In a comprehensive article offering a detailed explanation of how a moral war can be conducted, a U.S. general who oversaw the air campaign in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and a U.S. Army judge advocate officer who served as the Army’s senior law of war advisor sharply criticized The New York Times for its unfounded implication that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had deliberately chosen to permit increased civilian casualties.

Gen. Charles Wald and Geoffrey Corn referred to the New York Times article titled, “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians,” and stated that the information provided by the Times was presented “in a manner designed to lead to an invalid inference: that the IDF’s civilian casualty thresholds were a quota that every attack was designed to meet and, by raising those thresholds, the IDF displayed potentially illegal indifference towards civilian casualties.”

“This is a misrepresentation of the function of civilian casualty thresholds and what the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) demands,” they bluntly declare. “Crucially, civilian casualty thresholds indicate nothing about whether a particular attack does or does not comply with the LOAC proportionality rule.

“An attack falling within the scope of the threshold authority may not be proportional, while one exceeding it may be. Nor does the raising of the threshold mean that every IDF attack caused civilian casualties up to the authorized number,” the pair continued.

“The Times cites examples of IDF strikes that did result in many casualties, but it fails to cite the numerous attack proposals that were canceled or suspended because a commander who could authorize them decided not to do so. Without such balance, the true meaning of this threshold expansion is lost,” the added.

“The article’s implication seems obvious: that the decision to modify these thresholds and expand attack authority at lower levels of command was indicative of an overall disregard for the laws of armed conflict,” they wrote. “But this implication is almost impossible to square with our observations as well as those of a number of military experts who have interacted with the IDF to assess operational and tactical practices.

“As we, together with other retired U.S. military commanders, argued in a JINSA report informed by a fact-finding visit to Israel in which we were briefed by the IDF about their operations: ‘the IDF has carried out its mission to eliminate the Hamas threat with operational and tactical excellence and in overall compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). This occurred despite encountering a complex urban and subterranean battlefield,'” they further noted.

The authors quoted urban warfare expert John Spencer, who asserted, “Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”