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To analyze a war accurately, one must apply an analytical framework suited to its actual character. This requirement is nowhere more evident than in assessments of the Gaza War between Israel and Hamas. Much commentary on the conflict has implicitly measured it against a perceived “gold standard” of humane warfare: restrained campaigns emphasizing separation between insurgents and civilians, dismounted ground operations, and expansive humanitarian assistance designed to win “hearts and minds.”

This model is often drawn from interpretations of Western experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, including battles such as Fallujah, Mosul, and the surge. Those wars encompassed multiple modes of warfare: the defeat of conventional armies, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and episodes of intense urban combat. Yet interpretive habits formed during those campaigns — particularly population-centric counterinsurgency assumptions from the earlier phase of the Iraq War — continue to shape how subsequent conflicts are remembered and analyzed.

But this benchmark, or gold standard, against which Gaza is analyzed, rests on an idealized view of the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its core assumptions break down when applied to Gaza and Hamas.

To clarify these differences and their implications, this article proceeds in three steps. First, we examine the operational character of the Gaza war as a high-intensity urban campaign. In this respect, it differs even from the urban battles of the Iraq War, both during the insurgency and the campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Second, we analyze how such misclassification distorts legal judgments regarding proportionality, precaution, risk transfer, and the use of human shields. Third, we consider how civilian protection should be understood and pursued under the constraints imposed by terrain, force protection, and adversarial strategy.

Understanding the Gaza War correctly is not merely a retrospective exercise. Western militaries are increasingly likely to confront hybrid adversaries that combine regular and irregular military capabilities, dense urban fortifications, and sophisticated informational and legal strategies. Indeed, as this article is submitted, such a conflict has already erupted with Iran, the state sponsor of Hamas, whose forces are showing signs of adopting similar civilian camouflage and shielding practices. Failing to analyze Gaza on its own terms risks repeating a familiar pattern: preparing for the last war rather than the next.

The Nature of the Gaza War

The 2006 edition of U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24, the most influential counterinsurgency text of the last generation, observes that “in almost every case, the counterinsurgent faces a populace containing an active minority supporting a government and a similar militant faction opposing it.” Within this framework, operational success depends on the legitimacy of the government in the eyes of a large, uncommitted middle whose support can ultimately determine the outcome of the conflict.

This manual did not guide the entire Iraq War. Particularly during the campaign against the Islamic State, some U.S. military planners argued that counterinsurgency doctrine had become less relevant, and operations such as the battle for Mosul were increasingly described as conventional urban combat rather than counterinsurgency. Yet many of the operational and political assumptions associated with the earlier counterinsurgency framework remained in place. Coalition forces continued to fight alongside local partner forces, operate in support of a legitimate host government against an irregular foe (rather than a state), and treat the attitudes of the civilian population as strategically decisive.

The Battle of Mosul, often invoked as a benchmark for contemporary urban warfare, illustrates the complexity of this transition. Described by U.S. commanders as “the most significant urban combat to take place since World War II,” the campaign involved intense combined-arms fighting and extensive destruction. Yet Mosul is frequently treated as the outer limit of acceptable urban warfare. Even where counterinsurgency doctrine was formally set aside, many of its assumptions about governance, harm mitigation, joint work with local allies, and winning civilian support continued to shape how the campaign was interpreted.

But Gaza differed from this experience in several fundamental respects, as Israel did not fight alongside a host nation, but rather against it. In Mosul, there was a legitimate Iraqi government, which at least part of the population supported, and the Islamic State ruled the territory for only two years. Hamas, by contrast, functioned not as an insurgent movement but as the sole authority of the Gaza Strip for almost two decades. Through its control of political institutions, welfare systems, education, and ideological indoctrination, it transformed both society and terrain into a prepared urban battlespace. Polling data from Gaza and the West Bank, including PCPSR surveys from December 2023, show overwhelming public support for Hamas’ October 7 attack and its earlier attacks on Israeli civilians, even when support for Hamas as a governing movement fluctuated.

Under these conditions, Israel could not plausibly expect to win over the local population. Organized anti-Hamas militias and protests against Hamas’ rule emerged only after its military capabilities had been severely degraded late in the war, and even then remained limited. For most of the conflict, the key structural conditions that underpin the Iraq and Afghanistan paradigms — friendly local government and a persuadable population — simply did not exist.

Furthermore, particularly in the early stages of the war, Gaza was not defended only by guerrillas but by structured infantry forces that fought in organized companies and battalions with a coordinated defense strategy. Israeli strikes later forced them to adopt small-unit guerilla tactics. At the same time, these forces systematically relied on civilian shielding and camouflage not as a desperate measure of survival but as a foundational element of their strategy.

Hamas also used the civilian environment to embed a subterranean system, distinguished by its scale, depth, redundancy, and systematic integration with civil infrastructure. This system fundamentally altered the operational calculus in Gaza. In a tunnel-saturated environment, almost any building may conceal a shaft, command node, weapons cache, or ambush point — including beneath homes, hospitals, and schools. Israeli forces reported approximately 14,000 booby-trapped structures in Rafah alone by September 2024, making classical “clear-and-hold” operations extremely difficult, as fighters could reappear behind advancing units and re-contest or booby-trap previously cleared areas.

The result was quantitatively greater destruction than in other recent urban battles such as Nahr el-Bared (2007), Mosul (2016), Raqqa (2017), and Marawi (2018), though the core combat areas in each case were devastated: 65 percent of the buildings in Mosul were destroyed, with this percentage much higher in the Old City where the heaviest fighting took place. By comparison, as much as 80 percent of the buildings in Raqqa were destroyed, 95 percent in the 4 square kilometer city core of Marawi, and 95 percent of the 0.2 square kilometer core of Nahr el-Bared.

Operationally, preserving large portions of the urban environment was incompatible with the requirement to neutralize a tunnel-saturated defense system that pervaded the entire Gaza Strip. Absent the large-scale destruction of structures, no doctrine centered primarily on dismounted infantry operations, however refined, could operate without imposing prohibitive costs on the attacking force. Much commentary on the Gaza War nonetheless assumed that such levels of destruction could have been avoided, reflecting the lingering influence of analytical habits formed during the counterinsurgency phases of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where civilian harm mitigation and the preservation of urban infrastructure were often treated as operational objectives.

Seen in this broader context, the relationship between the counterinsurgency phase of the Iraq War, the Battles of Mosul and Raqqa, and the Gaza War is best understood as a continuum rather than a categorical divide. Early phases of the Iraq War largely followed population-centric counterinsurgency assumptions. Later battles such as Mosul involved far more intense urban combat against entrenched organized enemy forces and far more destruction, but with some of the old assumptions still in place. Gaza pushed these dynamics further beyond the breaking point. It displayed a densely fortified urban battlespace, prepared over many years by its governing authority, in which civilian infrastructure was systematically integrated with an extensive subterranean defense network, all within the midst of a population that was largely supportive of the enemy. Treating earlier campaigns as fixed benchmarks for acceptable urban warfare risks obscuring how profoundly such operational environments can differ.

Misreading the Principle of Proportionality

Under international humanitarian law, the principle of proportionality prohibits attacks in which the expected incidental harm to civilians would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Yet expectations shaped in part by perceived lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan have encouraged broader interpretations of that principle. Under such readings, civilian harm is sometimes judged cumulatively across an entire campaign rather than in relation to individual strikes. As a result, the overall scale of destruction in Gaza is often treated as evidence of disproportionality in and of itself, even where particular attacks may have complied with the traditional strike-by-strike analysis required by international humanitarian law.

This perspective helps explain why the Israel Defense Forces’ precautionary measures in Gaza were frequently judged inadequate despite the difficult operational circumstances. Accepting significant risks to its own forces, the Israeli military employed granular early-warning practices, often at the neighborhood or even block level, frequently at the expense of operational surprise. Strikes were often modified or canceled when a civilian presence was detected and anticipated collateral harm was deemed excessive.

Even during the war’s first two months — its most intense aerial phase, which was marked by systematic strikes against above- and below-ground defensive networks embedded in the civilian environment — available data indicate fewer than one death per munition deployed. This estimate is based on roughly 29,000 air-to-ground munitions (according to CNN) and around 22,000 deaths of combatants and civilians combined (according to Gaza Ministry of Health reports at the time). In dense urban terrain, where a single munition can cause mass casualties, such a pattern is more consistent with precision strikes than with indiscriminate bombardment. Yet these precautionary measures were often discounted in public debate, reflecting a tendency to infer illegality from the scale of destruction alone.

While we have already shown that in Gaza the scale of the destruction was dictated by operational conditions, an additional clarification is necessary. While cumulative approaches to proportionality have been proposed by some scholars, they are not widely accepted in state practice or military legal doctrine. The prevailing approach in international humanitarian law evaluates proportionality strike by strike, based on the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated and the foreseeable incidental harm at the moment of decision. A doctrine of cumulative proportionality would produce operationally untenable consequences, potentially obliging commanders to forgo time-sensitive strikes against high-value targets simply because earlier lawful operations had already caused civilian harm.

Many critiques implicitly assume that international humanitarian law mandates a single, conflict-independent “gold standard” of restraint. In practice, however, the principle of proportionality regulates force in relation to concrete military advantage, feasibility, and operational risk within the context of the war actually being fought.

The Question of Risk Transfer

Debates about proportionality often lead directly to a related question: How should risk be distributed between attacking forces and civilian populations during urban warfare? Critics of Israeli operations frequently argue that Israel inappropriately transferred risk from Israeli soldiers to Gazan civilians by relying heavily on firepower rather than accepting greater danger to its own troops. Such claims assume a model of warfare in which civilian protection requires attacking forces to absorb most operational risk, whether as a legal obligation or part of a “hearts and minds” strategy. This expectation, however, reflects yet again analytical habits shaped by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including their explicit or tacit counterinsurgency frameworks, rather than consistent historical lessons of urban warfare.

Historically, risk to attacking forces has rarely been treated as unlimited. The large-scale U.S. urban battles of the 20th century, from Aachen and Manila in World War II to later conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, caused immense destruction and civilian suffering partly in order to minimize friendly troop casualties. Even in the campaigns most often cited today as paradigms of restraint, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan, Western militaries routinely accepted increased collateral damage in order to reduce risks to their own troops. The British Army’s counterinsurgency manual, for example, explicitly draws an operational lesson from the Second Battle of Fallujah: Commanders may accept greater incidental harm to civilians in order to reduce friendly casualties. Even within population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine, and certainly in more intensive urban battles such as Mosul, the protection of one’s own troops remained a central operational consideration.

Crucially, even when Western forces adopted more restrained use of firepower in these campaigns, this did not necessarily mean they accepted greater operational risk themselves. Much of that risk was instead shifted to local allied forces. During the battle for Mosul, Iraqi forces, who vastly outnumbered the besieged Islamic State fighters, carried the brunt of this risk, suffering more than 1,200 fatalities while U.S. losses were much fewer. In Afghanistan as well, the burden of combat fell disproportionately on local forces: Afghan military and police forces suffered an estimated 69,000–92,000 casualties during the war, compared to 3,621 coalition fatalities, including 2,461 Americans.

Gaza offered no comparable risk diversion option. Israel had no allied Gazan force capable of assuming such risks, at least until the final months of the war. In the absence of such partners, Israeli forces relied more heavily on firepower to reduce their own casualties. Losses comparable to those borne by Iraqi or Afghan armies, or those U.S. forces would likely have sustained without local allies, would have been politically and operationally untenable for the Israel Defense Forces, particularly given the pressures of a multifront conflict, Israel’s persistent manpower shortages, and the sensitivity of democratic societies to military casualties.

Therefore, selective readings of earlier wars produce unrealistic expectations about restraint, while obscuring how risk was often redistributed in Iraq and Afghanistan — to allied forces, through firepower, or both. Applied to Gaza, these assumptions generate demands that neither historical practice nor the operational realities of the conflict can sustain.

Perverse Incentives: Misreading the Problem of Human Shields

The problem of risk distribution becomes even more complex when defenders deliberately exploit civilian presence as part of their military strategy. Some critics argue that the decisive question is not whether fighters embed themselves among civilians but how the attacking force responds, sometimes invoking analogies drawn from urban brawls. One frequently cited example compares the situation to a man attempting to assault a neighbor who is holding a baby: The attacker, it is suggested, must simply refrain from striking. While rhetorically vivid, such analogies are analytically misleading. Based on the counterinsurgency assumption that civilians are an uncommitted population to be “won over,” they treat civilians as passive bystanders.

As noted above, the population was far from being uncommitted neutrals, in sympathies or in action. In multiple documented cases, civilians held Israeli hostages or lynched them after they were brought to Gaza, stored weapons, or maintained tunnel shafts inside residential buildings, including within children’s bedrooms. This widespread and willing collaboration was, of course, intermixed with coercion. Using its highly effective security services to force the hand of political opponents or those who were less enthusiastic to collaborate, Hamas shielded its operations within the population.

Crucially, in this sense, Hamas’ conduct exceeds the traditional understanding of human shielding. As Geoffrey Corn has argued, it reflects an effort to weaponize the sensitivities of international humanitarian law, treating civilian casualties not merely as collateral costs, but as strategic assets capable of constraining the adversary and shaping international pressure. For that reason, Hamas refused to build air raid shelters for civilians, let alone give them refuge in its extensive tunnels. The relevant legal and strategic question is therefore not only how attackers should respond when civilians are present, but how international humanitarian law should address a defending force that deliberately seeks to profit from civilian suffering.

None of this negates the attacker’s obligation to distinguish, to apply proportionality, or to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm. Nor does it license indiscriminate attacks against the population. But analytical approaches that treat civilian presence as effectively immunizing military objectives, or that require attackers to abandon stand-off capabilities and assume extreme risks through dismounted assaults into a prepared urban and subterranean battlefield, risk creating precisely the perverse incentives international humanitarian law is meant to prevent. If systematically embedding military assets among civilians constrains the attacker more than it penalizes or hinders the defender, human shielding is incentivized rather than deterred, ultimately increasing rather than reducing civilian harm.

What Civilian Protection Does Mean in High-Intensity Urban Warfare

High-intensity urban wars such as Gaza do not suspend international humanitarian law. The principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution remain central. But they must be applied in ways that reflect the character of the conflict itself. As this article has argued, misidentifying the operational environment of a war can produce systematic distortions in how these principles are interpreted. Frameworks designed for conflicts involving local partners and a persuadable civilian population do not translate cleanly to high-intensity urban warfare against a governing authority supported by its population and entrenched both above and below ground.

In such circumstances, civilian protection cannot be operationalized through counterinsurgency templates without producing serious analytical and practical errors. Harm mitigation does not mean requiring dismounted infantry assaults without fire support regardless of risk to troops, canceling operations whenever uncertainty arises, or pursuing an illusory competition for “hearts and minds.” Civilian protection must instead operate within the constraints imposed by the intensity of the fighting, the physical terrain, and the adversary’s strategy.

Within those constraints, several protection measures remain both lawful and operationally viable in high-intensity urban wars. One can, for example, invest in warning systems where feasible, even at the neighborhood or block level, despite the operational costs such warnings impose by reducing surprise and enabling adversary adaptation. In addition, when feasible, civilian protection may include facilitating large-scale humanitarian aid — pending stringent security inspections and exclusion of dual-use items — even into enemy-controlled territory and when diversion by the adversary is anticipated.

Israel’s experience in Gaza illustrates both the necessity and the limits of these measures. They can reduce civilian harm relative to available alternatives, but they cannot eliminate widespread destruction in a dense urban battlefield saturated with tunnels, booby-traps, and military infrastructure. Under such conditions, the most effective protective measure is often the evacuation of civilians from active combat zones because it removes noncombatants from the dynamics of fighting rather than attempting to regulate violence around them. Earlier urban battles frequently benefited from this possibility. During operations such as Fallujah and Mosul, for example, large portions of the civilian population were able to flee the battlefield before or during the fighting, significantly reducing the number of civilians exposed to direct combat, though the Islamic State tried to hold back civilians and use them as human shields as well.

In Gaza, however, large-scale evacuation beyond the battlefield was largely unavailable. Neighboring states declined to admit significant numbers of refugees, effectively confining the civilian population within an active war zone. Israel, therefore, pursued a partial substitute through the creation of designated humanitarian or safer zones within the Strip. Hamas systematically undermined this mechanism by continuing military activity inside these areas, sheltering senior commanders, including its military chief Muhammad Deif, and launching thousands of rockets from their confines. Provisional analysis in our study nevertheless indicates that the Israeli military exercised substantially greater restraint in these zones, which were approximately 8.5 times safer than other parts of Gaza. Even so, the structure of the conflict imposed hard limits on harm mitigation.

Therefore, evacuation from the battlefield remains the most effective form of civilian protection in high-intensity urban warfare. Where geography, politics, or the defender prevent such evacuation, other mitigation tools can only partially reduce civilian harm. Frameworks that ignore these structural constraints risk mistaking moral aspiration for operational feasibility, and in doing so may ultimately increase rather than reduce civilian suffering. Above all, immunizing targets packed with human shields incentivizes further use of such a strategy to the detriment of civilian populations trapped in urban warfare zones.

For the United States and its allies, the broader lesson is analytical rather than prescriptive. Future conflicts are unlikely to replicate either the complex post-2003 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, campaigns that combined multiple forms of warfare yet remained shaped by strong counterinsurgency assumptions, or the unique circumstances of Gaza. More plausibly, future wars will recombine elements of both. Western forces may confront adversaries that blend regular military capabilities with fortified urban defenses, subterranean infrastructure, the use of human shields, and the deliberate exploitation of legal and informational arenas as instruments of war. Indeed, given the unfolding operations in Iran, and the possibility that airstrikes could expand into ground operations or into close air support for insurgents confronting a regime whose primary repressive forces are embedded within civilian settings, such confrontations may arrive sooner than expected.

Lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza, therefore, remain valuable, but only if applied with contextual discipline. The central task is to distinguish which lessons depend on permissive environments and which remain valid in dense urban battlefields against hybrid adversaries. Making that distinction will be essential not only for sound military analysis but also for preserving the credibility of international humanitarian law and meaningful civilian protection in future wars.

Danny Orbach, Ph.D., is a military and legal historian and an expert on the dynamics of war atrocities from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jonathan Boxman, Ph.D., is an independent quantitative researcher.

Yagil Henkin, Ph.D., is a military historian from Shalem College and the Israel Defense Forces Command and Staff College.

Advocate Jonathan Braverman is a lawyer specializing in international humanitarian law.

All four co-authored Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel–Hamas War from October 7 2023 to June 1 2025.

Image: Jaber Jehad Badwan via Wikimedia Commons