Tne NYT’s the Lede had an interesting feature on Israel’s attacks on Gazan smuggling tunnels.
One man interviewed by Mr. Eranger claims that the Israeli military seems to know the difference between the two kinds of tunnels:
Muhammad al-Zarb said that the Israelis somehow seemed to know which tunnels were commercial and which were run by Hamas, and that they seemed to be selective in their bombing. “If someone has a tunnel for Chipsy, it seems O.K.,” he said. “When a Hamas guy has a tunnel for weapons, they bomb it.”
From earlier briefings in Israel, I know the IDF takes an almost absurd degree of care in its targeting. The questioning doesn’t stop with “Is that the right building?” it then asks, “What should be our angle of attack to ensure any rubble falls into the street, not atop the primary school next door?” (Hamas consistently embeds terror facilities among innocent civilians.)
Hitting a terrorist hideout in an apartment building, for example, an F-16 would be armed with the smallest warhead that could do the job. If the terrorists are tucked into rooms on the fourth floor, targeting officers evaluate which window the guided missile should go through to kill the terrorists, while minimizing harm to civilians living below.
Any military veteran can tell that the Israelis are taking enormous care to spare civilians. Given the number of airstrikes thus far and the hundreds of tons of bombs dropped, it remains remarkable that so few innocents have been injured in such a dense urban environment.
So far this post hasn’t said anything new: you knew it all already. Well, in my professional life I deal with complex IT systems, and I’ve given a bit of thought t this issue seen from that perspective:
First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.
Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.
Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.
I hope to get to numerous posts on the relevant international when I have time, but just consider these three accounts when you hear someone talking about the disproportionate Israeli response.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.