Eylon Levy is a former Israeli government spokesman who frequently appears on shows such as Piers Morgan Uncensored to defend Israel’s war in Gaza. On Sunday, he declared in a post on X that “the Iranian regime is now indiscriminately firing ballistic missiles at Israeli civilian homes, committing textbook war crimes out in the open.” In an earlier post, he gave a specific example, expressing outrage that an Iranian ballistic missile strike in the Israeli city of Bat Yam was so indiscriminately destructive that it had “shaved off ten whole floors” of an apartment building. Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, similarly asserted that Iran had “crossed red lines after it dared to fire missiles at civilian population concentrations in Israel”.

The Bat Yam strike, which killed seven Israeli civilians, inspired Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to denounce Iran, in a speech given at the site of the attack, for its “murder of civilians — women, children — that it carried out deliberately”. The message has been echoed by many of Israel’s defenders in the West.

Iran’s retaliatory strikes in Israel in recent days have killed an estimated two dozen civilians. Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, meanwhile, has killed tens of thousands. In February, Donald Trump said during a White House press event with Netanyahu that Gaza’s civilian infrastructure had been so thoroughly destroyed that the best that could be done would be to “level it out”, destroying all the remaining buildings and relocating all the surviving civilians to other countries. As Netanyahu sat next to him, Trump fielded questions about whether Palestinian civilians would ever be able to return by asking: “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”

The official justification for all of this death and destruction has been that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields”. Organisations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations have consistently disputed the charge that Hamas engages in human shielding. In Gaza, even the deaths of people in the same large apartment block as an intended target have been justified on the grounds that Hamas uses civilians as human shields. That means that, for example, even someone who’s “part of Hamas” in the sense of being an employee of Gaza’s civilian government is considered a military target if they’re at home with their family at the time of the strike.

AI systems have been developed to make guesses about when tens of thousands of people on this target list are at home, since it’s considered easier to get at them when they’re relaxing in their apartments. One of the pieces of software Israel’s military developed for this purpose was even given the ghoulish name, “Where’s Daddy?” In the original investigative report on all of this in the Israeli magazine +972, it was reported that “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”

Does anyone truly doubt that, in a country like Israel which mandates universal military service, an apartment building in Bat Yam included several Israeli equivalents of Gazans whom Israel would consider legitimate targets? If anything, with its far less sophisticated weapons, Iran has more of an excuse than Israel for being less precise.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could all be consistent in the opposite direction, and recognise that knowingly launching strikes which kill or dismember large numbers of civilians is wrong. That’s true no matter who does it.

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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist and the host of the Give Them an Argument podcast.

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