Is the Israeli Defense Force “the most moral army in the world”? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated this slogan again and again.

In December, in an interview with Jewish News Syndicate, Israel Defense Forces international spokesman Major Doron Spielman said “I don’t think there’s been another army in history that has ever taken this much concern for a civilian population, of the enemy it is trying to defeat.”

The IDF warned Gazans before striking, he said, thereby losing operation surprise: “People eventually are going to be looking back to Israel as probably the unreachable model of what an army can do to take care of a civilian population.”

Four months later, these words sound hollow, even absurd. As calculated by Gaza’s health ministry, 34,000 people have died in Gaza, most of them civilians, under the Israeli bombardment. The enclave has become an apocalyptic wasteland. Israel has been rebuked by the Biden Administration and the UN Security Council has voted for a ceasefire.

The latest indication that the IDF is failing morally is the possibility that one of its units, the Netzah Yehuda brigade, will be sanctioned by the Biden Administration for human rights abuses on the West Bank. It is made up mostly of ultra-Orthodox nationalists and has a reputation for treating Palestinians harshly. It has been linked to the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian man with American citizenship, Omar As’ad, who died of heart failure after being arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded and abandoned in near-freezing conditions.

Most moral, then?

But definitely more moral than Hamas, its opponent in Gaza, whose fighters are being hailed as heroes on American campuses.

Hamas started the war on October 7 with an unprovoked assault on southern Israel in which its militants killed about 1,200 people and took 253 hostages. But a worse crime still was leaving the innocent civilian population of Gaza exposed to retaliation by the IDF.

Israel’s response was perfectly predictable. It did what the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq – it attacked with overwhelming strength. It always has. Moshe Dayan said in 1955: “We do not have the means to prevent the murders of [Israeli] workers in orchards or of families sleeping in their beds at night. What we can do is set a very high price for our blood, so high that no Arab locality, Arab army or Arab government will want to pay it.”

Hamas knew that. So Hamas bears some responsibility for every death in Gaza. It isn’t just indifferent to the suffering of Gazans after October 7; it wants them to suffer, as part of its strategy of humiliating Israel morally and detaching it from its allies.

Furthermore, Hamas has an appalling record of human rights abuses. In 2007 it fought a brief civil war with Fatah. A report by the Palestine Center for Human Rights, which normally is highly critical of Israel, detailed the atrocities committed by both sides.

“The fighting included: extra-judicial and willful killings of combatants who laid down their arms; killing a number of wounded persons inside hospitals; abduction and torture; using houses and apartment buildings in the fighting, endangering the lives of civilians; obstruction of access of medical and civil defense crews to areas of clashes.”

At least two Fatah officials were thrown off high buildings.