Andy Milburn’s (@andymilburn8) article, “Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility,” published in War on the Rocks (@WarOnTheRocks), argues that Israel’s conduct in Gaza departed sharply from U.S. urban warfare practices, systematically shifting risk from Israeli forces onto civilians and deprioritizing civilian protection. This essay challenges that framework and the assumptions underlying it.
Before taking any long analysis of the Gaza war seriously, there is a basic credibility test: does the author even acknowledge the defining realities of the battlefield? On that test, the argument fails immediately. Across 3,000 words assessing urban warfare in Gaza, the word “tunnel” never appears! There is no reference to Hamas’s tunnel network, the largest and most sophisticated subterranean military system ever constructed beneath civilian infrastructure, estimated at over 500 miles in length and accessed by 5,700 shafts.
This tunnel system is not peripheral to the conflict; it constitutes the core urban military environment in which the war has been fought and represents a challenge without precedent. To exclude it is to remove Hamas’s primary method of warfare from the analysis, fatally distorting any assessment of distinction, proportionality, risk, and precautions in attack.
This stunning erasure is not limited to tunnels. The analysis does not mention hostages, a central feature of the war and a key driver of Israel’s military necessity and operational urgency. October 7 is not referenced even in passing—imagine a 3,000-word essay about the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 with no mention of 9/11—nor Hamas’s explicit commitment to repeat those atrocities. The word “rocket” is absent, despite more than 13,000 fired from Gaza at Israeli cities and civilians over the past year. By ignoring the mass hostage-taking, the sustained rocket campaign that forced millions of Israelis into bomb shelters, and the ongoing threat of renewed massacres, the author excludes key factors that define military necessity. These are not background details but central drivers of the conflict that render comparisons to U.S. operations in Iraq fundamentally flawed.
Gaza is not merely a dense urban enclave where militants operate among civilians, as in Mosul or Fallujah. It is a civilian landscape deliberately engineered over seventeen years of Hamas rule into a fortified battlespace without modern precedent. Hamas embedded command centers beneath hospitals, rocket launchers in schools, and weapons caches inside homes and mosques. Deep, multi-story tunnel networks run beneath entire neighborhoods, with thousands of access shafts hidden inside family apartments, often literally inside children’s bedrooms. Tens of thousands of IEDs and booby traps were planted throughout the urban terrain (nearly 100,000 according to one report), also left unmentioned. No other fighting force in history has weaponized civilian living space on this scale while openly boasting that civilian sacrifice serves its war aims. The IDF also confronted a combined Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad force numbering over 47,000 in seven cities, dwarfing enemy forces in Mosul and Fallujah.
The hostage crisis and the ongoing threat of renewed massacres cannot be treated as peripheral. No state would be expected to exercise restraint while children are held by a terrorist army that openly pledges to repeat its atrocities indefinitely, as millions of civilians are driven nightly into bomb shelters by sustained rocket fire. This is where the comparison to Iraq ultimately collapses: U.S. forces in Mosul and Fallujah were not confronting a hostile force entrenched mere miles from their own cities while holding women and children in tunnels beneath neighboring urban centers. If an enemy poised on the U.S. border were committed to continuous mass slaughter, no one seriously believes American assessments of military necessity or targeting thresholds would resemble operations 6,000 miles away. International law requires proportionality, but it does not require a state to accept the perpetual victimization of its own population.
The entire proportionality calculus changes when an enemy sits on your border with a declared intention of continuous mass murder, where military necessity is driven by the immediacy of the threat. Yet Milburn offers no serious account of how Israel was supposed to neutralize, for example, a sustained rocket campaign with launchers deliberately embedded in Gaza’s civilian areas. His conclusions rest on a framework that omits these core strategic conditions of the conflict.
Early in the article, the author cites a figure of 71,000 Palestinian deaths and presents it as evidence of “civilian death on a scale that cannot be explained by inevitability alone.” This framing effectively collapses total fatalities into implied civilian fatalities, while barely engaging Israel’s estimate that roughly 25,000 were combatants, a figure publicly affirmed by President Trump. Civilian harm cannot be assessed by treating all deaths as civilian by default.
Later, Milburn argues that even if all adult males killed in Gaza were assumed to be combatants, civilians would still comprise “roughly two-thirds of reported deaths.” This is incorrect, as Hamas’s own published fatality data show that approximately 48 percent of those killed are adult males aged 18–59, with the share rising above 50 percent when males over 60 are included. Adult male deaths exceed adult female deaths by more than 23,000, producing a casualty profile heavily skewed toward combat-age men and broadly consistent with IDF claims of substantial combatant losses.
The author cites an early 2025 Lancet study suggesting a 40 percent undercount in fatalities as of June 2024. That analysis predates later Hamas fatality updates that incorporate thousands of deaths reported by families without the recovery of bodies. There is no credible evidence of an undercount on anything approaching this scale, yet the outdated and discredited estimate is used to inflate claims of civilian harm.
To further bolster these claims of excessive civilian harm, Milburn cites discredited figures suggesting civilians make up more than 80 percent of fatalities, referencing “international media” without methodological explanation. He also misrepresents a report by Gabriel Epstein in the Washington Institute as evidence for this false claim, but this report does not say this, as the author noted in a comment on X. The easily disproven “83% of Gaza fatalities are civilians” was produced by counting only a small subset of Hamas and PIJ fighters identified by first and last name by the IDF (8,900) and matched to a pre-war list, and labeling every other death civilian by default, instead of acknowledging the roughly 25,000 combatants Israel estimates were killed. By this standard, American forces in Iraq would appear to have killed very few combatants since it’s unlikely they gathered the first and last name of every fighter they killed.
The author purports to examine Israeli targeting practices yet provides no documentary evidence, strike-level data, rules of engagement, or institutional directives. Rather than grounding the analysis in official sources or systematic research, readers are asked to rely on anecdotal testimony from a small group of activists affiliated with the NGO Breaking the Silence and on the author’s own unattributed interviews with unnamed Israeli officers.
The author dismisses evacuations, advance warnings, humanitarian pauses, and alert systems as mere “justifications” for continued strikes. In reality, these measures exceed what most modern militaries have attempted at scale and imposed real operational costs, including the loss of surprise and the ability of enemy forces to reposition. Hamas repeatedly exploited evacuations to move fighters and hostages through its tunnel network. In Rafah, thousands of buildings were pre-rigged with booby traps, often in chains of interconnected structures, during the months in which Israel evacuated the civilian population prior to its entry.
The analysis also omits Egypt’s closure of its border and Hamas’s efforts to block civilian movement, as civilian casualties served its strategic narrative. Milburn further claims that after evacuations, “bombardment followed people from one designated zone to another,” once again erasing Hamas as an active party to the conflict. In practice, strikes followed Hamas as it relocated military assets into humanitarian zones. Hamas leader Mohammed Deif was killed in the Mawasi humanitarian area, and repeated airstrikes targeted rocket launchers deliberately positioned within designated civilian zones. The analysis thus implicitly assumes that Israel should tolerate continued rocket attacks on its civilian population rather than strike military assets deliberately positioned within designated humanitarian zones.
Responsibility is consistently assigned to Israel alone. This stands in sharp contrast to Fallujah, where the vast majority of residents were able to evacuate before the main assault yet 80 percent of the city was nonetheless damaged or destroyed. Treating Gaza and Fallujah as comparable operational environments therefore produces deeply misleading conclusions.
Assessments of Israeli civilian harm mitigation by urban warfare scholar John Spencer are dismissed largely on the basis of unsubstantiated and anecdotal claims from Breaking the Silence asserting that Israeli targets were based on “thin leads rather than the confirmed presence of a military objective,” without specific evidence or data offered to support the allegation.
Milburn’s reliance on the 2004 battles in Fallujah as a model of American restraint is particularly striking. The assault itself was launched in retaliation for the killing of four U.S. contractors, not after a 10/7 mass-casualty attack on civilians. Fallujah was widely recognized as one of the most destructive urban battles of the Iraq War. Milburn cites UN reporting on Gaza while omitting UN findings on Fallujah itself. In a 2010 submission, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described U.S. operations in the Second Battle of Fallujah as involving: "the deliberate destruction of the whole city, killing civilians and wounded persons, torture of the civilian populations, prevention of distribution of food and medicine, all can be easily categorized as: war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave violations of international humanitarian law."
Milburn points to the tragic April 2024 World Central Kitchen convoy strike as emblematic of what he calls the IDF’s “predictable” targeting failures, contrasting it with what he portrays as the American military’s “unblinking eye” and its “requirement to maintain continuous observation of a target from nomination through the moment of strike.” This portrayal of U.S. urban warfare as a model of superior intelligence and restraint collapses under even minimal historical scrutiny.
The U.S. military’s record is replete with catastrophic targeting errors committed under precisely the kind of persistent surveillance Milburn holds up as a safeguard. In October 2015, an AC-130U gunship repeatedly struck a Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 civilians despite real-time video feeds. In 2016, U.S. airstrikes on alleged ISIS “staging areas” instead killed more than 120 villagers. In 2021, a drone strike in Kabul, initially hailed as a precision success, was later revealed to have killed ten civilians, including seven children.
These were not isolated mishaps. The New York Times piece “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes” documented hundreds of civilian casualty incidents stemming from deeply flawed intelligence, rushed targeting, and systemic overconfidence in surveillance technology, many of them concealed from public view. The investigation concluded that the American air war was marked by “deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children,” directly contradicting the image of precision that Milburn invokes.
Yet Israeli errors are treated as evidence of uniquely reckless conduct— “strikes that American commanders would almost certainly have rejected”—without any comparative data, error-rate analysis, or institutional evidence to support that claim. No systematic comparison is offered between U.S. and Israeli targeting outcomes. The conclusion is simply asserted. What emerges is not a measured operational assessment but a selective narrative in which American failures are forgotten and Israeli errors are elevated into proof of exceptional wrongdoing.
At the same time, the author largely removes Hamas’s embedded warfare strategy from the causal chain, treating civilian harm as almost entirely the product of Israeli choice rather than the battlefield Hamas deliberately constructed. He dismisses the human shield argument on the grounds that civilians were not physically coerced to block strikes or prevented from leaving areas of attack. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of international law governing the use of civilian shields.
Human shielding does not require forcing civilians to stand in front of fighters at the moment of attack. Under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute (Article 8, xxiii), the prohibition can be triggered by placing military objectives in the presence of civilians in order to render them immune from attack. A 2019 NATO report extensively documented this principle of human shields employed by Hamas. This principle is also explicitly affirmed in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, which observes that “in some cases, a party to a conflict might attempt to use the presence or movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to shield military objectives from seizure or attack” (Section 5.4.4). The Manual further clarifies that such conduct “does not increase the legal obligations of the attacking party to discriminate in conducting attacks against the enemy.”
The Manual’s cited authority, W. Hays Parks, makes the allocation of responsibility explicit: while an attacker must still take reasonable precautions to minimize civilian harm, it is not required to assume additional responsibility created by the defender’s illegal conduct. To do so would, in his words, “serve as an incentive for a defender to continue to violate the law of war by exposing other innocent civilians to similar risk.” In short, U.S. military doctrine places responsibility for the heightened civilian danger created by human shielding on the party employing the tactic (Hamas), not on the force responding to it (see also Section 5.12.3.4).
Constructing tunnels beneath civilian homes, embedding command centers under hospitals, and positioning weapons in people's homes therefore constitutes human shielding by definition, even when the civilians above are unaware. By redefining the concept into near nonexistence and failing to engage seriously with the operational realities of the Gaza battlefield, Milburn once again removes Hamas from the causal chain and effectively absolves it of responsibility for its core military doctrine — the very doctrine it openly boasts about and that is the primary driver of civilian harm in Gaza.
Milburn further asserts that civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in Mosul were lower, despite credible estimates placing them at roughly three to one. Even taking Hamas and IDF fatality figures at face value, the ratio in Gaza appears at or below two to one, while acknowledging that uncertainty will persist until more definitive data are available. Yet Mosul is framed as an example of restraint and Gaza as unlawful. Once again, inconsistent metrics are used to support a predetermined narrative.
To reinforce this strained narrative, the author selectively recycles isolated and misrepresented remarks from Israeli leaders to argue the existence of an “institutional culture” of disregard for civilians. Defense Minister Gallant’s “we are fighting human animals” comment is repeatedly portrayed as dehumanizing Palestinians as a whole, despite his consistent framing of only Hamas as the enemy both before and after the statement. There is no evidence that Gallant was referring to the Palestinian population itself as human animals, yet this claim has become canonical in anti-Israel discourse.
President Herzog is similarly misrepresented. Milburn asserts that Herzog “blurred the institutional line between civilian and combatant,” based on one of the more egregiously misrepresented quotations of the war and one Herzog himself publicly denounced as dishonest. In the same press conference cited as evidence of this alleged blurring, Herzog stated:
"We are very cautious in the way we operate. The IDF uses all the means at its disposal in order to reduce harm to the population. For example, many resources are invested in gathering intelligence in trying to locate the enemy separately from civilian population, in evacuating the civilian population from the center of the battle, in warning citizens, in monitoring humanitarian situation."
Milburn argues that such leadership statements “shape the environment in which [targeting] decisions are made.” If that is the standard, then Herzog’s remarks point not toward civilian disregard but toward institutional emphasis on distinction, evacuation, and harm mitigation. Read in context, they undermine rather than support the narrative of systematic indifference to civilian life.
The contrast with American rhetoric in the very battles Milburn treats as models of restraint is striking. During the Second Battle of Fallujah, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt declared, “We will pacify that city.” On the eve of the assault, Lt. Col. Gary Brandl told his Marines, “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him.” General James Mattis famously instructed troops to “be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” This language was dismissed as battlefield rhetoric rather than evidence of institutional misconduct against all Iraqis — a leniency never extended to IDF personnel.
Near the conclusion, Milburn offers a glib analogy to minimize Hamas’s human shield strategy, quoting comedian Bill Burr: “if you want to beat up your neighbor but he is holding a baby, you do not try to punch him through the child.” But warfare against an embedded terrorist organization is not so simplistic. The real and tragic dilemma he avoids is this: what if that neighbor has murdered your family, kidnapped and raped your children, openly pledges to repeat these atrocities indefinitely, lives next door, and deliberately uses the child as protection while daring you to respond? Is a state then morally and legally required to allow perpetual violence against its population to continue in order to avoid all risk to the child? Hamas deliberately built its military doctrine around exploiting this dilemma, and Milburn’s analytical framework effectively rewards it.
Although the article presents itself as sober military analysis, it rests on foundational omissions, distorted casualty framing, legal misunderstandings, reliance on activist testimony instead data driven evidence, a falsely sanitized image of U.S. precision warfare, and false equivalence between radically different wars and conditions of military necessity.
By erasing October 7, the hostages, the tunnel network, the sustained rocket campaign, Hamas’s embedded warfare strategy, and the continued threat facing Israeli civilians in immediate proximity, the author constructs a narrative detached from operational reality — one in which Israel appears to choose civilian harm rather than confront a battlefield deliberately engineered to maximize it.
Most fundamentally, the comparison to American wars collapses. Military necessity and proportionality are shaped by the immediacy of the threat and the defense of one’s own civilian population. No American city would tolerate sustained rocket fire against its cities for even a few days, let alone years. Faced with a terrorist force embedded directly across its border committed to continuous mass violence, U.S. political leaders, the public, and the military would demand decisive and aggressive action to eliminate the threat. Under such conditions, American assessments of necessity, risk, and proportionality would be radically different, rendering Milburn’s analytical framework inapplicable.
Civilian suffering in Gaza is real and tragic. But any honest analysis must begin with how this war is actually being fought, not with a moral framework built around what is omitted. Milburn’s article does not seriously engage the battlefield Hamas created or the threats that drove Israel to act. Instead, it advances a narrative in which responsibility flows almost entirely in one direction while Hamas’s central role is largely erased. That narrative may be politically resonant but it does not withstand serious military, legal, or factual scrutiny.
