OZJF’s framework for civilian protection in wartime starts from international humanitarian law and ends, deliberately, at the same place: civilians are not combatants, and no security imperative erases that. This page lays out the legal baseline, describes the specific operational challenge that Hamas’s embedded-in-civilians doctrine creates for lawful militaries, and acknowledges, by name, specific incidents where Israeli procedures failed to prevent civilian harm.
The legal baseline
The core civilian-protection rules in armed conflict come from the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols, as elaborated in the International Committee of the Red Cross’s customary IHL commentary. Three principles do most of the work.
Distinction. Parties to a conflict must distinguish at all times between combatants and military objectives on the one hand, and civilians and civilian objects on the other. Attacks may be directed only at the former.
Proportionality. Attacks that may be expected to cause incidental civilian harm excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated are prohibited. Proportionality is an ex ante judgment, made with the information reasonably available to the commander at the time.
Precaution. Parties must take all feasible precautions in attack and in defense to minimize civilian harm, including warnings, target verification, and choice of means and methods of warfare.
These principles apply to every party in a conflict. They are not a favor one side grants the other. They are a floor.
Hamas’s embedded-in-civilians doctrine
The hardest operational fact about the current Gaza conflict, and the one most often missing from public discussion, is that Hamas’s military infrastructure has been deliberately co-located with civilian infrastructure: hospitals, schools, mosques, residential buildings, and United Nations facilities. The practice is documented in successive Congressional Research Service reports on the Israel-Hamas conflict, in UN OCHA situation reports that describe the density and geography of the fighting, and in the Colonna review of UNRWA that examines the use of UN-associated facilities. Under IHL, using civilians or civilian objects to shield military operations is itself a war crime. It does not, however, extinguish the obligations of the opposing party. A lawful military facing an embedded adversary still owes distinction, proportionality, and precaution.
That is the dilemma at the center of modern urban warfare in Gaza, and OZJF does not pretend it is a simple dilemma. It is a hard one, and hard dilemmas deserve serious writing, not slogans. A fuller treatment, with primary sources, appears in /research/hamas-use-of-civilian-infrastructure.
IDF mitigation procedures
The Israel Defense Forces publish their own descriptions of the mitigation measures used during operations in Gaza: target review processes overseen by the IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps, warnings to civilian populations via leaflets, phone calls, and text messages, evacuation corridors, and post-incident investigations. Those procedures are not self-validating, and no serious analyst treats them that way. They exist. They produce specific outputs. They also fail, and their failures need to be described.
A specific acknowledged failure
On April 1, 2024, an IDF strike in Gaza killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in a coordinated convoy. The IDF’s own preliminary inquiry and subsequent public statements described a cascade of identification and command failures, disciplined two officers, and committed to procedural changes. World Central Kitchen’s own response called the strike a targeting of clearly marked humanitarian workers and demanded an independent investigation. Both accounts are part of the public record, and OZJF treats them as such. Civilian humanitarian workers should never be killed by a democratic military’s strike. Saying so is not disloyal. It is the minimum condition for credibility.
How advocacy should speak about wartime harm
Numbers matter, and so does who is counting. OZJF distinguishes between figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which are widely cited but originate with a Hamas-controlled authority, and figures produced by UN OCHA, independent monitoring groups, and post-conflict reviews. We try to flag that distinction whenever we cite a number, and we treat disaggregation, between combatants and civilians, between different incidents, between verified and alleged events, as a responsibility rather than a nuisance. Relevant methodological guidance sits in /transparency/research-standards.
What OZJF will and will not claim
We will not claim that Israel conducts its operations without civilian harm. The record does not support that, and we will not insult readers by pretending it does. We will not endorse the framing that Israel is committing genocide. That framing misuses the legal term, flattens the facts of a war that Hamas started and continues to fight from within civilian areas, and substitutes a slogan for the harder work of assessing specific incidents against specific rules. Between those two positions is a lot of room for serious analysis, and that is the room OZJF is trying to hold.