As a digital interface, it enables access not only to text reports, but also to photos, videos, audio recordings and satellite imagery documenting the war – all in one place.

It is important to note that the Gaza Platform does not provide a complete record of the impact of Israeli attacks during the 2014 conflict. It does not cover every single attack that took place during the conflict, but only those for which a report is available. Therefore, the total number of casualties presented in the Gaza Platform falls short of the one recorded by the UN across the entire conflict.

However, the Gaza Platform does more than provide overall figures and statistics about the conflict. Each death is linked to a specific event, for which all available details and context are given, thus providing the granular details of each individual event recorded. It also helps to reveal trends by making links between dispersed individual events and detecting patterns of attacks across the 50-day time span of the conflict, thereby contributing to an assessment of the conduct of Israeli forces and its conformity or otherwise with the provisions of international humanitarian law (the laws of war). As such, the Gaza Platform is a tool aimed at uncovering the truth about the attacks on Gaza and contributing to accountability efforts for crimes under international law committed by both sides during the 2014 conflict, the third such conflict in six years.

According to Doug Bolton writing in the Independent:

Phillip Luther, the Director of Amnesty International‘s Middle East and North Africa programme, said it “has the potential to expose the systematic nature of Israeli violations committed during the conflict.”

He added: “Our aim it for it to become an invaluable resource for human rights investigators pushing for accountability for violations committed during the conflict.”…

Francesco Sebregondi, the director of the project at Forensic Architecture, said the map “exploits the power of new digital tools to shed light on complex events such as the latest war in Gaza.”

“It enables users to move across scales, from the granular details of each incident to the big picture of the overall conflict, by revealing connections between scattered events.”

I’m not going to link to them, but the hysterical response from apologists for the indiscriminate violence of the Israeli assault on Gaza shows that the Gaza Platform has hit a nerve: as it should.

Incidentally, there’s a short article in today’s Guardian about the ongoing transformation of humanities research: the growth of the ‘digital humanities’, ‘tech-savvy’ analysis of large data sets, collaborations with non-academic professionals, and a determination to show how ‘research can benefit society’. The Gaza Platform isn’t mentioned, but it surely exemplifies exactly what the author has in mind.

Second, Max Blumenthal‘s coruscating chronicle of The 51 Day War: ruin and resistance in Gaza, out now from Verso. As Juan Cole put it, ‘Max Blumenthal audaciously takes in-your-face, on-the-ground journalism into the realm of geopolitics.’ You can find Glenn Greenwald‘s interview with Max at The Intercept here:

What shook me the most was how well I was treated in the rubble. How after interviewing families who would tell me about witnessing their neighbors being destroyed by a missile, that they would beseech me to have lunch with them. I didn’t even know where the lunch would come from. They would chase me down after denouncing my government and insisting that the Obama administration was no better than Netanyahu, and hand me sweets, and tell me that they see a clear difference between the American people and the American government. I mean, that kind of treatment showed me how impeccable the character of these people was, even as they were facing their own immiseration and ruin.

That was kind of deceptive, because I started to adjust, in a weird way, to being in the rubble with these people. Then the bombing started again, and then I had to deal with the terror of night after night of bombings, and naval shelling throughout the day, and drones swooping closely overhead, searching for targets. And I became shell-shocked. So I couldn’t have even imagined going through 51 days of that, especially as a child under the age of seven.

We have to recognize that the Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. The majority of the people in the Gaza strip are under age 18, and a substantial percentage of those under 18 are under the age of seven, which means they have known nothing in their lives but these three atrocious wars, which have left almost 20 percent of the entire area of the Gaza Strip in ruins.

What’s on those children’s mind? What kind of lives can they have? Can they ever be normal as they go through life without therapy, without relief, without recourse and without justice, with continuous traumatic stress disorder?

Black Friday

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Just released: a joint investigation by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture reconstructs Israel’s siege of Rafah during its assault on Gaza in 2014. You can read the Executive Summary here and access the full report, Black Friday: carnage in Rafah, here.

In Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, a group of Israeli soldiers patrolling an agricultural area west of the border encountered a group of Hamas fighters posted there. A fire fight ensued, resulting in the death of two Israeli soldiers and one Palestinian fighter. The Hamas fighters captured an Israeli officer, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, and took him into a tunnel. What followed became one of the deadliest episodes of the war; an intensive use of firepower by Israel, which lasted four days and killed scores of civilians (reports range from at least 135 to over 200), injured many more and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes and other civilian structures, mostly on 1 August.

In this report, Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, a research team based at Goldsmiths, University of London, provide a detailed reconstruction of the events in Rafah from 1 August until 4 August 2014, when a ceasefire came into effect. The report examines the Israeli army’s response to the capture of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin and its implementation of the Hannibal Directive – a controversial command designed to deal with captures of soldiers by unleashing massive firepower on persons, vehicles and buildings in the vicinity of the attack, despite the risk to civilians and the captured soldier(s).

The report recounts events by connecting various forms of information including: testimonies from victims and witnesses including medics, journalists, and human rights defenders in Rafah; reports by human rights and other organizations; news and media feeds, public statements and other information from Israeli and Palestinian official sources; and videos and photographs collected on the ground and from the media.

Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture worked with a number of field researchers and photographers who documented sites where incidents took place using protocols for forensic photography. Forensic Architecture located elements of witness testimonies in space and time and plotted the movement of witnesses through a three-dimensional model of urban spaces. It also modelled and animated the testimony of several witnesses, combining spatial information obtained from separate testimonies and other sources in order to reconstruct incidents. Three satellite images of the area, dated 30 July, 1 August and 14 August, were obtained and analysed in detail; the image of 1 August reveals a rare overview of a moment within the conflict. Forensic Architecture also retrieved a large amount of audiovisual material on social media and employed digital maps and models to locate evidence such as oral description, photography, video and satellite imagery in space and time. When audiovisual material from social media came with inadequate metadata, Forensic Architecture used time indicators in the image, such as shadow and smoke plumes analysis, to locate sources in space and time….

Public statements by Israeli army commanders and soldiers after the conflict provide compelling reasons to conclude that some attacks that killed civilians and destroyed homes and property were intentionally carried out and motivated by a desire for revenge – to teach a lesson to, or punish, the population of Rafah for the capture of Lieutenant Goldin.

There is consequently strong evidence that many such attacks in Rafah between 1 and 4 August were serious violations of international humanitarian law and constituted grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention or other war crimes.

It really is worth accessing the full report and closely examining the video animations produced by Forensic Architecture.

You can find a commentary on the project and its wider implications, which also draws on a lecture FA’s Eyal Weizman gave at Médecins sans Frontières in Paris earlier this month, by Léopold Lambert over at Warscapes here: ‘The Hannibal Directive and the economy of lives: making sense of Black Friday in Gaza‘.

The Hannibal Directive exists because of the historical asymmetrical characteristics of prisoner exchanges between the Israeli government and Palestinian and Lebanese political groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The armed sections of these groups evidently rely on this precise asymmetrical relationship and undertake kidnappings of one or multiple Israeli soldiers when possible to negotiate the liberation of several Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. However, the economy of lives that can be perceived through this asymmetry is profoundly disturbing. The hidden message in the enunciation of the 2011 Shalit exchange is the following: One Israeli life is worth 1,027 Palestinian lives. The very fact that many of us know Shalit’s name, but not one of the 1,027 liberated Palestinian prisoners’, is symptomatic. In the case of “Black Friday,” this economy of lives exposes its violence through even more extreme and perverse forms: for the Israeli army, 135 to 200 Palestinian lives are worth ending in order to end an Israeli one, so to avoid freeing Palestinian prisoners.

We should not think of the concept of economy of lives as a retrospective reading of the Israeli Army’s crimes: This logic is at work in most Western military decision making, as Weizman shows in his book The Least of All Possible Evils (Verso 2011) through interviews with Human Rights Watch consultant Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon “chief of high-value targeting” during the first years of the 2003 US war in Iraq. For each airstrike against an Iraqi political or military figure that Garlasco designed, he had to follow a “correct balance of civilian casualties in relation to the military value of a mission. ” In other words, there is a number of civilians the US army allows itself to kill as “collateral damage” when targeting a strategic assassination. In Iraq, this number was 30, Garlasco reveals. “In this system of calculation,” writes Weizman, “twenty-nine deaths designates a threshold. Above it, in the eyes of the US military lawyers, is potentially ‘unlawful killing’; below it, ‘necessary sacrifice.’” Here, again, lives are disincarnated into statistics calculated in relation to military and ideological objectives.

I should not that there are also important critiques of Amnesty’s other investigations into ‘Operation Protective Edge’, most significantly from Normal Finkelstein at Jadaliyya.

He takes particular exception to Amnesty’s Unlawful and Deadly: Rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict.

He insists that Amnesty too often cites official Israeli sources in ways that ‘magnify Hamas’s and diminish Israel’s criminal culpability’. You can access what he describes as his ‘forensic analysis’ of that report in two parts, here and here.

My own posts on ‘Operation Protective Edge’ are here, here, here, here, here (my own attempt at a forensic analysis of sorts), and here.

Asymmetric law

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Breaking the Silence has just published a major report into the Israeli military’s tactics during its most recent offensive against Gaza and its people, so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’ (see my posts here, here, here and here).

Based on interviews with 65 IDF soldiers, the report includes Background, Testimonies (‘This is how we fought in Gaza‘), and a media gallery.

Writing in today’s Guardian, Peter Beaumont reports:

Describing the rules that meant life and death in Gaza during the 50-day war – a conflict in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed – the interviews shed light for the first time not only on what individual soldiers were told but on the doctrine informing the operation.

Despite the insistence of Israeli leaders that it took all necessary precautions to protect civilians, the interviews provide a very different picture. They suggest that an overarching priority was the minimisation of Israeli military casualties even at the risk of Palestinian civilians being harmed….

Post-conflict briefings to soldiers suggest that the high death toll and destruction were treated as “achievements” by officers who judged the attrition would keep Gaza “quiet for five years”.

The tone, according to one sergeant, was set before the ground offensive into Gaza that began on 17 July last year in pre-combat briefings that preceded the entry of six reinforced brigades into Gaza.

“[It] took place during training at Tze’elim, before entering Gaza, with the commander of the armoured battalion to which we were assigned,” recalled a sergeant, one of dozens of Israeli soldiers who have described how the war was fought last summer in the coastal strip.

“[The commander] said: ‘We don’t take risks. We do not spare ammo. We unload, we use as much as possible.’”

“The rules of engagement [were] pretty identical,” added another sergeant who served in a mechanised infantry unit in Deir al-Balah. “Anything inside [the Gaza Strip] is a threat. The area has to be ‘sterilised,’ empty of people – and if we don’t see someone waving a white flag, screaming: “I give up” or something – then he’s a threat and there’s authorisation to open fire … The saying was: ‘There’s no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.’ In that situation, anyone there is involved.”

“The rules of engagement for soldiers advancing on the ground were: open fire, open fire everywhere, first thing when you go in,” recalled another soldier who served during the ground operation in Gaza City. The assumption being that the moment we went in [to the Gaza Strip], anyone who dared poke his head out was a terrorist.”

You can find an impassioned, detailed commentary on the report by Neve Gordon – who provides vital context, not least about the asymmetric ethics pursued by supposedly ‘the most ethical army in the world’ – over at the London Review of Books here, and a shorter commentary by Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris here. Kevin notes:

The soldiers’ descriptions are disturbingly reminiscent of the notorious “free fire” zones in Vietnam and the US government’s well-documented (and erroneous) belief that signature strikes directed against “military-age men in an area of known terrorist activity” comply with IHL’s principle of distinction. The testimonials are, in a word, stunning — and put the lie to oft-repeated shibboleths about the IDF being “the most moral army in the world.” As ever, the stories told by the IDF and the Israeli government are contradicted by the soldiers who actually have to do the killing and dying.

The legal and ethical framework pursued by the Israeli military – and ‘pursued’ is the mot (in)juste, since its approach to international law and ethics is one of aggressive intervention – is in full view at a conference to be held in Jerusalem this week: ‘Towards a New Law of War‘.

‘The goal of the law of war conference,’ say the organisers, ‘is to influence the direction of legal discourse concerning issues critical to Israel and her ability to defend herself. The law of war is mainly unwritten and develops on the basis of state practice.’

You can find the full program here, dominated by speakers from Israel and the US, but notice in particular the session on ‘Proportionality: Crossing the line on civilian casualties‘:

As this makes clear, and as Ben White reports in the Middle East Monitor, law has become the target (see also my post here):

After ‘Operation Cast Lead’, Daniel Reisner, former head of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General’s Office, was frank about how he hoped things would progress.

If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries….International law progresses through violations.

Similarly, in a “moral evaluation” of the 2008/’09 Gaza massacre, Asa Kasher, author of the IDF’s ‘Code of Ethics’, expressed his hope that “our doctrine” will ultimately “be incorporated into customary international law.” How?

The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.

Now Israel’s strategy becomes clearer… Israel’s assault on the laws of war takes aim at the core, guiding principles in IHL – precaution, distinction, and proportionality – in order to strip them of their intended purpose: the protection of civilians during armed conflict. If successful, the victims of this assault will be in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon – and in occupations and war zones around the world.

Inhumanitarian mapping

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Derek Gregory

It’s strange how things sometimes come together – or collide and crash. Two weeks ago I wrote about satellite imagery and ‘remote violence’, and over the summer I discussed several projects that mapped Israel’s military assault on Gaza and its people, including the Gaza Crisis Atlas produced by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (which makes extensive use of hi-res satellite imagery).

The links between those two posts are obvious enough, but today I have something altogether different in my sights. ‘Judge Dan’ (Dan Smith), who blogs for Israellycool, has used the Gaza Crisis Atlas to construct a series of maps to geo-wash Israel’s military campaign.

Working from the data in the Atlas, Smith produces four maps to disaggregate the severity of destruction (the four levels, increasing from left to right, are based on OCHA’s own assessment):

His conclusions from this exercise are the following:

The attacks are in no way “random” or “indiscriminate”. One can clearly see the spatial distribution of the damage in several aspects. We find 8,952 of the 12,433 total points (72%) are within a 3 KM buffer abutting the border with Israel. The main objective of Operation Protective Edge was to find and destroy dozens of terror tunnels dug from Gaza into Israel.

That the most intensive damage was caused to the area where the tunnels naturally originated is thus perfectly understandable. Furthermore, of the 4,441 destroyed structures, 3,481 of them (78%) are within the 3 KM buffer, as are 2,531 of 3,303 (77%) of the lowest intensity damage (simple craters), which are mostly strikes on rocket launchers and tunnels.

Most of the attacks are grouped around certain neighborhoods or villages, such as Shuja’iyya, Johur ad-Dik, Sureij, and Khuza’a. These were probably the result of the ground operations that took place in dense urban areas also within the 3 KM buffer that housed multiple tunnel entrances and shafts, as well as launch sites for mortars and rockets.

Smith then takes the Israeli military’s map of ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in Shuja’iya and overlays this on what he calls ‘OCHA’s damage points’: ‘the correlation is uncanny.’

Smith’s next manoeuvre is to sweep aside OCHA’s focus ‘on the civilian aspect’ because it ‘misses the big picture’ (really – or perhaps Israelly): ‘the overall intensity of the strikes’. So he constructs a kernel density map or a ‘damage intensity heat map’:

It now becomes very clear that most of the damage was caused to 5 locations right on the border with Israel. The rest of the Gaza Strip was, for the most part, undamaged. The main population areas of Gaza city, Jabaliya, Khan Yunes, Rafah and Deir el-Balah were disproportionately undamaged (sic).

He continues:

If we do a rough estimate of the damage area, it is once again clear the vast majority of the Gaza Strip was unscathed. With a fairly generous estimation that a damage point has a 25 meter radius – the footprint of a house, or the blast radius of a bomb – the total damage area of the 12,433 impacts was in the order of 15 KM2. The land area of the Gaza strip is 360 Km2. In other words, less than 5% of the land was affected.

There’s a follow-up post on ‘damage clusters’ here, but in this commentary I’ll focus on Smith’s ‘big picture’. I take the basic points to be these:

(1) Smith’s approach makes an appeal to the supposed objectivity and even facticity of the map (and, by extension, the satellite image), but there is a substantial body of scholarship that goes back 25 years and underscores the multiple ways in which mapping is an exercise in the production of power. For a depressingly relevant example of the ways in which maps can speak power to truth, taken from Israel’s attack on Gaza in November 2012, see my discussion here (scroll down to the maps).

(2) Appealing to the map and its manipulations as the single source of authority is designed to disavow the testimony of witnesses on the ground: precisely the point sharpened by Andrew Herscher in his timely critique of ‘Surveillant witnessing’ (see my discussion here) and a far cry from the incorporation of photographs in (say) the Gaza War Map.

(3) Smith’s methodology reduces Gaza to an object space of structures and buildings, craters and points; he constructs a kernel density map (more on this in a moment) but provides no population density map that would at least gesture towards the people killed, wounded and traumatised by the Israeli offensive and who are wholly absent from his account. Here, by contrast, is a map I posted previously showing deaths in Gaza to 6 August:

The Gaza Crisis Atlas focuses on damage to buildings and infrastructure because it is a tool directed explicitly towards reconstruction, so the same criticism doesn’t apply (particularly if you look at OCHA’s work more generally, including the information it provided for the map I’ve just reproduced). But if we are to limit ourselves to gazing on structures from space, UNOSAT’s analysis of satellite imagery provides a sharp reminder that these buildings included schools and hospitals (see also here and here); the report also provides a telling comparison between the intensity of destruction in 2009 and 2014:

(4) Smith prefers to construct his own generalised map of damage density using kernel density estimation, a smoothing algorithm that converts point data into a continuous surface. I discussed the way in which the US military uses this technique in ‘Seeing Red’ (DOWNLOADS tab), and what I said there bears repeating:

The maps are known for their dramatic visual impact, and the desired message can be engineered into the production process. One of the most influential handbooks on KDE is published by the US National Institute of Justice and describes how to map crime ‘hot spots’… The authors of the NIJ handbook acknowledge that ‘map production is an iterative process’ and that ‘the first map produced is very rarely the one presented to the target audience.’ They continue: ‘The intended message should also be seen as the driving force behind what the map should look like’ (US National Institute of Justice, 2005: 26, 33).

So let’s turn to the rest of Smith’s message.

(4) Smith justifies the pattern of destruction shown on his maps by claiming that ‘the main objective of Operation Protective Edge was to find and destroy dozens of terror tunnels dug from Gaza into Israel.’ In fact, the stated objectives of the Israeli assault changed throughout the campaign. The attacks were supposedly sparked by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers – in the West Bank not Gaza – and as the mission was ratcheted up so their central objective changed: according to the IDF the aim was to put an end to Hamas rockets being fired into Israel (for a radically different view, see Graham Liddell‘s more general discussion at Mondoweiss here). The rhetoric of ‘terror tunnels’ came later. And while Smith is right to draw attention to the swathes of destruction to the east of Gaza’s central spine, he never addresses the human consequences of successive Israeli expansions of this so-called ‘buffer zone’ until it covered more than 40 per cent of Gaza: see my post here for more details.

(5) Towards the end of his analysis, Smith concedes that destruction is not punctiform. Bombs are not ‘pinpoints’ (cf. Nathan Guttman‘s report on Smith’s work and ‘the pinpoint accuracy of Israel’s strikes’), not only because they rarely land exactly on target but also because their blast radiates outwards from the point of impact. But Smith’s ‘fairly generous estimate that a damage point has a 25 meter [82 feet] radius‘ – is in fact a serious underestimate that at the very least halves the blast radius of a 155 mm shell. Here is Mark Perry‘s report that I cited previously, which includes testimony from senior US military officers about the shelling of Shuj’aiyya:

Artillery pieces used during the operation included a mix of Soltam M71 guns and U.S.-manufactured Paladin M109s (a 155-mm howitzer), each of which can fire three shells per minute. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” said the senior U.S. military officer. “It’s not mowing the lawn,” he added, referring to a popular IDF term for periodic military operations against Hamas in Gaza. “It’s removing the topsoil.”

“Holy bejeezus,” exclaimed retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard when told the numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action. “That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely disproportionate.” A West Point graduate who is a veteran of two wars and is the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., he added that even if Israeli artillery units fired guided munitions, it would have made little difference.

Even the most sophisticated munitions have a circular area of probability, Gard explained, with a certain percentage of shells landing dozens or even hundreds of feet from intended targets. Highly trained artillery commanders know this and compensate for their misses by firing more shells. So if even 10 percent of the shells fired at combatants in Shujaiya landed close to but did not hit their targets — a higher than average rate of accuracy — that would have meant at least 700 lethal shells landing among the civilian population of Shujaiya during the night of July 20 into June 21. And the kill radius of even the most precisely targeted 155-mm shell is 164 feet. Put another way, as Gard said, “precision weapons aren’t all that precise.”

(6) Finally, let’s take Smith’s central claim that ‘less than 5% of the land [of Gaza] was affected’ – and reverse it. If Hamas were to say that less than 0.00005% of Israel had been hit by its rockets – to be fair, it’s a difficult calculation to make because Israel has never fixed its borders and so it’s not possible to determine its area – and that the rest of Israel was ‘disproportionately undamaged’, would Israelis have simply shrugged them off?