IDF striking schools in Gaza: Made sense before, not anymore - this is why

If you look objectively at the black-and-white laws of war, there is no question that there are some circumstances where a military can attack a school or a place of worship if enemy forces are using it for military purposes.

This has been Israel’s mantra when explaining to the world why it has the right to target dozens, if not some hundreds, of schools and other civilian locations in Gaza: Hamas is using them, so Jerusalem can target them.

Of course, there are questions of proportionality. An army cannot blow up a school that houses 20 civilians to kill one low-grade terrorist.

But the legal principle that the IDF – at least as a matter of law – can kill terrorists in such locations if the proportional balance of terrorists to civilians is reasonable, remains unimpeachable.

However, the law is only the first prong of analyzing such a military action.

Even if the operation is legal, maybe the more important question is: Do the broader benefits outweigh the costs?

If the answer to that question in the war’s early months, and maybe even at least until defeating Hamas in Khan Yunis by early February, was an emphatic ‘yes,’ at some point, it probably shifted to a ‘no’, and by May, it probably shifted to an emphatic ‘no.’

Until February, the IDF needed to erase October 7 from Hamas’s and its other enemies’ worldview as a paradigm for a helpless and weak Israel.

The IDF needed to make it clear to its enemies that Hamas was defeated as a national military organization, that it could take control of any area of Gaza at will, and that any enemy who made a similar mistake of going too far could face the same scenes of military defeat and destruction.

In order to do that, the IDF had to defeat Hamas’s two most powerful arms, its northern Gaza battalions and its Khan Yunis battalions.

Also, defeating Hamas in northern Gaza led to a return of over 100 hostages, and there was a real chance that defeating Hamas in Khan Yunis might lead to another hostage deal.

In order to do that, the IDF could not allow Hamas to conceal itself among human shields in civilian locations.

Anywhere in northern Gaza and Khan Yunis where Hamas hid, the IDF needed to attack it as long as proportionality was followed, even if it meant ancillary civilian casualties sometimes.

The only path forward to defeat Hamas 

This was the only way to dismantle Hamas’s battalions.

Also, Israel had strong and consistent US backing and did not yet face significant intervention from international courts until December and, to some extent, until mid-late March.

Israel made several errors in March, such as mistakenly killing seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen organization.

There is an ongoing debate among top defense officials about how necessary it was for the IDF to invade Rafah, though most are happy that the IDF took over the Philadelphi Corridor.

In any case, as soon as Israel invaded Rafah, the Biden administration froze some weapons sales publicly, the International Criminal Court Prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a variety of Israeli allies started discussions about sanctions or at least weapons sales freezes.

Why did everything shift so much? It could be Hamas’s Health Ministry reporting 30,000, then 35,000, then 40,000 Palestinian civilians dead and over 90,000 wounded.

Israel can absolutely reduce those numbers by noting that 16,000 or more were probably Hamas terrorists and maybe that the number of dead is 5,000–10,000 less, given that at least one UN organization admitted in May that they had collected 10,000 bodies fewer than the death count so far.

But in the best-case scenario, Israel probably still killed 15,000 civilians, and the number could easily be closer to 25,000.

At those numbers, Israel has essentially no allies who will continue to support strikes that kill a mix of terrorists and civilians. Each strike makes more arms embargoes, war crimes charges, and broader sanctions more likely.

Moreover, it has become abundantly clear that invading Rafah did not break Hamas much more than invading northern Gaza and Khan Yunis. Each time Hamas is attacked it does lose some forces, but it has a significant number hiding and waiting to strike, holding out until Israel’s attention from “mowing the grass” in Gaza fades.

So attacking one more school and killing 20 more terrorists is not going to make a large difference in the broader goal of getting the hostages back or bringing an end to Hamas’s political identity.

And while the IDF legal division finally started to make some headlines after 10 months, there is still almost no information about its 300 operational probes, nor is there much more about its 135 accelerated criminal and operational probes. Aside from a few indictments from Sde Teiman, Israel has presented little to the world to assuage its doubts about Israeli justice, even regarding high-profile cases like the mistaken killing of Reuters journalists in Lebanon back in October 2023.

The bottom line is that by May, if not by February, the costs to Israel’s legitimacy of killing mixes of terrorists and civilians – even if legally permissible – have likely shifted to become not worthwhile given the negligible impact that each incident has on achieving the war’s broader goals.

The sooner the IDF shifts strategies, the sooner it can start the process of restoring Israeli legitimacy and cutting off the threat of arms embargoes, global war crimes prosecutions, and sanctions.