Opinion
When you force people into a ‘safe zone’ then bomb it, ‘whoops’ doesn’t quite cut it
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicWhoops. Perhaps no sentiment in the mouths of Western leaders and their allies is so laden with blood. This week’s iteration comes from Benjamin Netanyahu after Israel’s catastrophic airstrike in Rafah, which set fire to a tent city, incinerating Palestinian civilians who had been specifically told this would be a safe zone.
As I write, the reported death toll is at 45 with some 60 more injured, but that doesn’t begin to tell the story. It’s the manner of it that suffocates.
The remnants ofatent city in Rafah set alight by an Israeli airstrike, burning its inhabitants to death.Credit: AP
“The tents are melting and the people’s bodies are also melting,” said one resident in hospital. “We pulled out children who were in pieces,” said one man who rushed to the scene. “We pulled out young and elderly people. The fire in the camp was unreal.” Whoops.
“Regret” said one Israeli major-general. Or in Netanyahu’s phrase, “something unfortunately went tragically wrong”. Elsewhere in the same speech he blamed a “technical failure”, presumably to be detailed once Israel finishes investigating the incident. But the overall message is clear:
“Unfortunately, in the past day there was a tragic event in which our forces unintentionally harmed non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. This happens in war. We are conducting a thorough inquiry … We will do everything to prevent a recurrence.”
Oh, sorry, that last quote was what Netanyahu said after an Israeli strike killed seven aid workers last month. Whoops.
“This happens in war.” That phrase reveals a little more than intended. Israel tends to offer this as a defence; as a way of categorising such events as sad, yet ultimately unavoidable. These things are not done, they just happen. And war does not happen without them.
There is a sense in which that is true: modern warfare inevitably claims awful numbers of civilian lives. But to stop there is misleading because it masks the choices made along the way – the warnings that are ignored, the risks (and therefore the anticipated consequences) deemed acceptable from the start.
Let me illustrate this with a quite different war: the US-led invasion of Iraq. By any estimation, it claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives. You can say that happens in war, but you also then have to admit politicians chose to take that risk. And then you have to see how they chose to take it: in that case after relying on poor intelligence and a flimsy pretext – both of which they were warned about – to reach a conclusion they were all too eager to reach. And when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction? Whoops.
On this occasion in Rafah, Israel’s account is that it was bombing a Hamas target, but some shrapnel struck a nearby fuel tank, which caught fire and engulfed nearby tents. That’s plausible, and I’m in no position to dispute it. If that is what happened, then Netanyahu is accurate, in a literal sense, to describe it as a “tragic mistake”. But that doesn’t ameliorate Israel’s transgression in the way Netanyahu probably imagines. Instead, it underscores Israel’s culpability.
Displaced Palestinians inspect their tents destroyed by Israeli strikes at a UN facility west of Rafah.Credit: AP
That’s because this is exactly the kind of thing that was always bound to occur in Rafah. It is simply what happens when you instruct a million people to go to a tiny area, thereby creating an environment of impossible population density, then proceed to conduct air strikes on that place. Doubly so if you strike the area you’ve specifically told them will be safe.
This is not hindsight. Israel’s own allies – each fully aware of Hamas’ threat – have foretold this for months. “A military operation into Rafah would be catastrophic,” a joint statement from the prime ministers of Australia, Canada and New Zealand declared in February. “The impacts on Palestinian civilians would be devastating … There is simply nowhere else for civilians to go.”
The following month, the French president told Netanyahu he would consider any forced transfer of people from Rafah to be a “war crime”. But the German chancellor issued perhaps the plainest verdict last month: “We do not believe that there is any approach that would not lead in the end to incredible loss of human life of innocent civilians.” Israel made choices in that context.
If some horror is so obviously predictable, even inevitable, is it really, truly, in the fullest sense, a mistake when it happens? Between the deliberate and the accidental, there is the foreseeable. That is not a place of exoneration or excuse; it’s a place of liability, of guilt. And in the case of catastrophe in Rafah, we’re talking about something not merely foreseeable, but foreseen. Forewarned.
This week’s melting bodies are simply a gruesome version of what Israel’s own allies said would occur, which is why this week they sounded concerned but not surprised. Here’s Anthony Albanese in parliament: “We consistently opposed the ground offensive in Rafah … given that more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were sheltering in Rafah, and were told to go to Rafah where they would be safe.” What new sentiment is in those words?
We need a word for this. We need a word for an inevitable accident. Something whose heft reveals the absurd inadequacy of words like “regret” and “mistake”. Something that leaves no room for “whoops”. Such words ultimately conceal the choices being made, then let you walk away and carry on, much as they did after Iraq: no prevention, no true accountability, just series of tragic mistakes whose consequences are born by anonymous others.
Already there are signs of something similar in this case. President Joe Biden threatened to stop supplying Israel’s weapons so it couldn’t “wage war” in Rafah. Now the White House is saying this only applies if Israel proceeds to “smash into Rafah”, which apparently is something more than we’re seeing.
A piece of shrapnel flying 100 metres from an airstrike: this happens in war. But that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be happening in Rafah. Because if that’s all it takes to unleash a horror like this, the problem is with the strike in the first place.
Israel has stared the likelihood of such tragedy in the face and pressed on willingly. It continues to do so. Accordingly, it buys the result. All of which means very little at all if, after the outrage and condemnation of the moment, none of its allies ultimately care to exact a price.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.
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