UK General: The IDF ‘Doing All It Can to Save Civilians’

Nearly two years ago, General John McColl, a 38-year veteran of the British army, and a former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, visited Gaza, along with six of his colleagues from NATO, to see for himself how the IDF was conducting its war against Hamas. His observations do not date, and deserve to be republished, along with the findings of other truth-tellers such as Professor John Spencer of West Point and British Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. More on General John McColl’s report from September 2024 can be found here: “I fought in Iraq — I know Israel’s doing all it can to save civilians,” by General Sir John McColl, The Times, September 11, 2024:

…Last week I visited Israel with a team of military experts from six Nato countries to see for myself. As a career officer, I served for 38 years in the British Army and have been in combat in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was deputy supreme allied commander of Nato.

I have seen war and know how difficult it can be to minimise civilian casualties. But I also know how hard we worked to do just that with our soldiers’ clear rules of engagement. Mistakes were made, but thankfully they were few and far between.

Basing my views about the Israel-Hamas war on UK media coverage, I arrived in Israel critical and sceptical of their military operations….

Our briefings on IDF operations came from senior field commanders and also included time in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, observing troops in action.

The IDF said 1,500 aid trucks were flowing into the Gaza Strip but drone footage appeared to show Hamas intercepting supplies at gunpoint.

Firstly let me say that what we, military observers with decades of combined experience in leading Nato armies, were told and saw was the most complex and demanding operational environment any of us had come across, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The IDF commanders explained that underneath Gaza they have discovered 125 miles of tunnels, but believe that there could be in excess of 310 miles. The areas they have cleared have tunnel shaft entrances in houses, in children’s bedrooms, mosques, schools and hospitals. The tunnels are used for fighters to move around the urban areas, appearing behind and on the flanks of troops. Suicide bombers are a constant threat. Many of the houses and tunnel entrances are booby-trapped and civilians are used by Hamas as human shields.

It means that in the confusion, regrettably, errors will occur. But the real problem is whether soldiers’ rules of engagement adhere to the law of armed conflict, whether they are being applied strictly, and whether when mistakes occur they are investigated thoroughly.

Our briefing from the independent military legal directorate laid out in detail the rules designed to protect civilian life. The procedures are at least as rigorous as those applied in the UK armed forces. In addition, the Israeli military carries out civilian evacuations of war zones, forgoing the element of surprise, to which it would be entitled in armed conflict.

Phone calls and text messages to Gazan residents, loudhailers [loudspeakers], leaflet drops and “knocking” on the roofs of targeted buildings with small non-lethal munitions to warn of an imminent strike are part of the IDF’s tactics to minimise civilian casualties

In fact, the tremendous scope of the IDF’s efforts at “civilian death mitigation” needs to be stressed. By March 2024, the IDF had already dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, and made millions of robocalls. Imagine how many more millions of such warnings about sites soon to be targeted have been made in the more than two years since.

Since General McColl published this report in The Times of London two years ago, much of the world has turned even more against Israel, refusing to recognize all the ways the IDF tries to minimize casualties and Hamas tries to maximize them. Hamas figures on casualties, lumping both combatant and civilian deaths together, are uncritically accepted, while the IDF figures, that show a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of less than 2:1, while in all the wars fought since World War II that ratio has on average been 9:1 — In Iraq the Americans managed to get it down 4:1 — are simply ignored.

We need to listen to the military men who have actually gone to Gaza to see how the IDF conducts itself. These people include General Sir John McColl and British Colonel Richard Kemp, as well as one of the world’s leading scholars of urban warfare, West Point Professor John Spencer. These are three of the men who have kept their minds clear, amidst so much hysteria and hate being directed at the Jewish state.