The West must urge Israel to consider restraint as well as retribution

According to the Israeli defence minister, his country, unlike Hamas, doesn’t shoot civilians. Yoav Gallant has advised residents of Gaza City to evacuate and move elsewhere because the Israel Defence Forces don’t wish to harm them.

The sentiment is laudable in the sense that it stands in stark contrast to the random, unprovoked barbarity of Hamas, which was unleashed a week ago without warning let alone an opportunity for Israeli families to flee to some kind of safety.

Nonetheless, the IDF order, which is what it amounts to, that more than 1 million people move across the country within 24 hours, with nowhere to go and with a shortage of fuel, electricity and water, is simply impossible. The United Nations has declared it so, and common sense suggests it is utterly impractical: imagine the entire population of Birmingham being ordered to depart the city by the end of the following day, but without transportation to help, or shelter to go to. It cannot be done.

The rubble and chaos are already impeding the exodus. How will families without cars or the fuel to put into them get away from the imminent destruction that is about to be visited upon them? How will the sick and the vulnerable reach (relative) safety? What do they do if Hamas tells them not to travel?

Meanwhile, the bombardment continues. The Israeli threat to “raze” parts of Gaza wasn’t an idle one. Many Palestinians that remain will be killed in bombardment and by incoming troops; the ones that make it south may die of disease and malnutrition. This is a siege, after all.

The IDF say they do not wish to harm civilians, but a humanitarian disaster on a vast scale is inevitable. It is certainly hard to see such a policy as consistent with international conventions on the treatment of civilian populations in war. The consequences will be devastating.

There might be some kind of justification for such a policy in a time of war, because all nations have a right to self-defence, and in wars civilians do get hurt. But that only has any force if it had any chance of success; if it allowed Israel to secure its stated objective – a welcome one – of destroying Hamas’s bases and eradicating it.

Hamas is at war with Israel, and it is dedicated to the murder of Jewish people and the establishment of an Islamic state under Sharia law, as well as the destruction of Israel. This is why the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, refers to it as “Gaza’s Isis”, and wants it treated with the same ruthlessness.

But it won’t work. The aim of the evacuation is apparently to separate Hamas from the civilian population. It might be possible to identify and destroy some Hamas training camps and infrastructure as a result, but Hamas is really much more than that: it is a body of jihadist fighters, and they are not going to oblige the Israelis by engaging them in open conventional warfare with no civilians around. Most of the militants, their commanders and their hostages will be moving to safer places. Hamas will continue to use 2.2 million Palestinians as human shields.

Every military incursion of this type by Israel over many decades has failed to make the state safer. If ruthlessness and the use of massive military force in the occupied territories and in Lebanon were the key to peace, then Israel would be the most secure and serene place on earth.

Pulverising and starving the civilian population of Gaza won’t defeat Hamas, because Hamas, like its Iranian mentors, has no interest in the welfare of the Palestinian people. Just as Hezbollah on the West Bank and in southern Lebanon does, Hamas weaponises the grievances and sufferings of the Palestinian people for its own ends. It seeks to recruit from those dispossessed, bereaved and brutalised by war. Israel should not make it easier for it to do so.

When civilians leave Gaza City, and the Israeli tanks roll in, the cowardly Hamas will be long gone, leaving it to ill-equipped Palestinian youths to fight the rearguard action. How long will Israel want to be in charge of piles of rubble, burnt-out cars, starving civilians and the unburied dead?

The attacks on Israel only a few days ago provoked an enormous outpouring of emotion and support across the world. The Hamas terror served to prove what an existential threat Israel’s population have to live with, and how vulnerable they are. Half a century ago, in the Yom Kippur war, Israel’s neighbours – Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq – combined to try to occupy and abolish the state, with unthinkable consequences had they succeeded.

They failed, and in the succeeding decades Israel managed to conclude peace treaties with many of its historic enemies. Those settlements have prevented any repetition of the events of 1973, but they are endangered by Israel’s tactics in this latest conflict.

This, of course, suits Iran’s geopolitical ambitions, as does having Israel bogged down in a war over the rubble of Gaza and, potentially, plagued by incursions to the north and from the West Bank. America and the West will always have Israel’s back, but her allies cannot bring the sense of security and stability that Israel deserves.

The West, then, should urge Israel to reconsider its tactics, in the spirit of a candid friend. Such advice is made all the more urgent by the looming prospect of the Gaza conflict turning into a humanitarian disaster and then a large-scale refugee crisis.

If a million people are on the move, and then trapped awaiting their own destruction, the chances must be that they will find a way to break out into Egypt. From there, they may end up in Greece or in Libya, and thence travel to Italy. Gaza is not just Israel’s problem, and Israel’s friends have a right to expect it to listen to them, too.