John Spencer is one of the world’s preeminent experts on urban warfare. He’s been inside Gaza three times since December, embedded with the Israel Defense Forces, analyzing the war against Hamas from multiple angles. He interviewed the prime minister, the IDF chief of staff, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, “all the way down to soldiers in the field.”
He knows Israel’s critics accuse the Jewish state of conducting the war on Hamas with disproportionate casualties, excessive force, indiscriminate bombing and an alleged campaign to starve the people of Gaza.
That’s not what Spencer saw in Gaza. He saw the IDF doing “harm mitigation at a level that nobody’s ever tried.”
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"Over the course of a decade, Spencer’s research has focused on military operations in such situations as dense urban areas and subterranean warfare, including Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Ukraine and Israel.
The charge that Israel’s response has been disproportionate or indiscriminate is “baseless,” he said.
Each Israeli strike has a “proportionality analysis,” he said, including the threat level and target value, the number of civilians nearby, the ability to act without civilian harm, and potential measures to prevent civilian harm.
Israel takes all of this seriously, he said. “There has been no actual evidence — unless you believe TikTok videos — of Israel targeting civilians, or any prohibited target.”
The accusation that Israel is trying to starve Gazans is also “a big lie,” and “the data does not support the claim.” Israel “has done everything feasible and reasonable to flood Gaza with food.” There are, however, examples where Hamas intercepted aid, sometimes shooting people to get it, then selling it at a high price, he said. “There’s a lot of evidence showing that as well.”
One big problem is that Israel is “horrible at communicating operations to the public,” Spencer said. If he had the ability to change things, he would “assign more resources to winning the battle of narratives on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.”
“Under the social media algorithm-driven confirmation bias, if you had negative ideas about Israel, it’s going to feed you that. Then you’re going to infer what you want.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has tried to make the case throughout 11 months of war with Hamas, including from the podium of his Jerusalem press conference on Wednesday: “We are fighting a just war, with just means,” he said.
The war, Netanyahu insisted, has “the lowest ratio of non-combatants to combatant deaths in urban warfare history.” He added: “We have taken effort that no other military has taken.” He also said Israel has provided Gazans a million tons of aid, 700,000 tons of food, medical aid, and water, among other necessities.
To Spencer, an Israeli win looks like this: Hamas virtually eliminated, Gaza demilitarized, hostages freed — and afterwards, reconstruction and deradicalization. But that’s a ways off yet.
“The enemy had 15 years to prepare to defend the area, meaning it’s going to require a lot of force to overtake the enemy,” he said."
