War on Gaza: How Palestinian lives are reduced to a series of grotesque calculations

That military action was authorised with reference to the norm of “responsibility to protect”, which states that the international community should step in when civilians’ lives are threatened.

In Gaza, where more than two million people have been deliberately starved amid relentless Israeli bombardment since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, we have seen a campaign of genocide replete with sexual violence, mass graves, detainees paraded in their underwear, the bombing of schools and hospitals and mass displacement.

We have also seen the last nail in the coffin of the idea of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect.

Given the unbelievable atrocities in Gaza, we can ask: was the notion of responsibility to protect always a flimsy liberal veil over the US-led military imperial project?

If the project to normalise civilian protection in conflict was a genuine attempt to harness US-led military power for ethical ends, then are Palestinians in Gaza not human?

In my book on the Libya intervention, I argue that the language of ethics and civilian protection obscures the racist violence at the heart of the liberal empire, which permits violence against illegitimate “others” at the border of the empire in order to protect the lives of legitimate subjects within it.

Cruel ratio

In the case of Libya, military action was mobilised to further secure Europe’s southern borders after Gaddafi threatened to disrupt the established order of EU border violence, which had for years consigned migratory flows to undemocratic regimes in North Africa.

The preferred method of liberal intervention of aerial bombing – in Libya as in Kosovo in 1999 – points to the racist core of liberal militarism, which places the value of western lives many times higher than those they are purportedly trying to save. Nowhere is that imbalance so stark as in Israel and Palestine.

The latest Israeli war on Gaza exposes the cruel ratio of Israeli militarism. Behind the Israeli bombardment of the tiny territory of Gaza lies a series of indescribably grotesque calculations about the value of Palestinian versus Israeli lives.

Over decades of Israeli military occupation, followed by a strict blockade of Gaza, the Israeli government has built a comprehensive vision of the tiny enclave, amounting to what one analyst calls “as close to perfect intelligence as possible in a modern combat environment”.

As a result of this near-perfect real-time surveillance of Gaza, alongside knowledge of the underground bunker network that Israeli contractors helped build, Israeli forces know precisely how many civilians will be killed in each strike.

With its acquiescence to such Israeli brutality, the international community has overseen the death of the idea of ‘responsibility to protect’ in Gaza

Given this, how many Palestinian civilian deaths does the Israeli government deem acceptable in its overall military goal of eliminating Hamas in Gaza? How many Palestinians can be killed to secure an Israeli life? How many can be sacrificed for the targeting of each Hamas leader or each low-level Hamas fighter?

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that there is a historically low civilian-to-combatant death ratio of one-to-one, an investigation by the UN Human Rights Office into identified victims in Gaza found that the ages most represented among the dead were between five and nine years old and that nearly 70 percent of those killed were women and children.

At the same time, Israeli officials have claimed that there are “no innocent civilians” in Gaza, that the “entire nation” is responsible for the 7 October atrocities, that Palestinians are “human animals” and that Gaza needs to be “erased from the face of the Earth” – statements with clear genocidal implications.

This brutality plays out in individual strikes where civilian deaths are calculated and authorised, such as the precision strike on al-Maghazi refugee camp that killed 10 children who were playing football. Amnesty International referred this and two other strikes to the International Criminal Court as potential war crimes.

Asymmetric warfare

Five adult men were reportedly killed in the strike on al-Maghazi, resulting in a two-to-one ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths – if it is assumed that all five men were Hamas fighters. Amnesty’s investigation, however, found that the men killed included “a barber, a falafel seller, a dental assistant, a football coach and an older man with a disability”.

Even if one or two of these men were also low-level Hamas fighters, which is possible, then the ratio could be between seven and 15 civilians for one combatant. This fits with Israeli sources stating that ratios of 15 or 20 civilians were permitted for one low-level Hamas fighter. The children’s deaths become part of the cruel ratios of Israel’s war.

In one of the worst single strikes of the war, at least 120 Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel bombed Jabalia refugee camp on 31 October 2023. More than half of the victims were reportedly children, along with 22 women and seven civilian hostages. The strike also killed Hamas military commander Ibrahim Biari, with an ultimate ratio of more than 100 civilian deaths for one high-level commander.

An Israeli military spokesperson said after the Jabalia massacre that the operation’s military aim had been achieved. This appalling toll seems to corroborate information from Israeli military sources that civilian-to-combatant ratios of up to 100-to-one were permissible for high-level Hamas commanders.

In contrast, the US military’s accepted ratio for Osama bin Laden was 30-to-one.

The horrific war in Gaza over the past 15 months exposes the racist core of the project of liberal intervention: that the lives of westerners and the political interests of the western world will always trump black and brown lives in the periphery – no matter how egregious the atrocities visited upon them.

Israel has showcased the cruel ratios of asymmetric warfare with its near-perfect surveillance capabilities, massive aerial power and AI-generated targets, wherein Palestinian civilian deaths are precisely calculated and authorised prior to the deployment of force.

These advanced capabilities have not yet enabled Israel to defeat Hamas, but they have helped to achieve the Israeli right’s aim of destroying the possibility of meaningful Palestinian life in Gaza. And with its acquiescence to such Israeli brutality, the international community has overseen the death of the idea of “responsibility to protect” in Gaza.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.