Friendly fire deaths in Gaza speak volumes about the chaos of war

To his family and friends, this was a moment that changed their world forever. To the world at large, the death of Ben Nun was just another statistic in successive grim tallies of suffering in the conflict. It highlights, however, the rarely considered phenomenon of friendly fire deaths in Gaza, which reveal much about the nature of the war.

Ben Nun’s death brought the tally of Israeli deaths that resulted from friendly fire or accident to 53, out of a total casualty count of 330. This is a soberingly high number, and a surprisingly high proportion of the whole. More than anything, it demonstrates the hellish difficulty of keeping your own people safe in a fast-moving and intense warzone.

In truth, we knew that already. On October 7 itself, some Israelis fell in fire from their own side as the IDF battled the terrorist insurgency in a state of chaos, disorientation and panic. This, of course, was seized upon by the ghoulish conspiracy theorists who used it to suggest that the massacre was somehow an inside job.

A similar depraved narrative was drawn around the deaths of Yotam Haim, 28, Samar Talalka, 22, and 26-year-old Alon Shamriz, three hostages who were tragically killed by the IDF during an attempted rescue in December. Was this evidence of Israeli heavy-handedness? Obviously not. It was simply evidence of the confusion and terror of war, something that most of us in the west are lucky enough to fail to understand.

Much was made of the announcement by Hamas last week that 40,000 Palestinians had lost their lives in the war. It was shocking – though hardly surprising – that although this was widely reported, few outlets mentioned the parallel Israeli announcement that 17,000 terrorists had been killed so far.

In reporting the story, the formula observed by most broadcasters and publications went something like this. Forty thousand people have been killed in Gaza. This is shocking. The figures came from the Hamas health ministry. Insert examples of suffering here. Israel has come under widespread criticism for its handling of the campaign. Oh, and before we forget, Jerusalem has contested the figures. The end.

The truth of the conflict was either warped or ignored altogether. Here we have a responsible, if flawed, democracy, fighting for its life while trying to protect civilians, against a depraved terrorist foe whose strategy relies upon the sacrifice of its own people. What would be a more responsible way to structure the story?

Well, something like this. Israel says 17,000 terrorists have been killed in the war, bringing victory within sight. Hamas, which is known to inflate or fabricate figures, has claimed that the total deaths amount to 40,000. Even if this was true, it would produce a kill ratio of one combatant to every two civilians, which is a better record than any other western country has achieved in war, despite the fact that Hamas intentionally places its own people in harm’s way. The truth is probably an unprecedented ratio of 1:1. Hamas has also claimed that most of the dead are women and children, an assertion that flies in the face of common sense, does not tally with any independent calculation and has been questioned by many experts.

Setting these two media narratives side-by-side reveals the irresponsible attitude of the world’s journalists in their reporting of the conflict. It also explains why public opinion is so heavily weighted against a democracy which shares our values, and in favour of jihadi terrorists who would happily butcher our own people at home, given half the chance. (Indeed, it recently emerged that Hamas had planned to disinter the remains of British servicemen from their World War One grave in central Gaza and hold the bodies hostage for ransom from London.)

Which brings me back to Lieutenant Shahar Ben Nun. It is self-evident that Israel does all it can to protect the lives of its own soldiers. The fact that 53 out of 330 IDF casualties in Gaza came as a result of friendly fire or accident is testament to the fact that it is impossible to fight a war without making mistakes.

So much is demonstrated again and again throughout history. Take D-Day, for example. During dress rehearsals for the assault codenamed Operation Tiger, on April 27 1944, up to 450 Allied troops were killed while practising with live ammunition, due to a mix-up in timings. If such tragic errors can take place even during wargames, it should come as no surprise that they occur in the fighting itself.

This was the light in which we should have seen the Israeli strike on the aid workers from World Central Kitchen in April. When the errant missiles do not come from the IDF, the world seems to understand; no outrage accompanied the US drone strike that claimed the lives of an aid worker and nine members of his family, including seven children, in Kabul in 2021, for example; or the 13 people, including an ambulance driver, three nurses and friendly troops, killed by a NATO airstrike in Libya in 2011.

In fact, in the aftermath of the Afghanistan incident, the New York Times argued that footage of the tragic attack showed how “the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias… The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians.”

An eloquent way to describe the stress, pressure, chaos, confusion, terror, adrenaline and dangers of all war. It’s time to put these pieces together. Tragically, even the best armies kill members of their own forces – and civilians.

Without wishing for a moment to downplay the anguish of even a single innocent casualty on either side, the IDF’s campaign in Gaza has spilled proportionately less civilian blood than any other army on Earth, in circumstances expressly designed to provoke such casualties for propaganda purposes.

In short, war is hell. That is why Hamas – and its dezinformatsiya – must be defeated.

This article appeared on Jake Wallis Simons’s Substack