Their simplistic story of Israeli malevolence was hopelessly complicated by the facts.
The impulsive reaction of Israel’s reflexive critics to an Israeli air strike inside Rafah over the weekend illustrates the folly in lending too much credence to the news that emerges from the imperfect information environment of the battlefield.
Over the weekend, local officials inside Hamas-controlled Gaza described a “horrifying” scene in which an Israeli strike on a refugee encampment near Rafah killed dozens of civilians. Israeli-government officials describe the incident as “tragic” and a “mistake” owing to the fog of war, though Jerusalem continues to investigate the event.
The strike was initially said to have targeted “displaced Palestinians at a tent camp in Rafah,” which may constitute a “violation of President Biden’s ‘red line,’” Axios journalist Barak Ravid reported. Still, the Biden administration reserved judgment. The White House’s failure to lunge for the least charitable explanation for Israel’s conduct was quickly deemed a betrayal of his own policy preferences.
“Will anything that Israel does cross that line? Or is this a line that is infinitely movable,” asked Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth. Biden dithered, the Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom snarked, gathering “the best and brightest minds to debate whether or not this was an acceptable number of displaced children burned alive in their tent camp.” New York Times reporter Peter Baker relayed a conspiracy theory he hears peddled by “White House officials” who allege that the Israeli government’s recklessness was designed to “sabotage the president’s reelection campaign.”
In the intervening hours, however, a simplistic story centered on Israeli perfidy and malevolence became hopelessly complicated by the facts of the matter.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces maintains that the strike, in which at least 45 are believed to have been killed, involved the deployment of the “smallest munition our jets can use” and suggested that secondary explosions were responsible for the excessive collateral damage. The IDF subsequently produced audio of an intercepted phone conversation between two Gazans who substantiated the Israeli claim. “All of the ammunition started exploding,” one observed. When asked if the ammunition was “ours,” the speaker emphatically confirmed that it was. “Yes, this is an ammunition warehouse,” he continued. Both subjects concur that the “Jewish bombing wasn’t strong” and there were “a lot of secondary explosions.”
Israel’s critics are unlikely to take the IDF’s word or the evidence in support of it at face value. But that circumspection seems never to apply to the claims retailed by Gaza-based Palestinians. In the hours since that controversial Rafah strike, the IDF has maintained its tempo of operations in Rafah. On Tuesday, another 21 Gazans were killed and many more wounded in what local authorities claim was an Israeli artillery strike on a civilian tent encampment. But the IDF maintains that it executed no strikes anywhere near a humanitarian corridor where displaced Rafah residents are taking shelter — a detail even the Washington Post later confirmed. “Witnesses said the strikes occurred just south of the humanitarian zone,” it reported tersely.
No one in a position of authority disputes that the fire in the Rafah camp was anything other than a tragedy of the sort that is lamentably common in warfare. Israel’s critics routinely cast their own credibility in doubt, however, by racing to attribute Israel’s actions to the malice fueling its eliminationist campaign in the Gaza Strip. That tidy narrative rarely survives closer inspection, but its advocates seem never to reexamine their priors.