Kamala Harris Denounces IDF Attack on Hamas Command-and-Control Center

On August 10, the IDF fired three precision missiles at one part of the Al-Tabeen school in Gaza that was being used as a command-and-control center by Hamas. The IDF had a list with the names of 19 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members that it knew were at the center and were killed in the attack. Among those 19 was the military commander of Hamas’ central camps in Gaza. At once, Hamas began issuing its claims as to casualties. First, it did not admit that any part of the school had a military use. It claimed that several of the 19 Hamas combatants the IDF said it had killed at the school had, in fact, been killed weeks before at other locations. Second, Hamas gave out figures to the media that as the day passed were constantly increased without explanation. Hamas said that 50 people had been killed, then 70, then 80, then it stopped at 93.

WATCH: IDF statement regarding the strike on the Al-Taba’een School building in Gaza City

These are the figures, remember, put out by Hamas, which has a long record of lying about civilian casualties. Remember the claim that the IDF had killed “500 civilians” in what Hamas called the “massacre at Jenin”? It turned out that not 500, but 52 people had been killed in Jenin, and at least 45 of them were revealed to be Hamas combatants, not civilians. Then there was Hamas’ report about an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. That turned out to be not an Israeli airstrike, but a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile launched toward Israel, that had misfired and fell to earth inside Gaza, not on the hospital itself, but on a parking lot next to the hospital, killing not 500 people, but 50.

Hamas has a long history of exaggerating civilian casualties, yet when it claimed 50, then 70, then 93 casualties from the IDF’s latest attack on a Hamas command-and-control center, the world accepted these figures without the slightest hesitation, despite Hamas’ long record of exaggerating civilian deaths. The IDF protested that the kind of precision munitions it had used made it extremely unlikely that so many people had been killed. Furthermore, the IDF released before-and-after photos showing that only a small part of the school compound that was being used as a mosque had been hit. The photographs showed that only that area of the prayer hall where men — not women and children — could congregate had been hit.

But the world’s media, and many of its political leaders, from Kamala Harris (as Jihad Watch initially reported here) to Emmanuel Macron to the EU’s Josep Borell, were not about to listen to the IDF’s careful explanation of why the “school” — or one small part of it — was targeted. They didn’t want to hear the IDF’s explanation of what precision munitions were used in the attack, of such small size that they could not possibly have killed as many people as Hamas claims. They paid no attention to the photographic evidence released by the IDF that showed that only one small part of the makeshift mosque in the school compound had been hit. Their minds were made up to engage yet again in Israel-bashing; don’t confuse them with facts.

But let’s for the sake of argument make the worst possible case against the IDF. Let’s assume that there were only 19 casualties from the ranks of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — the ones whose names and photos were released by the IDF. And then, despite the fact that we have no reason to believe Hamas’ figures, given its record of exaggeration, let’s accept the terror group’s figure of a total of 93 people who died at the school compound. Of those 93, at least 19 were known Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants. That leaves 74 dead whom Hamas wants the world to believe, without any evidence, were all civilians, and chiefly “women and children” — even though the IDF has released photographic proof that the part of the prayer hall that was hit was limited to adult males. The civilian-to-combatant ratio would then be 74-to-19, or slightly less than 4:1.

Is that, as Kamala Harris insists, “far too many” civilian casualties? Is she right to demand that such attacks “must stop”? The 4:1 civilian-to-combatant ratio is better than that achieved by the Americans in any war except that in Iraq, where a 3:1 ratio was attained. And it is far better than the 9:1 civilian-to-combatant ratio that the UN itself says is the average ratio attained, on average, in all the wars fought since 1945. So it is wrong to describe the latest attack as causing a “disproportionate” number of civilian casualties.

And again, we must remind ourselves that among those killed there may well have been many more Hamas and PIJ combatants than the nineteen Israel has positively identified. Similarly, the figure of 93 deaths reported by Hamas has not been proved, and if the past is any guide, Hamas is certain to be greatly exaggerating that figure, for the obvious purpose of whipping up an international condemnation of the IDF. It seems to have worked. Israel is indeed being denounced for these “93 deaths of mostly women and children.” But that is no reason for the rest of us to accept Hamas’ claims, or to refuse to listen to the IDF’s meticulous explanation of the target chosen (“a command-and-control center”), the precision weapons used to cause the least collateral damage, and the likely number of casualties, both civilians and combatants, at the school compound being used by Hamas as a military base.

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