The cruelty of the attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October and the violence deployed against innocent civilians, including babies, children and elderly people was beyond comprehension. With over 1,400 Israelis killed and over 5,000 injured by the Hamas atrocities, the subsequent outcome of over 6,000 Palestinians allegedly killed by Israeli retaliatory strikes, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, some journalists, commentators and even politicians have made the claim that Israel’s response has been disproportionate.

However, these claims stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what proportionality means within international law.

The rule of proportionality requires that the anticipated loss of human life and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective. Hamas has threatened to destroy the State of Israel and therefore it is entirely legitimate for Israel to define a military objective to destroy Hamas.

It is common for people to believe that proportionality requires that any military response must be with the same degree of force that was used by the enemy. In the case of 7 October, this would require Israel to wait for a music festival to take place in Gaza and then kill some 260 people who attended this festival. It would also mean that the total number of people killed in Gaza in response should be about 1,400 and over 5,000 people should be injured and approximately 200 citizens of Gaza should be kidnapped and held as hostages. And then the response would be proportionate

But this is a complete misunderstanding of the principle of proportionality. Under no circumstances does this principle state that the parties to an ongoing conflict must impose only symmetrical or equivalent harm upon each other. If that was the principle, how would one forgive the disproportionate response of the attacks by the allies in World War Two against the German cities of Dresden and Cologne or the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was the objective associated with these actions, to end the war, that defined whether the number of deaths was proportionate or not and if it violated humanitarian international law.

When planning any kind of action against Hamas, it is understood that this terrorist organisation undertakes military operations from civilian locations, such as private homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques. Israel therefore calculates the potential harm to civilians against the expected military advantage to be gained from the attack and determines whether the attack is proportionate.

It must therefore be understood that when assessing proportionality, this is not a mathematical comparison. Proportionality does not require equality of the number of casualties on both sides. What is relevant is not the final outcome of the battle but the identification of the military objective and the expected losses among civilians as this objective is undertaken.

It is well understood that Hamas deliberately uses Palestinian civilians as human shields and therefore the ultimate responsibility for the death or injury of civilians who are used as a shield for military activities lies with Hamas. However, the likely number of all Palestinian civilian casualties caused by any attack is included by the IDF in its assessment with regard to the objectives of the attack and its proportionality.

Thus, in this war, Hamas displayed exceptional brutality which proved that this terror group is much more dangerous and impervious to the fate of civilians than previously thought. The planned military advantage may therefore be given more weight than in other military operations that Israel has undertaken against Hamas.

Israel’s current military operation has a clear and stated goal. The complete eliminating Hamas, a genocidal terrorist group that perpetrated the unprecedented and deliberate massacre of Israeli civilians including babies, children, women and the elderly some of whom were Holocaust survivors.

Israel’s objective to save the lives of millions of its citizens from another attempted genocide by Hamas is an entirely legitimate, legal and justified by the initiation of a military action intended to achieve this objective.

As this war progressed against such an evil enemy, it is regrettable that the loss of civilian life is inevitable. However, in this case, the fault lies entirely with Hamas which murders Israeli civilians and also hides behind Palestinian civilians. Furthermore, the number of deaths as reported by Hamas cannot be accepted at face value. A terrorist organisation that is prepared to slaughter and butcher babies, children and pregnant women will almost certainly not be concerned about reporting inflated and misleading number of civilians killed by the IDF. The Hamas number of deaths apparently includes the casualties that occurred as a result of the imaginary attack by Israel on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.

We are constantly reminded by many of the news outlets that there are over 2 million civilians living in Gaza and it is the largest prison camp in the world. One only has to look at the topography of the Strip to know that this claim is false. But if Israel was not seeking to avoid civilian casualties or, as some charge, targeting them intentionally, the number of casualties over the past 3 weeks would have been in the tens of thousands if not the hundreds of thousands.

However, the IDF has been internationally recognised as the most moral army in the world and it has gone to extraordinary lengths, not normally witnessed in the history of modern warfare, to avoid civilian casualties sometimes at risk to its own soldiers.

During this war, the IDF has advised Gaza’s civilians to evacuate from certain areas before planned attacks. This kind of warning was never issued by the UK during the war in Afghanistan nor the US before its attacks in Iraq. This action carried out by Israel is not required under international law but is a deliberate action by Israel in to avoid and minimise civilian casualties.

It is important to remember therefore that the fact that there are civilian casualties in an armed conflict, even in significant numbers, does not in itself establish any level of disproportionality or the violation of international law.