Many ‘civilians’ killed in Gaza were in fact militants, Israel says

According to the report issued by the Foreign Ministry today on Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the civilian death toll resulted from the conditions in which the fighting took place.

In all armed conflicts, the application of military force almost inevitably causes residual and incidental harm; this is even more so when the hostilities occur in the urban environment. The 2014 Gaza Conflict in particular involved high-intensity, protracted hostilities, including close-quarter combat and intensive urban warfare, exacerbating the risk of harm to civilians within the combat arena.

Such harm was also the direct result of rockets and mortars that were launched towards Israel from within the Gaza Strip but that fell short. Furthermore, much of what may have appeared to external parties to be indiscriminate harm to civilians or purely civilian objects was in fact legitimate attacks against military targets that merely appear civilian but were actually part of the military operations of these terrorist organizations.

Many allegedly “civilian” casualties were in fact militants. Harm to the civilian population also occurred as the result of unfortunate — yet lawful — incidental effects of legitimate military action in the vicinity of civilians and their surroundings, and as a result of the inescapable constraint of commanders not being infallible, intelligence not being perfect and technological systems sometimes failing.