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Israel Gaza: Checking Israel's claim to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters (www.bbc.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The toll of at least 30,035 killed, from Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, has previously been described as trustworthy by the World Health Organization's (WHO) regional emergency director Richard Brennan.

The WHO says the ministry has "good capacity in data collection" and its previous reporting has been credible and "well developed".

But its overall tally of those killed does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The Gaza authorities' last demographic breakdown from 29 February indicated more than 70% of those killed had been women and children.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Not a lot of new information in this article. My summary is that there's no way to verify either Israeli claims about the number of Hamas fighters killed or Hamas claims about the number of Palestinians killed. However, the two groups' claims are mutually consistent, with Israel reporting approximately 10,000 Hamas fighters killed and Hamas reporting 30,000 Palestinians killed.

In December, [the IDF] described an assessment that it was killing two civilians for every Hamas fighter as "tremendously positive", given the challenges it faced on the battlefield.

Of course, (30,000 - 10,000) to 10,000 is 2 to 1.

As Arete says in another comment, 2 to 1 is ordinary for urban warfare. It's better than I expected, actually, given how heavily fortified Gaza is.

There's an interesting blog post by a military historian here. In his words,

The IDF claims that they are killing one Hamas soldier for every two civilians they kill in Gaza, a ratio of 0.5, which their spokespeople have claimed is ‘unprecedented in the modern history of warfare,’ but which looking at the figures above is not actually a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio – though of course one may well argue the vast differences in circumstances. It is still both far from the best and far from the worst performance for armies operating in civilian spaces.

I'm not endorsing everything he says but I think he gives some good context on the topic of civilian deaths during urban warfare. (IMO he's being somewhat uncharitable to Israel, given that Hamas spent billions of dollars fortifying Gaza in preparation for exactly this and also has an unusual incentive to have civilians on its own side die due to the role of international opinion in this war.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So according to you, all the male individuals Israel killed in this war of fighting age are Hamas fighters? That's very convenient to believe but it is far from the reality.

In Gaza, before the 7th of October the Hamas military division was supposed to have 30K fighters. Israel has been proven to use unguided munitions and a lot more powerful bombs than they should.

Even considering that all of their targets were legitimate, which I am pretty sure wasn't the case claiming that they killed 10K is extremely presumptuous.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

If you accept the Hamas claim that

The Gaza authorities' last demographic breakdown from 29 February indicated more than 70% of those killed had been women and children.

but you also think that Israel is getting its 2:1 value by counting corpses rather than by just making it up, that would imply that they're counting all dead men (and 5% of dead women and children) as Hamas fighters.

However, given that approximately half of the population of Gaza is under 18, 70% would imply that over 93% of Palestinian casualties are civilians (based on the assumption that adult men make up 100% of Hamas fighters but only 25% of the civilian population). That's 14 civilians killed for every fighter, more than twice as bad as the Russian siege of Mariupol. I don't believe this because (1) it doesn't correspond to the level of destruction we're seeing, (2) I think Biden would act very differently if it were true, and (3) Hamas has a great deal of motivation to lie.

If Israel were killing literally everyone, women and children would be 75% of the dead. This is what Hamas is saying when they say "more than 70%". I think it's absolutely ridiculous but it's what some people apparently believe and what the Western media reports uncritically.

Note that if if we accept the 2:1 casualty ratio Israel claims but believe they're counting dead Hamas fighters completely accurately, that would mean 50% of casualties would be women and children and 17% of the casualties would be civilian men. If we think Israel is also exaggerating, then 7500 Hamas fighters killed, a 3:1 casualty ratio (pretty bad but not necessarily unjustifiable) would mean 56% of the casualties would be women and children and 19% would be civilian men. So I think the true fraction of women and children among the dead is somewhere between 50% and 56%.