An occupying power has a vested interest in speaking of “war.” It implies that the enemy forces are at par with yours, and that you intend to get out of that situation as soon as possible.
In a conventional sense, war is defined as armies facing each other on the same battlefield with similar means of destruction. It doesn’t take a military genius, in this regard, to figure that the original thirty to forty thousand Hamas fighters with machine guns and rockets were no match against an army with tanks, missiles, and fighter jets, backed by hundreds of thousands of reservists, and supported by the best intelligence service in the world.
Another essential aspect of war is that it is supposed to respect the principle of proportionality between military targets and civilian collateral damage. Netanyahu once boasted that the IDF had achieved the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare—it’s 1 to 1.”1 A weird statement. Not only is this an appalling ratio, but what he calls “urban warfare” has consisted in the leveling of all urban infrastructures and the steady mass killing of unarmed civilians.
And, of course, the claim of a 1-to-1 ratio is a lie. According to data from the Israeli intelligence services, the actual ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the Gaza Strip between October 2023 and May 2025 is at least 83 percent civilians.2 Illustrating this, among countless other examples, an investigation done in 2024 by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about one instance of mass killing in the Netzarim Corridor found that among the 200 “terrorists” the IDF spokesperson labeled as such, only 10 could be verified as Hamas operatives.3