Structural unengineering

Bombs are stronger than buildings. Nu?

The IDF learned something important this week, which after a year leveling most of Gaza it appears not to have known. Even its more recent, expanded efforts to remodel the region did not elucidate a key aspect of basic physics: A building is usually weaker than an explosive device.

This is the reasonable takeaway from this week’s targeting, we’re told, of a man on a rooftop in northern Gaza. Apparently he was holding binoculars and therefore had to be eliminated. It’s less clear if the perhaps 90-plus other people in the building needed to be eliminated, too.

Who was this man with the binoculars on the rooftop? Was he Hamas? A birdwatching enthusiast? Hamas with an enthusiasm for birdwatching? We will probably never know.

Who was everyone else? Not so important, it seems.

Now it’s true that a military is, by definition, a hammer looking for a nail. So a bomb to kill a guy on a roof is indeed quite a big hammer for a comparatively very small nail. Perhaps Israel was fresh out of pagers at …