Spencer: Israel doing more to protect enemy civilians than any military in history

While anti-Israel activists and anti-Israel organizations charge Israel with committing genocide in Gaza or targeting civilians, the world’s leading urban warfare expert says most people “really don’t know what they are talking about.”

John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum and former chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, was in Birmingham recently to speak to a Birmingham Jewish Federation gathering.

During his presentation, he cut through numerous falsehoods about how Israel has been conducting the war against Hamas since Oct. 7. Israel “is getting criticized when they have done more to protect civilians than any military in history,” he said. And Israel is doing it despite an unprecedented no-win situation that Hamas established in Gaza, fanned by misleading media coverage that accepts Hamas narratives at face value.

In July, he was in Khan Yunis, and though he had studied urban warfare for years, “I was still blown away with what I was seeing on the ground.” He has interviewed everyone from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to soldiers in the field, and has been in Gaza three times since Oct. 7.

In most wars throughout history, urban warfare has come up relatively suddenly. In the case of Gaza, over 15 years Hamas spent billions of dollars and “designed a world for war… unlike any of the other battles in modern history.”

There had already been a lot of misinformation about Gaza spread worldwide, such as it being the most densely-populated place on Earth. “I study cities for a living. It’s not even in the top 200.” Even counting only Gaza City would rank 62^nd.

He compares the Gaza operation to other battles, but what the IDF has faced “no other military has ever faced, in the history of militaries.” In the opening hours of Oct. 7, Hamas launched more rockets toward Israel than were launched in the entirety of the second Lebanese war, “and they never stopped… every one of them a war crime because they can’t distinguish where they are going and they are pointed at Israel’s civilian areas.”

Hamas had also built an extensive network of tunnels to hide in, placing them under civilian areas, even under United Nations installations.

“Most scholars underestimated the tunnels,” he said. “Even Israel underestimated the tunnels,” which now are estimated at roughly 450 miles. “You could go into a tunnel in the north of Gaza and come out in Rafah” at the Southern border. There are tunnels under the river basin separating north and south Gaza, “which they didn’t even think was possible.” Many tunnels were large enough to drive trucks through.

The tunnels were built “beneath the civilian population, on purpose,” he said. They would build a tunnel and put a mosque on top of it, to protect it with a non-military cover.

In Ukraine, there are tunnels that civilians can use to escape Russian bombardment. Hamas will not allow the Gaza civilians into the Gaza tunnels, even though the 2.2 million Gazans could easily fit.

Spencer said the investment in the Gaza tunnels is about $12 million per kilometer, for the sole purpose of military infrastructure.

“Hamas has never said they want self-determination, that they want a two-state solution, that they want equal rights, that they want anything. They have only said their goal in life, and in the afterlife, is the destruction of Israel. How do you fight that? How do you negotiate with that?” he asked.

Each summer, Spencer noted, over 100,000 kids, ages 5 to 18, would go to Hamas summer camps where they learned about fighting Israel, martyrdom and hatred of Israel.

Invasion, not terror attack

The first bit of misinformation about the war, he said, was Oct. 7 itself. “Some people called it a terror attack… by every definition, Oct. 7 was an invasion from a different territory by an invading military” including over 4,000 Hamas members and thousands of civilians, penetrating the border in 20 different locations and targeting civilian sites “as if they were military sites.”

He saw the 45-minute video of raw footage from the Hamas invasion and viewed atrocities he had never seen before in war, “how methodical it was, and what they planned to do.” Not only did Hamas record their exploits, they had guides on the best ways to kill civilians, such as taking tires off cars and rolling them into houses before setting the houses on fire, to increase the toxic smoke.

That day, he said, Hamas was hoping to reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and to incite reactions in Judea and Samaria so the Palestinians in those areas would join the attack. They also hoped for Hezbollah to join, which they did to some extent through rocket fire, but Spencer said it has since been shown that Hezbollah already had prepared for their own Oct. 7-style invasion.

Hamas made preparations to attack communication towers and cameras on Oct. 7. “They methodically blinded Israel so they could do their killing.”

Israel then declared three objectives: Secure the return of the over 250 hostages Hamas took, destroy Hamas and remove them from military and political power, and to ensure that no group from Gaza has the capability to harm Israel in that manner again.

Conversely, Hamas never declared its objective, aside from naming the operation after the liberation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. “I believe they thought they would destroy Israel,” but after Israel started its response, the Hamas objective became to just survive the war, which to them would still mean victory.

To do that, the goal was to “just buy time,” which is why they built the tunnels where, in accordance with history, “they wait long enough and the United States or some international group will stop Israel and say ‘look, we understand you got attacked, you have to stop,’ and Hamas was counting on that.”

Their entire strategy was to get the world to stop Israel, he said, by using their long-prepared battlefield to maximize civilian harm to Gazans and attract world sympathy, and condemnation of Israel.

Spencer said this is Hamas’ “human sacrifice strategy,” which goes beyond the “human shield strategy” of hiding in hospitals and schools and claiming they are protected under the laws of warfare.

The sacrifice strategy is unique, Spencer said. “It’s the only one I’ve ever studied. The Nazis didn’t do this. ISIS, Al-Qaeda — nobody has ever fought a war where they are saying ‘I need as much of my population to die as possible’.”

Critics say Israel is violating international law in its fight against Hamas, but Spencer said “most people don’t know what the law of war says,” and those misunderstandings are being weaponized to use against Israel.

When it comes to the law, there is no magic number of casualties or buildings destroyed, it is whether an operation’s necessity outweighs possible harm to civilians, even more so in a war of survival. “I can use the amount of force necessary to stop these people who are trying to erase me from history.”

Critics also complain about “proportionality,” saying “only” 1200 Israelis were killed, as opposed to 40,000 Gazans, and that is unfair. But one can’t compare the number to the opening salvo of the war, it has to be looked at in reference to the overall goal — ensuring another Oct. 7 can’t happen. Hamas was certainly hoping for far more than 1200 dead on Oct. 7.

Spencer spoke of how in the last couple decades, “civilian harm mitigation steps” have been developed for warfare. “The IDF, despite facing challenges that no one has ever faced, has done more to protect enemy civilians, the population of an enemy, or civilians in general, than any military in the history of war,” including the U.S. and Britain. And he has seen it first-hand.

“I know what the steps are,” he said. “Every time I would visit the IDF in Gaza, the IDF was doing stuff I’d never seen.” Everyone has heard that Israel drops leaflets and evacuates cities, despite the world telling Israel that is impossible. Even after Oct. 7, Israel still did “roof knocking” to warn those inside to leave since the building was a military target. Israel also calls Gazans to persuade them to go to safer locations.

Though Israel takes “immense risks” in trying to minimize civilian casualties, “what you see in the news is the opposite, that Israel is targeting civilians,” he said. “There is not one bit of evidence… TikTok videos are not evidence.”

The second-guessing of Israel by the world “has prolonged this war,” as Hamas tries to get its own civilians killed, and strategically uses the information from Israel’s warnings.

Another problem Israel faced is that there was “never a war where (the civilians) have nowhere to go” and be out of harm’s way. “Thanks to Egypt, which nobody calls out… saying not one refugee can come to our border, Israel had to fight a war where the civilians had nowhere to go,” aside from Israel trying to move them around from where the fighting was most intense.

“If anybody owns the deaths of Gazans, outside of Hamas, it’s the Egyptians,” who could have allowed the setup of a staging area in the vast open spaces of the northern Sinai, instead of building a 30-foot wall to make sure Gazans couldn’t cross.

All of this taken together shows that Israel is facing a war whose circumstances are unprecedented.

He told Netanyahu that historically, only the 1945 battle in Manila has some of the same elements the IDF faces. In that case, the Japanese had 3,000 American and British prisoners of war in the city. Japan had a few months to prepare the city for combat and had about 17,000 soldiers there. There was a directive for no bombing of Manila.

After the U.S. attacked, “about 100,000 civilians died.” Spencer noted that “from history, nobody has ever asked about the civilian to combatant ratio. That’s an Israel question… it’s not even a double standard, it’s an Israeli standard. Nobody has ever asked that question because if we did, it would not go well.”

In Manila, it was actually Japan that was slaughtering the civilians, who they had been starving to ensure that the U.S. would be facing a humanitarian crisis. “Maybe Hamas is a descendant of them.”

Mosul in 2016 was the largest urban battle since World War II. ISIS had two years to prepare the city for the battle and had 3,000 defenders when 100,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi forces attacked. “There is no number” for the civilian to combatant ratio, he said. It took a year for estimates that 50,000 civilians had died. But Hamas has this “magic system” to tell the world “within minutes” how many civilians died in Gaza, and the media dutifully report it as fact.

The Gaza numbers from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health are “not true.” But even using those numbers, as of early November the figure was around 42,000, with no distinction between Hamas fighters and civilians. “That number includes anyone who has died since Oct. 7, no matter what the reason,” including natural deaths, inter-Palestinian fighting such as Hamas “enforcement,” or those killed by errant Hamas rockets. It also includes those who were killed by Israel on Oct. 7 during the Hamas invasion. “It includes people who don’t exist. It includes people who are missing.”

Israel states that about 21,000 combatants have been killed. Even taking Hamas’ numbers at face value, that is a 1 to 1 ration of civilians to combatants, an astonishingly low civilian toll. Mosul was 2.5 to 1, Manila was 6 to 1. And according to the United Nations, in modern warfare, the typical figure is 9 civilians for each combatant.

But he said he does not like to focus on the numbers — it is whether Israel is doing all it can to minimize civilian casualties.

To claim that Israel is causing a genocide “is just perverse,” Spencer said. He noted there are thousands of Hamas war crimes, though.

Also, the charge of starvation is spurious, as Israel is facilitating more food to an enemy population during a battle than any other military in history.

The images of widespread destruction are similar to other wars around the world where the enemy refuses to surrender. Spencer reminded that there is no magic level of destruction that is considered excessive if the military objective has not been met.

“My concern now is that people would ask these questions of any military in the future,” Spencer said. If they do, “we have created a combatant who believes that they can win wars by sacrificing their population, by turning every inch of their land into a human shield.”

He concluded, “it will create more of these situations if we don’t let Israel finish the job.”