WALL STREET JOURNAL
President Biden’s speech in Israel Wednesday told the world two truths it needed to hear: The tragic deaths outside a Gaza hospital were caused by a Palestinian rocket, and the U.S. hasn’t wavered in its solidarity with Israel. The President kept the focus where it should be—on Hamas’s gross violations of the laws of war. These are now being misconstrued to tie Israel’s hands, with consequences for the West at large.
“The world will know that Israel is stronger than ever,” Mr. Biden said, announcing that he will “keep Iron Dome fully supplied” to shoot down rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and ask Congress for an “unprecedented support package.” U.S. support for Israel’s defense will survive Hamas’s propaganda campaign about the hospital blast.
At first the media took Hamas at its word: 500 dead from an Israeli strike. The BBC explained on air that the Israelis “said they are investigating, but it is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike, or several airstrikes.”
Headlines have since changed, but the world received the story essentially as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) put it on Twitter: “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that.” She also blamed Mr. Biden for not coercing Israel into a cease-fire, as Hamas would no doubt like to see.
We can now have confidence that the initial story was false. A White House National Security Council spokesman confirms that its “current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza.” Israeli drone footage and an intercept of a call between Hamas members add to the evidence.
“I am telling you this is the first time we see a missile like this falling, and so that’s why we are saying it belongs to Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” one Hamas member began.
“It’s from us?” the other answered.
“It looks like it. They are saying that the shrapnel from the missile is local shrapnel and not like Israeli shrapnel.”
Video from Al Jazeera, hardly an Israel-friendly source, caught the trajectory of one such rocket. Launched from Gaza, it went badly astray, seemed to shoot off shrapnel, and landed within Gaza right about the time reports emerged of an impact at the hospital.
Hamas blamed the attack on Israel, but its story doesn’t add up. Any observer can now see the hospital is still standing. Instead, the parking lot outside has been hit, with much evidence of fire damage but not the impact crater typical of Israeli airstrikes. The signs point to a long-range rocket from Gaza that fell before using up its accelerant.
Hamas may still call this a success: Its propaganda held up long enough to set the Middle East ablaze. An angry mob took to the Ramallah streets to protest Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, for not doing enough to help Hamas. A mob tried to storm the Israeli embassy in Jordan.
Mr. Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah, who receives more than $1 billion in annual U.S. aid, canceled a meeting with Mr. Biden over the hospital blast. On Wednesday the U.S. intercepted two attack drones targeting an Iraqi air base where U.S. troops are located.
Which brings us to the larger context regarding the laws of war and casualties. There are two bedrock principles in war that civilized nations developed over centuries. The first is that you can’t target civilians. On that standard every Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah rocket attack on Israel is a war crime. They are aimed at cities with the hope of falling on an unlucky cafe or home.
The second principle is proportionality, which is that incidental casualties have to be balanced against the war aims. This is based on the expectation that in any war there will be some innocents killed, but that they must be related to the goals of self-defense. The standard isn’t zero casualties, which is impossible. It’s as few as possible consistent with defeating the enemy.
Yet the Western left has been moving to a standard that any civilian casualties in war are too many. If that is the law of war, then Israel would be denied the right of self-defense to destroy an enemy embedded in schools, mosques or dense urban neighborhoods. Under that standard, no Western nation, including the U.S., would be able to strike back against terrorists if civilians might be killed.
Those aren’t the laws of war; they’re the laws of Western unilateral disarmament. Israel deserves U.S. support for its much-lied-about way of war, in addition to its just cause.
