Every Bomb is a Choice

Hitting a hospital isn’t just an accident. It’s the product of a failed strategy and a morally bankrupt leadership.

Earlier this week Israel struck Nasser Hospital in Gaza, killing 20 people, including five journalists. Netanyahu expressed regret for the “tragic mishap.” The Israeli military later said the target was a Hamas camera, though videos verified by the New York Times show journalists regularly filming from that location. I don’t believe Israel deliberately targeted journalists, but at this point I don’t know if that even matters. The pattern is clear: two years into this war, Israel continues to weigh the marginal value of killing a Hamas operative against the enormous moral, legal, and strategic costs of striking civilian facilities—and keeps choosing to strike.

Why? The mentality starts at the top. Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir push for “total victory”—destroying Hamas through sheer body counts. This is impossible without a security and governance plan to replace Hamas, something this extremist government rejects. So the guidance to the IDF boils down to: kill operatives, take over Gaza, eliminate Hamas. As in Vietnam and the early years of Iraq, this “body count” strategy is both morally disastrous and strategically self-defeating.

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The IDF, following this guidance, prioritizes killing Hamas operatives over humanitarian needs, civilian protection, or Israel’s international standing. Targeting decisions—like bombing a hospital—are not accidents. They are deliberate risk calculations shaped by political directives. As one former American senior defense official recently told me: “The Israelis are just as good as the United States at precision targeting. They are just choosing to hit things we would never hit.”

The same mentality drives humanitarian policy. If the goal were to prevent famine, Israel would clear routes for aid convoys. Instead, the pattern is different: the World Food Program and other agencies coordinate with the IDF, receive assurances the night before that a specific route will be deconflicted, and prepare their convoys. But the next morning, if the IDF detects even a mid- or low-level Hamas operative along that route, it cancels the convoy and takes the shot. Do this enough times, and aid stops moving, food supplies dwindle, and starvation spreads. What should be a straightforward decision to protect humanitarian access becomes, under current guidance, a repeated choice to block it—producing both a human tragedy for Palestinians and a strategic disaster for Israel.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) decision is another example. Israel could have continued distributing aid through hundreds of local sites, ensuring broad and easier access. Instead, it consolidated to just four massive sites, forcing Palestinians to walk miles through dangerous war zones. The logic was to weaken Hamas and ensure it could not use food as a source of leverage, power, and money—but in practice it did the opposite. The guys with the guns will always eat. By concentrating distribution, Israel created a humanitarian emergency, which drove up prices and gave Hamas greater leverage. A better and more moral strategy would have been to flood Gaza with aid, drop prices, and in the process strip Hamas of its ability to use food as leverage.

The bottom line: Israel claims to have “the most moral military in the world.” But no military can act morally when it takes its order from an immoral political leadership.

Ilan Goldenberg is a Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer at J Street and served as a Senior Advisor on the Middle East to Vice President Kamala Harris. Opinions are his own.