US pressure on IDF results in significant casualty increase

The rate of IDF deaths has increased as a result, all to please the Bidenites.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

Recently, The Guardian ran a story with interviews of IDF soldiers that they hoped would make Israel look bad; the result was quite the contrary: “The @Guardian lies to spin IDF soldiers as monsters – but they show that the @IDF remains the most moral army in the world,” Elder of Ziyon, February 9, 2024:

Similarly, the newspaper makes the unfounded “suggestion” that the IDF uses massive firepower unnecessarily, and this kills many civilians….

How do reporters from The Guardian know that the IDF “unnecessarily uses massive firepower? Who decides what is “unnecessary”? The IDF is fighting a war for the survival of the Jewish state, against an enemy that uses civilians as human shields, embedding both its weapons and its operatives in civilian areas, including in large buildings.

Having done everything conceivable to get civilians to leave, the IDF levels those buildings that it has good reason to believe have been emptied of civilians, destroying huge caches of weapons, command-and-control centers, and Hamas terrorists determined not to flee but to remain and fight.

Is what The Guardian describes as the IDF’s “massive firepower” anything like the “massive firepower” that the Americans used in their campaign in the Gulf War to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait, or in their later wars to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and ISIS in Iraq and Syria?

There is no comparison; the American firepower was in each of these campaigns many times more powerful than what the IDF has brought to bear in Gaza.

One soldier from the special forces Duvdevan unit said his unit had only encountered Hamas militants on three occasions during six weeks in north Gaza, from where the majority of civilians were ordered to evacuate early in the war….

His special forces unit had in six weeks in northern Gaza encountered Hamas terrorists only on three occasions. Many of the rest must have fled south, or been hiding in the tunnels.

Not one civilian was identified as being killed in these two testimonies – but the Guardian says that the huge response to Hamas attacks is responsible for civilian deaths. Without a single shred of proof….

How many civilian deaths were due to Hamas enforcers firing on civilians to prevent them from fleeing, so that they were forced to remain as human shields?

How many civilians have died as a result of Hamas missiles falling short in Gaza and hitting people on the ground?

Shouldn’t Hamas be the one to hold responsible for civilian deaths, for it has always embedded its men and weapons in civilian areas and buildings, and keeps those civilians from escaping to the safe areas set out by the IDF?

[Another] described how a relatively light injury to a fellow soldier triggered a “massive response”.

“We just took down the whole area where we thought the shooter was,” he said….

The IDF has a right to fire back when fired upon; it hardly matters whether a Hamas terrorist’s fire resulted in an IDF soldier being killed or suffering only a light wound.

The Hamas fighter, had he at that point not been neutralized, might have fired again, this time managing to kill an IDF soldier.

The IDF is not required to hold its fire if one of its soldiers has “only” suffered a light wound. If the IDF is sure that all civilians have left the building from where the shots were fired, it is allowed by the laws of war to destroy the building.

Nothing in the laws of armed conflict proscribe these actions. Every army would do the same thing.

The most outrageous part of The Guardian report was when one soldier says that IDF troops died for no reason to make Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken happy:

Another special forces soldier said that advances were “done properly” during the early stages of the war.

“We had everything we needed and all in the right order. First airstrikes and artillery, then the tanks, and only then the foot soldiers. By the time we got somewhere, there wasn’t much left,” he said.’’

The soldier said that more recently, following US pressure to minimise civilian casualties, tactics had changed. “Now the infantry are going in alongside the tanks and that’s why they are getting killed,” he said.

IDF soldiers are putting themselves in danger, and being killed, to please the US. That is sickening and damning.

The Biden-Blinken administration put pressure on Israel to rely less on airstrikes, and more on infantry, so as to lessen the number of civilian casualties.

Israel complied, and the result is that instead of being sent in only after a site had been thoroughly pulverized first by airstrikes, then artillery, then tank fire, the infantry is now being sent in alongside the tanks, greatly increasing their vulnerability to fire.

The rate of IDF deaths has increased as a result, all to please the Bidenites.

Even though these soldiers were interviewed anonymously, not one of them gave any indication of the IDF not performing its duties properly, fully in accordance with the laws of armed conflict. (If one did, we know the Guardian would have featured that testimony in paragraph 1.)

Clearly the newspaper was hoping to find soldiers among dozens interviewed who would angrily claim that his commanders or comrades were wantonly shooting women and children, as Hamas and Hamas supporters claim happens daily.

They couldn’t find one….

The Guardian reporters came up empty, in their attempt to elicit from interviews with IDF soldiers evidence of war crimes. Not one of the soldiers interviewed suggested that there was anything like that.

They had not seen, in their battles, any sign of the “dead women and children” that Hamas keeps insisting are the “main victims” of the “genocidal” Israelis.

Perhaps The Guardian should instead be interviewing the leaders of Hamas, asking for their evidence that the IDF has been deliberately killing women and children.