Rahul Bedi 
Chandigarh: The indiscriminate, relentless and above all, unopposed aerial bombing of Gaza over the past 80-odd days by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can be likened to hunting big game in a zoo or game reserve. It exceeds the ghastly redux of what Israel’s backers – the US and Britain – executed during the months leading up to the end of the second world war, by carpet bombing the German city of Dresden and, like Gaza, reducing it to rubble.
At the time, four consecutive raids between February 13-15, 1945 by 772 Royal Air Force (RAF) heavy bombers and 527 of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of ordnance and incendiary devices on Dresden, capital of the German state of Saxony, killing over 25,000 people. Like the RAF and the USAAF, the IDF, nearly eight decades later faced no airborne resistance in fulfilling its blood lust by raining death and destruction on an industrial scale, largely upon a civilian population.
Subsequent reports and analyses “justified” the Dresden bombings, much like the IDF is trying to do today, on grounds of strategic and political exigency. But, over intervening years ,jurists and human rights activists had maintained that indiscriminately pounding Dresden constituted a heinous war crime, as the ongoing bombing of Gaza was already being defined almost daily in world capitals, including London and Washington, by millions of protesting citizens.
Since October 7, the IDF, according to the US’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessments, had conducted strategic bombing missions over Gaza, dropping over 29,000 tonnes of air-to-ground munitions across a 365 sq. km area, or nearly 80 lbs of killer ordnance per sq. km. This was aimed egregiously into the world’s most densely populated region that includes eight refugee camps and a population density of 6,507 persons per sq. km.
Consequently, these unremitting IDF air strikes have significantly added to the overall Palestinian death toll, which currently totals around 21,000 people, including some 6,000 children. Another 55,000-odd Palestinians had been wounded, with little or no recourse to medical assistance, or hope of any kind in a war-ravaged and besieged Gaza, according to multiple human rights organisations.
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In its December 14 report, CNN, quoting unnamed US intelligence sources, claimed that 45% of this killer ordnance delivered aerially, comprised unguided bunker busters, or free-fall ‘dumb bombs’ that were not fitted with any guidance systems. In its website report it declared that if the IDF was employing unguided munitions at the rate, like the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence believes it was, then it simply ‘undercut’ Tel Aviv’s claims of trying to minimise civilian casualties.
CNN further went on to state that the US had supplied Israel some 3,000 of these joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs) since October 7 after the Gaza offensive began, following Hamas’s cross-border raid on multiple Israeli targets, in which some 1,200 people, including women and children, were killed and hundreds of others kidnapped.
According to experts, the blast from these 1,000-2,000-odd pound JDAMs in open spaces meant ‘instant death’ for anyone within a 30-metre radius; lethal fragmentation from them extended around 365m. In an October 31 strike on the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya at the northern end of the Gaza strip, a 2,000-pound unguided JDAM had instantly killed over 100 civilians, according to news reports from the area.
Detailed accounts from the battle zone also revealed that the IDF frequently dive-bombed its ground targets with JDAMs, rendering their impact even more lethal. Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and United Nations war crimes investigator told the Associated Press (AP) recently that these JDAMS turn ‘earth to liquid’ and ‘pancaked entire buildings’. Other Western military analysts concurred that the rate at which Israel was using these dumb bombs was ‘contributing significantly’ to the soaring Palestinian death toll.
It is unclear, however, in the fog of war, the high level of secrecy prevailing over the conflict and lack of access provided by Israel to independent news reporters, the exact nature of these killer bombs. But experts claimed some of them to be US-origin M117’s that were used extensively by the US Air Force in the Vietnam War, and thereafter during Operation Desert Storm against the Iraqi military, in the early 1990’s, with devastating effect.
CNN and other US media also reported that the US had provided Israel with assorted unguided bombs, including 5,000 Mk82s and its variants. These were 500-pound low-drag, general purpose aircraft bombs containing around 200 lbs of high explosive.
“It’s bad enough to be using these weapons (bombs) when they are precisely hitting their targets,” Brian Castner, a weapons investigator and ordnance expert with Amnesty International told CNN. However, it is a massive civilian harm problem if they do not have that accuracy, and if you can’t even determine whether the bomb is actually landing where the IDF intended it to, he added.
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Despite widespread criticism, including from United Nations bodies, the US has quietly continued to supply materiel, including JDAMs to Israel, notwithstanding US President Joe Biden’s somewhat disingenuous claim that Tel Aviv was ‘losing international legitimacy’ for what he termed its ‘indiscriminate bombings’. Other senior US officials also duplicitously iterated IDF’s preposterous assertions that it was ‘doing everything’ to reduce civilian casualties in its ongoing Gaza offensive.
Furthermore, CNN revealed that the remaining 55% or so of ordnance used by the IDF in its unchallenged bombing were the even more destructive precision guided munitions (PGMs) that included 2,000-pound bombs guided by ‘Smart, Precise, Cost-Effective’ or SPICE kits, equipped with GPS guidance systems for greater accuracy. It reported recently that the US planned on transferring $320 million worth of SPICE kits to Israel, manufactured by the US subsidiary of Raphael Advanced Defence Systems in Haifa that originally developed these precision enablers for assorted air-to-ground missiles.
It may be recalled that the Indian Air Force’s Mirage 2000Hs which conducted the punitive raid on an alleged Islamist terrorist camp in Balakot in north-west Pakistan in February 2019 – in response to the fatal bombing of a bus carrying Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir – also employed Israel-supplied SPICE kits to deliver Paveway II laser-guided bombs to their intended targets.
Meanwhile, in a disagreeable flashback to the second world war Dresden raids, Israel, like the RAF and the RAAF, also resorted to air dropping Arabic leaflets into Gazan towns, warning Palestinian civilians to vacate their homes ahead of impending bombing raids. And much like the former, the IDF leaflets too announced their unambiguous intent to carry out aerial strikes, warning all Gaza residents against disregarding these warnings at their peril.
The Dresden leaflets as paraphrased by American satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – who, as a US army prisoner of war was interned in the city during its bombing and survived in a meat locker in a local slaughterhouse – starkly stated that “destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional and the unavoidable fortunes of war”. After the war, Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, a semi-autobiographical anti-war novel of Dresden’s fire-bombing by the Allies that went on to become a best-seller in the 1970s.
However, little seems to have changed since 1945 in the five basic principles governing the legal use of force by the powerful in an armed conflict. These incorporate military necessity, distinction-whereby attackers need to distinguish between combatants and civilians-proportionality, humanity and honour or chivalry.
None it appears existed then, and certainly none do now, in Gaza.