The rural terrain of Helmand province (Image: Andrew Fox)[Missing Credit]
Gaza presented a far denser and more complex environment. The IDF had to fight house by house through a defensive system running through walls, floors and deep underground while protecting Israeli civilians from rocket fire. Hamas had spent years turning the ground beneath Gaza into a subterranean fortress, linking fighting positions, command posts and weapons stores. Shafts opened inside homes and civilian buildings. More than 250 hostages were taken into Gaza, many of them into that network, forcing Israeli troops to advance while searching for captives whom Hamas could move or kill at any moment.
We faced nothing comparable in Afghanistan. We did not contend with hundreds of miles of tunnels woven through the battlefield, clear apartment blocks while fighters emerged behind us from concealed shafts, or search for civilians held beneath the ground we were attacking. We fought a counterinsurgency against an enemy with limited heavy weapons and engineering capacity. The IDF was fighting a full-scale urban war against an organisation that had spent years fortifying the terrain above and below ground.
The density of explosives changes everything. Estimates given to me by IDF engineers ran into the tens of thousands, with an upper figure of about 100,000 improvised explosive devices. Spread evenly across Gaza, that is roughly one device for every half a football pitch. In built-up areas, the concentration was greater. Tunnel mouths, stairwells, doors and whole buildings could be rigged. The deliberate pace we enjoyed around one suspected device in Helmand was often unavailable to Israeli troops under fire. If they had stopped to defuse every device, they would never have made it past the Gaza border.
This also explains much of the physical destruction. In the areas I examined, a large proportion of damage resulted from ground clearance: explosive breaching, controlled demolition, armoured bulldozers, and the detonation of booby traps. Buildings were opened to create protected routes, brought down because they concealed tunnels, or destroyed after explosives rendered them unsafe. A photograph of rubble cannot tell you whether an aircraft struck the building, engineers demolished it, or Hamas explosives destroyed it during clearance. It cannot establish whether the action was lawful either.
Of course, there are fair criticisms of the IDF. It is a mass reserve army, and the quality of its units is uneven. Some reserve formations lack the depth of training and professional habits expected of a British regular battalion. The IDF also lacks the deep, long-service non-commissioned officer spine that gives the British Army much of its discipline. The killing of Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samer Talalka in December 2023 remains a terrible example. The escaped hostages were shirtless, and one carried a white flag. Soldiers from a battalion of Israel’s infantry training school misidentified them as a threat and opened fire, breaching the rules of engagement.
No honest soldier should excuse that failure, or any of the other tragic mistakes and breaches that occur in every war zone. British forces have also killed civilians or comrades through error, poor communication or failures of command. Our own elite SAS are currently under investigation. My stories from Afghanistan are not allegations of war crimes against the soldiers involved; the point is that hideous stories like these happen on every battlefield, be it Helmand or Gaza. They show that lawful armies make catastrophic mistakes, and that tragedy alone does not settle the legal or moral question.
The institutional test is the law of armed conflict: distinction, military necessity, proportionality and precautions in attack. Those principles are embedded in IDF planning, targeting and legal review, as they are in the British Army. That does not make every Israeli action lawful or every investigation sufficient. It does make Streeting’s comparison intellectually unserious. He has treated the visible consequences of an exceptionally difficult battlefield as proof of inferior standards.
British soldiers in Afghanistan were brave and professional. We also fought with advantages the IDF did not have: a rural battlespace, no vast tunnel complex, no hostage rescue mission threaded through operations, and an enemy unable to prepare almost every block as a fortified position, rather than a highly trained guerrilla force. A fair comparison asks how British forces would have performed under the same conditions. I see no evidence that we would have performed better. I spent sixteen years serving under British military standards. Having seen both wars up close, the only standards I can say with confidence have fallen short are those of Britain’s Defence Secretary.
Andrew Fox is a senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, and co-host of The Brink podcast with former JC editor, Jake Wallis Simons
