There is no comparison between Israel and Hamas.
Hamas is a terror group that butchered 1,200 men, women, and children on October 7, kidnapped another 250, and used its population as human shields.
The IDF innovates a variety of ways to try to warn and evacuate Palestinian civilians so as not to harm them despite Hamas’s human shield strategy.
However, the number of IDF mistakes regarding the UN and humanitarian aid areas is starting to increase and could have strategic consequences for the US, the EU, and international courts.
After a variety of delays to address a polio outbreak in Gaza, the IDF finally started facilitating the mass transfer by the UN and other humanitarian aid groups of vaccines to Gazans.
But recently, the IDF seems to be making mistakes after mistakes, even though past deadly mistakes should have led to extremely precise safeguards to avoid such mistakes.
The IDF still has yet to put out an updated explanation of an incident in which it detained UN officials at gunpoint on Monday night.
However, the IDF made a significant error that almost ended in another tragedy.
Late Monday night, the IDF put out a message that seemed to accuse the UN of having intentionally or unintentionally harbored some terrorists in a caravan of aid trucks.
At that point, the IDF also denied that the aid trucks had anything to do with distributing polio vaccines.
Later, the UN sent a message saying that all its personnel had been freed without adequately explaining why they had been detained.
Further, the UN doubled down that the aid trucks had been transporting polio vaccines.
Suddenly, the IDF went silent on Tuesday, uncharacteristically leaving the UN’s accusations alone with seemingly no counter-narrative.
If there were no terrorists, then the IDF has some explaining to do, and it should do so soon and publicly to show its integrity and rebuild trust.
If this were a one-off incident, it would be more understandable.
However, on August 28, the World Food Program reported that one of its trucks was fired on near an IDF checkpoint.
In this case, the IDF could only say that the incident was being probed.
Two weeks later, the IDF was still silent about the incident.
Unfortunately, there have been many such incidents, and going back to March 31, seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen were mistakenly killed by the IDF when Hamas terrorists had been nearby and suspected of being connected to an aid caravan.
That tragedy was supposed to lead to extremely careful rules when dealing with aid trucks – even if terrorists were involved.
Part of the lesson of the March 31 incident was that the cost of harming aid workers was far larger than the benefit of catching a few low-ranking Hamas terrorists, even if it is infuriating that these terrorists abuse the laws of war and humanitarian aid trucks.
This works into an incident on Tuesday at the al-Mawasi humanitarian zone near Khan Yunis where the IDF said it killed multiple mid-level Hamas commanders and a total of around 11 terrorists, but with reports from Gaza of between 19 or dozens being killed.
There have now anecdotally been at least around a dozen such incidents where it seems clear that some sizable number of civilians were killed in a humanitarian zone, a school, or a mosque and where the IDF target was mid-level or lower Hamas commanders.
From October until May, there was a vital strategic argument for carrying out such air strikes, even at the cost of some civilian casualties, to take apart Hamas’s 24 battalions. But by the end of May or the end of June, Hamas’s battalions had already been taken apart.
That means that the strategic benefit of killing a few more Hamas mid-level commanders is now exceptionally small, even if it was more significant earlier in the war.
In contrast, the cost has skyrocketed due to various US and UK arms pauses and the arrest warrant debate started at the International Criminal Court in May.
Hamas should never get away with such manipulations of the laws of war, but being smart can be far more important than being “right” at this late point in the game.
All of this is without even getting into the many errors of mistaken killed Palestinians in the West Bank, including an elderly man who recently died in custody, allegedly because of a brutal attack, but with no full accounting, and of a Turkish-American activist, whose politics Israel did not like, but who the IDF admits should not have been killed.
It also is that much harder to convince the world, and even US allies, that mistaken deaths are mistakes when the mistakes continue over time and when the world sees a potential nexus between these mistakes and attacks where Israel admits it knowingly killed some civilians to get at some terrorists.
None of this means that Israel needs to halt the war on Hamas. And if Israel finds Gaza Chief Yahya Sinwar, the world will be more understanding about collateral civilian damage.
But just as Israel is changing its operations to better avoid risks to Israeli hostages held by Hamas, its strategic goals are likely furthered more at this point by greater restraint when dealing with suspicions relating to the UN and even when finding confirmed mid or low-level terrorists in humanitarian zones.