Comment by Gabriel54
2 years ago
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.
One significant difference is that Ukrainian authorities goes really far to evacuate civilians while Hamas goes really far to prevent civilians from evacuating.
Earlier it has been said that based on previous reporting from previous incidents we can roughly trust the total numbers Hamas release evem if they are obviously wrong in that they claim every death to be an innocent civilian.
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Not saying it isn't, and I wasn't trying to make a comparison between the two conflicts. Only pointing out the inaccuracy of the quoted Ukrainian numbers.
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.
The barbed wire fences were equally built by Israel, are they not? Israel definitely controls that border.
The current geopolitical outcome of Egypt accepting large numbers of Palestinian is that Israel does what it is doing now to Palestine, to Egypt at some point in the future.
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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.
A similar anti-terrorist war featuring large amounts of urban conflict, eg Iraq (3:1) or Afghanistan (4:1.1) — since much of Ukraine is designated armies across open fields.
Numbers from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
Ukraine's troops are uniformed and fighting along a front, not trying to blend in with civilians in an urban area
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> What indication is there that there is any significant "blending in" of Hamas fighters?
I think it is rather well documented.
Go to r/combatfootage on reddit to see for yourself.
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