The cease-fire announced Tuesday between Israel and Palestinian factions
— if it holds — will end seven weeks of fighting that killed more than
2,200 Gazans and 69 Israelis. But as the rival camps seek to put their
spin on the outcome, one assessment of Israel’s Gaza operation that
won’t be publicized is the U.S. military’s. Though the Pentagon shies
from publicly expressing judgments that might fall afoul of a decidedly
pro-Israel Congress, senior U.S. military sources speaking on condition
of anonymity offered scathing assessments of Israeli tactics,
particularly in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.

One of the more curious moments in Israel’s Operation Protective Edge
came on July 20, when a live microphone at Fox News caught U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry commenting sarcastically on Israel’s
military action. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry said.
“It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.”

Kerry’s comment followed the heaviest bombardment of the war to that
point, as Israeli artillery rained thousands of high-explosive shells on
Shujaiya, a residential area on the eastern edge of Gaza City. A
high-ranking U.S. military officer said that the source of Kerry’s
apparent consternation was almost certainly a Pentagon summary report
assessing the Israeli barrage on which he had been briefed by an aide
moments earlier.

According to this senior U.S. officer, who had access to the July 21
Pentagon summary of the previous 24 hours of Israeli operations, the
internal report showed that 11 Israeli artillery battalions — a minimum
of 258 artillery pieces, according to the officer’s estimate — pumped at
least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood, which
included a barrage of some 4,800 shells during a seven-hour period at
the height of the operation. Senior U.S. officers were stunned by the
report.

Twice daily throughout the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) operation, a
select group of senior U.S. military and intelligence officers at the
Pentagon received lengthy written summaries of Israeli military action
in Gaza. The reports — compiled from information gleaned from open
sources, Israeli military officers with whom U.S. officials speak and
satellite images — offered a detailed assessment of Israel’s battlefield
tactics and the performance of its weaponry, a considerable portion of
it supplied by the United States.

Although these reports shy from offering political judgments on the
operation, a number of senior U.S. military officers who spoke about the
contents of those daily reports were highly critical of some of the
IDF’s tactics, particularly in the Israeli ground invasion of Shujaiya.
An official spokesman at the Pentagon declined to comment on the
contents of this article.

On July 16, the IDF dropped leaflets into Shujaiya, warning residents of an imminent Israeli attack and urging them to evacuate the area. The
next day, after a short artillery preparation, three IDF units, led by
the Golani Brigade, began a ground assault into the neighborhood to
destroy Hamas bunkers and break up Hamas formations.

The incursion went well at first, with Golani soldiers meeting little
resistance. But by late on Saturday afternoon, July 19, forward
elements of the brigade were running head on into well-organized Hamas
units, and some IDF formations were pinned down in vicious fighting in
Shujaiya’s streets and alleys. What had been envisaged as a limited
ground operation was not going as planned, with Hamas units emerging
from tunnels and bunkers in attempts to exploit IDF weaknesses. The
Hamas units were well prepared and trained, with their formations hidden
so well that Israeli soldiers were rarely able to pinpoint their
locations.

“The ground assault was poorly handled into eastern Gaza City,” an
Israel civilian adviser to the IDF’s chief of staff said at the time.
“The Hamas fighters showed an unexpected tenacity and were far more
effective against our armored units than we’d anticipated.”

By late Saturday night and into Sunday morning, the fight had
devolved into a series of vicious small unit clashes, with IDF squads
facing off against Hamas squads, sniper units and teams carrying lethal
anti-tank rockets. In one eight-hour period starting early on July 20,
the IDF suffered 13 dead,
seven of them in an armored personnel carrier that caught fire after a
Hamas sapper team detonated an anti-tank mine beneath it. When the IDF
moved to retrieve the bodies and the stricken APC, Hamas fighters
targeted the rescue vehicles and engaged in gun battles with IDF combat teams as the rescue convoy retreated.

In the early hours of that Sunday morning, with IDF casualties
mounting, senior officers directed IDF tank commanders to “take off the
gloves” and “to open fire at anything that moves,” according to reports in the Israeli press.

The three Israeli units assaulting Shujaiya were never in danger of
being defeated, but the losses the IDF suffered in the four-day
house-to-house battle embarrassed IDF commanders. By the afternoon of
July 19, even before Israel had suffered most of its casualties, the
scale of resistance prompted Israeli battlefield commanders to blanket
Shujaiya with high-explosive artillery rounds, rockets fired from
helicopters and bombs dropped by F-16s. The decision was confirmed at
the highest levels of the IDF.

By Sunday night, Palestinian officials were denouncing the
bombardment of Shujaiya as a massacre, and international pressure
mounted on the Israeli government to explain the heavy casualty toll
being inflicted on Gaza civilians. The IDF told the press that Shujaiya
had been a “fortress for Hamas terrorists” and reiterated that while
Israel had “warned civilians” to evacuate, “Hamas ordered them to stay.
Hamas put them in the line of fire.”

Kerry’s hot-microphone comments reflect the shock among U.S. observers at the scale and lethality of the Israeli bombardment.

“Eleven battalions of IDF artillery is equivalent to the artillery we
deploy to support two divisions of U.S. infantry,” a senior Pentagon
officer with access to the daily briefings said. “That’s a massive
amount of firepower, and it’s absolutely deadly.” Another officer, a
retired artillery commander who served in Iraq, said the Pentagon’s
assessment might well have underestimated the firepower the IDF brought
to bear on Shujaiya. “This is the equivalent of the artillery we deploy
to support a full corps,” he said. “It’s just a huge number of weapons.”

Artillery pieces used during the operation included a mix of Soltam
M71 guns and U.S.-manufactured Paladin M109s (a 155-mm howitzer), each
of which can fire three shells per minute. “The only possible reason for
doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as
possible,” said the senior U.S. military officer. “It’s not mowing the
lawn,” he added, referring to a popular IDF term for periodic military
operations against Hamas in Gaza. “It’s removing the topsoil.”

“Holy bejeezus,” exclaimed retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard when told the
numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action.
“That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the
figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely
disproportionate.” A West Point graduate who is a veteran of two wars
and is the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
in Washington, D.C., he added that even if Israeli artillery units
fired guided munitions, it would have made little difference.

Even the most sophisticated munitions have a circular area of
probability, Gard explained, with a certain percentage of shells landing
dozens or even hundreds of feet from intended targets. Highly trained
artillery commanders know this and compensate for their misses by firing
more shells. So if even 10 percent of the shells fired at combatants in
Shujaiya landed close to but did not hit their targets — a higher than
average rate of accuracy — that would have meant at least 700 lethal
shells landing among the civilian population of Shujaiya during the
night of July 20 into June 21. And the kill radius of even the most
precisely targeted 155-mm shell is 164 feet. Put another way, as Gard
said, “precision weapons aren’t all that precise.”

Senior U.S. officers who are familiar with the battle and Israeli
artillery operations, which are modeled on U.S. doctrine, assessed that,
given that rate of artillery fire into Shujaiya, IDF commanders were
not precisely targeting Palestinian military formations as much as
laying down an indiscriminate barrage aimed at cratering the
neighborhood. The cratering operation was designed to collapse the Hamas
tunnels discovered when IDF ground units came under fire in the
neighborhood. Initially, said the senior Pentagon officer, Israel’s
artillery used “suppressing fire to protect their forward units but then
poured in everything they had, in a kind of walking barrage.
Suppressing fire is perfectly defensible. A walking barrage isn’t.”

That the Israelis explained the civilian casualty toll by saying the
neighborhood’s noncombatant population had been ordered to stay in their
homes and were used as human shields by Hamas reinforced the belief
among some senior U.S. officers that artillery fire into Shujaiya was
indiscriminate. 

“Listen, we know what it’s like to kill civilians in war,” said the
senior U.S. officer. “Hell, we even put it on the front pages. We call
it collateral damage. We absolutely try to minimize it, because we know
it turns people against you. Killing civilians is a sure prescription
for defeat. But that’s not what the IDF did in Shujaiya on July 21.
Human shields? C’mon, just own up to it.”