Gaza Summary: An investigation into the latest war in Gaza

Guest article by Philip Webber

This guest article is written by Philip Webber, a scientist who has been active with SGR responsible science and its predecessors for over 40 years. He has given expert evidence about nuclear weapons and writes about the dangers of the militarisation of society and continued over-use of fossil fuels. Here he is writing in a personal capacity. This article is based on his two previous ones on this topic: Gaza: one of the most intense bombardments in history? And Gaza: how the West’s weapons are fuelling a catastrophe. Spoiler: Gaza has been the most intense bombardment in history.

The surprise attack by Hamas of 7 October 2023 was followed by an unusually ferocious military response by Israel which continues over a year later. Whilst, at least to start with, there was intense main stream media coverage and political comment, overall, it appeared biased - framed primarily from one side’s perspective: Israel. There were many holes in the narrative we were being given, and important questions that the media did not ask.

From a scientific, journalistic perspective, especially in today’s misinformation age, my advice is: ‘read the original sources of information’. I have used referenced open sources to try to establish a more accurate picture of the assault on Gaza, starting with its scale and targeting. Then, following the old adage of ‘follow the money’, to find out how and who paid for and provided the enormous volume of munitions. Finally, the legal position. Did this assault breach the laws of war? Was this a genocide?

Some context: the Gaza strip is a small area of only 140 square miles. Until recently, it was very heavily populated with around 2.3 million inhabitants who lived in what has been widely described as the world’s largest open-air prison. Its boundaries have been rigidly enforced by air, land and sea by the Israeli military with a complete military blockade since 2007, in breach of multiple UN resolutions. Supplies of food aid, water, electricity and other key materials are tightly controlled by Israel at a small number of checkpoints.

Israel deploys overwhelming military force in the region. Since 2008, Israel has engaged in four major bombing and land assaults, killing many Gaza residents and deliberately destroying housing and agriculture. These campaigns resulted in few Israeli casualties – mostly Israeli military – and did not receive much coverage in the western main media.

On 7 October 2023, a Hamas military brigade launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing at least 340 civilians and seizing some 240 hostages. This was the most lethal attack suffered by Israel for decades. It was a major blow to Israel’s national self-esteem and military superiority.

Western media interest was piqued by Israeli allegations of violent atrocities committed by Hamas fighters involving infants and women. These were widely reported and amplified in the media without question or independent verification.

The scale of the Israeli military response was unusually ferocious, sustained, and continues to this day.

Western mainstream media has reported this latest war largely from an allied perspective – supporting Israel. For example, US President Biden is on the record as saying that “if Israel did not exist, we would have to create it” – meaning that Israel was ‘our’ supposedly democratic bulwark in the Middle East fending off part of what previous presidents had called an ‘axis of evil’.

Typical media coverage presented misleading Israeli framing as fact. Ignorance or bias? For example, whilst often showing coverage of Palestinian suffering, Israel’s framing was not challenged, that this suffering was inevitable as Israel was fighting cowardly Hamas terrorists hiding behind ‘human shields’ or necessary in ‘self-defence’. As I highlight later, it was Israeli policy to deliberately target civilian homes and vital facilities whether or not ‘Hamas’ were inside or ‘in tunnels’. Also, bomb targeting could not and did not reliably or accurately target Hamas militants. Especially in war, self-defence must be proportionate and avoid undue harm to civilian populations to avoid being a war crime. This was anything but proportionate.

But strongly challenging the pro-Israel narrative was the fact that this was the first major conflict to take place where ordinary people – Gazans - subject to intense bombing and artillery fire, had access to mobile phones and the internet and could give their version of events. Ordinary Gazans gave graphic first-hand reports of the deaths of family members, particularly children, widespread injuries and of the widespread destruction of their houses by huge bombs.

In an effort to stop this flood of first-hand atrocity footage, Israel banned any external press from entering and reporting from Gaza and official Israeli media regularly posted their own information releases. Israeli spokespersons had a very simple supposed justification for all their military strikes. With hardly any exception, they said that these strikes were absolutely necessary to hit Hamas targets such as underground tunnels or command centres that, according to Israel, ran for several kilometres under the whole extent of Gaza. However, civilians on the ground routinely denied any such tunnels or command centres in their locations and no independent verification was possible. Israel posted very few photographs of any such tunnels or command centres.

On the other hand, the Israeli military, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) and Defence Forces (IDF), regularly posted – mostly in Hebrew – updates about the numbers of targets they were hitting and the levels of destruction that they were creating with huge air strikes. From the posts of Israel’s own military, it quickly became very clear that this Israeli assault on Gaza was much more intense than any one of the previous cycles of violence going back decades.

Key points:

Up to 20,000 tonnes of bombs dropped within the first month.

The Israel Air Force (IAF) posted that they dropped 6,000 bombs within the first five days together with graphic images of whole residential neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. The intensity of the bombing at 1,200 bombs a day or 50 every hour was higher than any comparable assault in history – for example even more than the most intense periods of the US-led air campaign in Mosul in Iraq in 2016. The tonnage of explosives expended during the first week of bombardment was higher than one year’s use by the USA in Afghanistan! Within the first 33 days – by the end of December 2023 – the IAF announced that they had struck 15,000 targets. This is 430 ‘targets’ a day, consistent with their stated daily target numbers which ranged from 250 to 750 a day.

15,000 - a huge number of locations targeted in the first month

Hitting such a huge number of targets is not consistent with attacking Hamas – some 30,000 men organised in 30 brigades. It does not seem realistic to assume that each one of 15,000 locations bombed included a separate Hamas fighter. More consistent with 15,000 targets is that the IAF did not know where Hamas were concentrated and were hitting any target that they thought might have any possible connection with Hamas. It would be more realistic to describe this bombardment as indiscriminate revenge. In any case, to expend 20,000 tonnes of bombs against a dispersed guerilla force in a densely populated area is both incredibly wasteful of munitions and extremely hazardous for any civilians anywhere near the targets. And the very high civilian casualty rate supports this hypothesis.

Victims of bombing predominantly innocent civilians

The result of the bombing of these initial 15,000 targets was 19,000 dead, including 7,700 children - hundreds of them infants, also 52,000 injured and 8,000 missing – presumed buried under rubble. Over 70% of the dead were women and children. This means that no more than 5,700 of the dead could possibly be men of fighting age – to be charitable maybe 2,500 of these could possibly have been Hamas militants. This means that only one in 6 of the 15,000 ‘targets’ bombed could possibly have successfully killed a Hamas militant – and that the primary result of the first month of bombing was to kill 16,000 innocent civilians and injure a further 60,000. Six civilians killed for every possible alleged Hamas militant killed. This is a very high figure compared to other conflicts.

Both the huge tonnages of bombs dropped from the air and the huge number of targets hit, are consistent, not with a war aim of defeating Hamas militarily, but to undermine support for Hamas by destroying civil infrastructure vital for survival in Gaza and inflicting widespread civilian deaths and injuries. This is in fact a long-standing Israeli strategy called ‘Dahiya’ – see section below.

The incredibly high bombing rate: initially 1,200 bombs a day reducing to around 430 a day within the first month made human legal authorisation and checking impossible.

In other conflicts – for example US forces in Iraq or UK or US forces in Afghanistan, air strikes had to be authorised by senior personnel to confirm a valid military target and significant numbers of civilians would not be harmed.

What we learned later was that the Israeli military were using a computer-generated target list.

Extensive surveillance of civilians across Gaza via interception of mobile phone communications by Israel intelligence was routine and a target list of people loosely ‘linked’ to Hamas was already in existence. During the conflict, regular spy plane overflights, some from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, were used to pinpoint specific mobile phone locations. Some of the people ‘linked’ to Hamas were civil defence workers, local administrators or simply family members who had borrowed a phone – very common in a war zone.

In Gaza only minimal human checking of target selection was possible. Apparently, this meant simply listening in to a phone conversation to check if the user was male.

Such an extensive target list without proper safeguards and legal authorisation meant that high civilian casualties were inevitable. Even worse, the IAF preferred to target alleged Hamas personnel when they were inside their family home as that was a location with known coordinates using an app called ‘where’s daddy’ which then triggered an air or drone strike. This policy inevitably led to high and completely unjustifiable deaths of civilian family members.

The intense assault continues over a year later

After the initial aerial bombardment, the Israeli assault continued, using US-made F-15, F-16 and F-35 aircraft, missiles, up to 75,000 tonnes of munitions including ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ bombs, tank shells, over 50,000 rounds of 105mm shells, fired by howitzers and naval artillery, combined with Israeli ground forces expending literally millions of small arms and mortar rounds, and the extensive use of sniper and surveillance drones.

Apart from Israel’s own arms industry, most of this weaponry is supplied by the USA who over this period made over 100 arms shipments. Other EU nations continued to supply vital parts – for example for the F-35 planes from the UK and provision of military intelligence.

Israel’s military expenditure rose by 260% to $4.7bn a month. The US supplied an additional $14bn of arms on top of its annual military funding of Israel of $3.8bn. Israel became the world’s third highest per capita arms spender – after Qatar and the USA.

By the close of 2024, the result of the use of this huge arsenal on Gaza can only be described as catastrophic. At least 46,000 former inhabitants, mainly civilians, and of these mainly women and including over 17,000 children, had been killed and over 109,000 wounded, 10,000 missing, presumed buried under rubble. Even these terrible figures are likely to be an underestimate. It is more likely that over 76,000 people have been killed according to a Lancet study using accepted methods developed from other war zones. At least 1.9 million people – 80% of the original population are displaced – many multiple times - from direct assaults and 26 Israeli evacuation orders. Many of these people now survive with little shelter and no security in tents in cold and wet conditions with no sanitation or access to medical care, clean water or adequate food. 70 to 80% of commercial facilities, schools, croplands and roads have been destroyed and over half of homes and hospitals. Hospitals that remain as buildings lack water, electricity and basic medicines and dressings, whilst medical staff have been deliberately targeted by drone sniper fire. In July 2024, medical experts estimated that a further 186,000 deaths could result from disease and lack of medical care.

War crimes?

High levels of civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure was not ‘accidental’ – it has been a published part of ‘Dahiya’, Israeli military strategy since 2006.

In the Dahiya strategy, disproportionate and overwhelming force deliberately targets civilian and government infrastructure with the aim of forcing a civilian population to pressurise militant groups to end their rocket firing at Israel – although any significant rocket fire ceased long ago. This policy is consistent both with the very high civilian casualty rates caused by the bombing campaign and the complete destruction of entire residential neighbourhoods reduced to cratered rubble. Later in the conflict, videos emerged posted by Israeli forces themselves, deliberately blowing up universities, health facilities, wells and electricity supplies vital for water desalination and functioning hospitals.

Dahiya breaches several international laws of war by not protecting the lives of civilians, by using disproportionate force and by siege: the deliberate destruction of infrastructure such as water and electricity, vital for survival. Food aid has been deliberately blocked at the few potentially open crossing points into Gaza throughout the war.

Senior doctors who had recently managed to assist in hospitals in Gaza gave chilling testimony to the UK house of Commons that they had been personally targeted by drone fire and they witnessed the deliberate targeting of very young children by sniper drones as they lay injured. US doctors reported multiple cases of children deliberately targeted by sniper bullets to the head. This was not accidental.

There is also evidence that food aid workers and reporters were deliberately targeted. To date at least 148 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed.

The intentions of the Israel government and military at the outset of the Israeli assault, could not have been clearer. Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Knesset member speaking for the Israeli government on 9 October 2023, stated that there would be a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” ie illegally targeting civilians, and that Israel was: “… fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.

Very early in the conflict, over one thousand of the UK’s most senior lawyers and former judges, were very clear that: “we are witnessing clear violations of international humanitarian law… in Gaza.” In a series of letters sent to the British Prime Minister, they highlighted breaches of law committed by Hamas (attacks on unarmed civilians), but went on to state that the Hamas attacks cannot “justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people” or Israel’s “wilful and systematic destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure” … “resulting in crimes against humanity in Gaza.”

At the time, politicians, including former barristers or head of the crown prosecution service (Sir Keir Starmer) used phrases such as ‘the right to self-defence’ and the need to ‘defeat’ or to destroy Hamas. Israeli spokespersons routinely used as justification that Hamas use ‘human shields’ – the civilian population - or that militia were hiding in tunnels or command centres under every possible area in Gaza, under hospitals, in hospitals, schools or in heavily populated apartment blocks. Israeli bombs were always ‘carefully’ or ‘precisely’ targeted.

But these same spokespersons did not mention that whilst there is a right to self-defence, that to be lawful, any actions in self-defence must be proportionate. This is particularly the case when heavily armed military forces are conducting intense warfare using bombs and artillery against civilian areas in an effort to fight a lightly armed essentially guerilla force such as Hamas.

Israel’s spokespersons continued to take a very dismissive and exceptionalist attitude to legal issues in war.

As an example, Israeli lawmakers – members of the ruling Knesset - no less, a year later, called upon the military to destroy food, water and power sources in Gaza, because they regarded the IDF strategy as ineffective in defeating Hamas. This is a very clear statement of encouraging and condoning the commissioning of more war crimes.

Genocide?

Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, stated in October 2023 that Israeli forces may kill 600,000 civilians and repeatedly invoked the Allies’ bombing of German cities such as Dresden in World War Two (WW2) against the Nazi regime in a direct and deliberate comparison in defence of Israel. She argued that if it was OK for UK forces in WW2, it was OK for Israel targeting Hamas in Gaza.

The damage comparison was very apt. By the end of January 2024, a study by US-based academics using satellite radar data measured levels of damage – over 60% of buildings destroyed – comparable to the Allied ‘carpet-bombing’ of the German cities of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg during WW2 in 1943 to 1945. By the close of 2024, the levels of damage in Gaza, far exceeded even this the most extreme carpet-bombing campaigns of WW2 with levels of destruction in the 70-80% range. So, the bombardment of Gaza was the most intense bombardment in history.

It appears in retrospect that the Israeli ambassador was aware of the impact of the extremely destructive air campaign and possible charges of genocide, and was attempting to pre-empt criticism of it.

An accusation of the crime of genocide is a particularly sensitive one for Israel, as the convention was created in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War and Nazi policies leading to the extermination millions of Jewish and other populations in occupied Europe and the killing of one million Armenians in Syria by the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Thus, any allegation of genocide creates an immediate comparison with the killing of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps. Genocide is regarded as the worst possible crime that can be committed by a nation or individuals responsible for commissioning it.

An extensive body of evidence was presented to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa who brought a charge of genocide against Israel. That South Africa, a previous apartheid state brought this case, added additional moral force. In January 2024 the court ruled that there was a plausible case of genocide to investigate and called for an immediate halt to the blocking of emergency food, medical and emergency shelters.

Israel did not comply with this request, accused the ICJ of being antisemitic and accused the UN Refugee and Welfare Agency (UNRWA), a vital source of humanitarian aid inside Gaza, of including Hamas fighters. No evidence of this was given, but this claim acted both to distract from the ICJ ruling and to cause several countries, including the UK to immediately suspend UNRWA funding.

The Court also issued an immediate ruling ordering Israel to take “all measures” to avoid inflicting bodily or mental harm on the Palestinian people, prevent and punish incitement to commit genocide by Israel’s officials, enable humanitarian aid, and report back to the Court on its progress within one month. This request was ignored.

The UK and US then responded with hypocrisy. Having recently welcomed an ICJ case against President Putin of the Russian Federation, they called for his arrest and brought in far-reaching sanctions. But because Israel was seen as an important ally, the case against it was dismissed by then-UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron as “bandying around terms” and by US secretary of State Blinken as ‘meritless’.

The ICJ ruling was then joined by Spain, Ireland, Mexico and Norway who were also accused of being antisemitic. Presumably the other 146 nations recognising the state of Palestine – out of 193 UN nations – are also antisemitic.

Finally, the International Criminal Court – which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting war crimes by individuals – issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity for the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, citing crimes of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and extermination. Warrants for arrest were also issued for three Hamas leaders for crimes of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and sexual violence, and torture. The three Hamas leaders are now all deceased, having been killed by Israel.

I sense, however, that there has been a gradual shift in reporting of the continuing deaths, injuries and Israeli bombardment. During December 2024, three reports came out concluding that Israel was guilty of genocide.

Amnesty International: ‘Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza’ and ‘For over a year, the world has been bearing witness to unfathomable levels of death and destruction in the occupied Gaza Strip.’; Human Rights Watch: ‘Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza’; UN Special Committee: ‘Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war’.

Conclusion

Prospects for any kind of peace look extremely bleak. Speaking as a UK national, I am disgusted by the UK government’s continuing refusal to be honest about the ongoing human atrocity that is Gaza, whilst mouthing meaningless ‘support’ for a two-state solution and continuing to export UK-made vital parts for Israel’s F-35 jets.

There is a long-standing Arab Peace Initiative, which offers recognition of Israel’s right to exist and secure borders as long as a two-state solution is agreed upon, based on the pre-1967 borders, along with Israel’s recognition of the State of Palestine. Clearly this could only be possible after a total and permanent ceasefire, massive humanitarian assistance, and the start of reconstruction in Gaza.

None of this can happen because Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, and a majority of his cabinet, categorically reject recognition of the State of Palestine and see this latest conflict as a once in a lifetime opportunity to redraw the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel’s favour. Hence invading Lebanon and bombing Syria. Israel’s ultimate aim appears to be to remove Palestinians from large areas of Gaza and settle it. As such, peace seems ever more distant.

Even if there was a radical shift in the stance of Israel and neighbouring states, the horrific level of deaths, injuries and damage incurred so far would take generations to unpick in what would need to be a heroic peace process lasting generations.

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Thank you for reading this guest article. You can follow Philip Webber on Bluesky @philwebber.bsky.social

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