On Tuesday, since the below was posted, someone triggered explosions in the pagers of at least 2,800 people in Lebanon and Syria. On Wednesday, the same occurred with hundreds of walkie-talkies and radios. Almost no one in those countries uses such devices for communication except members of Iran’s Hezbollah and other Iran-owned terror groups. There were few deaths but many hundreds of serious injuries, narrowly focused on fighters who have launched or will launch hundreds of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians; every rocket directed at civilians is a war crime. If Israel did sabotage the devices, these grim attacks are its largest operation since the war started, possibly ever. From early reports, it will likely have the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of any war, anywhere, in centuries. It will restore some of the deterrence lost on October 7th. It could result in a full-out war or, after a likely retaliation by Iran’s Hezbollah, the peace deal long sought by the United States.

For personal reasons I haven’t written for a while and I want to summarize where I think we are now. But first, the update of my chart on deaths in Gaza as counted by the Hamas-affiliated Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).  Despite the continual repetition of Big Lies and blood libels about Israel’s conduct of this war, civilian vs. combatant deaths in Gaza (by Hamas’s own count) have been at a ratio of 1:1-2:1, which is low compared to recent wars.

The last systematic account by the UN is the widely cited 2021 Security Council report, “Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict.”  It states, “When explosive weapons were used in populated areas in 2020, a total of 88 percent of those killed and injured were civilians” (p. 3). Most of Israel’s war in Gaza has involved explosives in crowded areas. Due to Hamas’s well documented and self-proclaimed use of civilians as shields, the IDF’s challenge in protecting them has been exceptional. It succeeded by evacuating most crowded areas before bombings.

A new study shows that the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in Gaza is low compared to the Korean, Persian Gulf, and Iraq wars and comparable to the Vietnam and Balkan wars. The same study shows that the number of civilians killed per airstrike bomb according to Hamas is 0.5, approximately one fifth of the number in the 2017 Battle for Mosul or the Russia-Ukraine war. Careful precision bombing is obviously characteristic of what Israel has done in Gaza.

This does not work every time. Rarely, dozens of civilians have been killed in an airstrike, but the overall effort to protect civilians while Hamas systematically endangers them is remarkable. Civilian deaths are tragically part of the cost of every war, but Israel has minimized them, as emphasized by experts on urban warfare such as John Spencer, West Point department head and 25-year infantry veteran, and Colonel Richard Kemp, longtime commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who has often called the IDF the most moral army in the world.

The chart shows a recent Big Lie/blood libel by a different kind of “expert,” Barbara Slavin. In an interview with retired General Kenneth McKenzie, for years the head of US Central Command (which includes the Middle East), she recklessly and falsely claimed “that there are thousands of children that are starving to death” (minute 38). Where she could have gotten this wildly inventive number is (as the King says in The King and I) a puzzlement. There is no famine in Gaza.

Gen. McKenzie’s answer was to squarely blame Hamas for the “great tragedy” of civilian suffering and to state with emphatic clarity, “If you’re asking for moral equivalency from me on this, you’re not going to get it, because I don’t believe they’re morally equivalent.” She went on, laughingly, to point to her audience and say, “Let’s see if somebody has better luck.” Nobody took her up on this attempted manipulation of the question period.

So the lies go on, but fortunately they are rejected by people who matter more. The Iranian empire has surrounded Israel with well-organized, well-funded, and well-armed antisemitic terrorist violence. Iran’s Hamas is largely defeated, but Iran’s Hezbollah is active daily in the north and is much more dangerous. Iran’s Houthis have put an end to 90 percent of shipping in the Red Sea—12 percent of the world’s maritime traffic; they are launching increasingly advanced missiles against Israel from the south, one of which partly broke through its air defenses yesterday.

Iran’s Arab militias as well as Iran’s own elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), operate freely in Syria and Iraq, and in collaboration with Iran’s Yemenite Houthis are right now massing—far from Yemen—for an October-7th-type attack on Israel’s border in the Golan Heights in the northeast. Last but not least, Iran’s spies, money, and weapons are fomenting terrorist violence in the West Bank, and even in Jordan, in Israel’s east.

All these Iranian octopus-arms, which completely surround Israel, have the same declared goal as Iran: to eradicate Israel by eliminative genocide against its Jews, then to move on to mass murder of the Jews around the world, and then to foment revolutions that will establish Islamic states throughout Europe and in the United States. These goals are not inferred, they are stated explicitly and repeatedly by Iran and its slavish clients in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the West Bank.

Israel is strong but it is not invulnerable. It cannot, by itself, repel Iran which, together with its servile non-Iranian armies, is ten times the size of Israel in population and a hundred times in land area. Israel has more advanced arms, but the gap is closing, and the mass effect of less advanced but far more numerous weapons could overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

To survive in the long run, Israel needs the United States, Europe, and moderate Arab countries for military, economic, and moral support. All these allies want Israel to defend itself, but not to the point where there can be no discussion of means and methods. The current government of Israel, contrary to the declared wishes of its own military leaders and Minister of Defense, is driving these friends away.