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Comment by zmgsabst

2 years ago

That’s always the case.

At 2:1 civilians to combatants, this is an unusually low civilian death count.

Trying my best to assume this comment in good faith... Low compared to what? For reference, in the recent war in Ukraine (post 2022), there have been approximately 11,000 Ukrainian civilians killed and approximately 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

  • Not to get into the debate about that other war, but there have almost certainly been many more Ukrainian civilians killed than the 11 000 formally confirmed deaths. That's just the number that can be properly verified, mostly in Ukrainian-held territory, and nobody is entirely certain how many have died in the Russian-occupied regions. Ukraine claims a much larger number have died, including more than 25 000 in Mariupol alone, for instance, but that can't be independently verified because it's still Russian-held.

    • This is at least as true in Gaza too is it not? And over a much shorter time frame, with a significantly smaller population.

      The expectation is that there are at a minimum 15/20% dead under the bombed and decimated buildings. It could well be much, much higher, even double, or triple is not infeasible, given the large scale untargeted bombing, population dispersement and recognised IDF tactics that don't allow for groups to even consider searching and rescue operations in most cases but leave possible survivors buried under the rubble to die slowly and horribly.

      The current numbers are just not even close to verifiable given the circumstances, but are statistically clearly far worse in terms of civilians on all measures.

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    • Also Ukraine is a large country, civilians who were not drafted have mostly evacuated westward, and Poland and other countries have taken in other countless Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, Egypt has built barbed wire fences to prevent Palestinians from crossing the border and taking refuge there. And no other countries are presently accepting large numbers of Palestinian refugees at all.

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  • Usually you would compare it to other instances of urban combat.

    E.g. you might compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in cities, but you wouldn't compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in the middle of nowhere where no civilians were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio has some things to compare against. Part of the problem is it is often hard to identify who is a civilian, and often different battles will categorize them differently. For example, in the iraq war us was accused of significantly undercounting civilian casualties. All this makes it hard to do direct comparisons.

Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio.

“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...

  • Since we're quoting might as well: "Under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, they killed indiscriminately in streets, houses, kibbutz communities and at a rave music festival.

    It took more than three days of heavy fighting for the Israeli army to regain control, and left the country deeply traumatised by violence unseen since the country's formation in 1948.

    Police are still working to assess the scale of the sexual violence that was reported alongside the killings."

    I'm pretty sure "security forces" includes police and possibly firefighters and even ambulance drivers. What I found in the IDF site is 282 soldiers: https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/swords-of-iron-idf-ca...

    So the ratio is more like over 3:1. More importantly your statement not true ("civilian to soldier").

    • 3:1 ratio = wanton indiscriminate terroristic destruction Thus 2:1 ratio = ?

    • So even if the ratio is slightly lower (also debatable whether every death they count as “combatant” is accurate), this makes a fundamental difference in terms of IDF’s behavior compared to that of who they designate as “terrorists”?

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This could only be possible if you are assuming all males killed are Hamas militants. In other words, absurd.

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  • I don't know about the "Israeli Zionist European settler Jews", but a plurality of all Israeli Jewish people are indigenous to MENA, so summing the population up that way is a little bit racist. I may be misreading you, though.

    • I believe the poster above was referring to the biggest representatives of the extremist minority of Israel who are cheering this conflict on in those terms. Not all of Israel is pro-genocide, but those that are are more likely than not to be in that group.

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