Photo Credit: Asher Schwartz

One little-publicized aspect of Israel’s Protective Edge campaign this past summer was that the United Nations, along with a variety of prominent Westerners, have in fact – though not publicly recognized as such – served as unpaid consultants to the genocide-promoting terrorists of Hamas.

Before analyzing the issue in greater detail, one should summarize the opinions of leading military professionals on Protective Edge. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has stated that the Israeli army went to “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties in its war against Hamas.”

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He added that the U.S. army sent a team to Israel “to get the lessons from the particular operation in Gaza.” Dempsey also noted that Israel is judged by a standard its enemies are not held to.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, has said, “The IDF has developed the most comprehensive and sophisticated measures to minimize civilian casualties during attacks against legitimate military targets.”

Kemp has also pointed out that the global average in warfare is four civilians killed for each combatant. In Protective Edge, despite Hamas’s use of human shields and residential areas for launching rockets, the average was one civilian killed for every combatant. In Kemp’s words, “No army in the world acts with as much discretion and great care as the IDF in order to minimize damage. The U.S. and the UK are careful, but not as much as Israel.”

The Hamas charter explicitly states that the movement wants to exterminate all Jews, because that pleases Allah. Palestinian Media Watch has noted that Hamas TV broadcast similar statements over the summer. One of them was from the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, who said, “We love death like our enemies love life! We love Martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died!”

It is against this morbid background of Hamas’s love for death that it tried to have as many Palestinian civilians killed as possible so that Westerners would condemn Israel.

Hamas leaders know the formula: the more civilian casualties, the more condemnations Israel receives from the West. By condemning Israel, these Westerners thus encouraged Hamas to expose even more Palestinian civilians to Israeli fire, including children.

Only a few examples – including the United Nations and some of its associated organizations – among many of the de facto unpaid consultants to Hamas can be mentioned here. The UN’s World Health Organization condemned Israel for targeting civilian populations. It went even further, blaming Israel for all civilian casualties in Gaza and ignoring the fact that a number of the Palestinian civilians who were killed, including nine children in a Gaza City refugee camp, were actually killed by misfired Hamas rockets and mortar shells.

Another unpaid consultant was the UN Security Council. The UNSC president released a statement on behalf of the entire council condemning Israeli actions in Gaza and the loss of civilian lives. It also requested an increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza because of its “critical humanitarian needs.” In the UNSC statement, Hamas’s deployment of human shields, its use of residential areas as cover, and its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians were ignored.

A second category of unpaid consultants to Hamas includes the so-called humanitarian NGOs. In an article titled “Unlawful Israeli Airstrikes Kill Civilians,” Human Rights Watch argued that Israeli strikes against non-military Hamas infrastructure constitute war crimes. According to HRW, “Israel has wrongly claimed as a matter of policy that civilian members of Hamas or other political groups who do not have a military role are ‘terrorists’ and therefore valid military targets, and has previously carried out hundreds of unlawful attacks on this basis.”

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Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is a former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (2000-2012). Jamie Berk is a researcher working toward an MA in political science at Hebrew University.