There are ongoing discussions regarding the number of victims in Gaza during the two years of war. Most probably we will never know the exact number, but of course we may approach the true one closely and in the process debunk different lies about it that may be found in media.
Let's start with the source. The majority of Western media writing about Gaza casualties refers to "Gaza Health Ministry". It means Hamas. Since 2007 Hamas has been ruling Gaza in a totalitarian way. As in Mussolini's definition - "everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" - in combination with the Stalin's way of executing power. Nothing, including ministries, health care, statistics and press and media releases, could have been done without Hamas's "imprimatur".
This data was repeated by UN (in itself not objective, but this is for another occasion), which openly states so in all its reports, by NGOs, media representatives and health personnel on spot. None of them has any other source of information. And if they would question Hamas's data they would have been excluded from entering Gaza at all.
Now that we know the source, unreliable as it is, let's examine the data (after all even the worst sources occasionally were known to produce correct data for a variety of reasons, still, the source needs to be taken into account). So, according to Hamas during last two years in Gaza app. 69,000 people died as a result of war. Before 2023 the average natural death rate in Gaza was approximately 8,000 people a year. No natural deaths are reported for the wartime, and in fact Hamas official admitted that they were counted as war casualties.
"The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry, Zaher al-Wahidi, made the admission to Sky News after an analysis by the HonestReporting nonprofit last week found that some 3,400 individuals listed as war casualties in earlier tallies had been dropped from the ministry’s latest update."
Therefore, at least 15,000-16,000 reported casualties are, in fact, deaths caused by natural causes. So let's be conservative, and reduce the given by Hamas number by 14,000 to 55,000 war casualties.
The next problem almost NEVER addressed is that Hamas (also if it's named Health Ministry) does not differentiate between targeted terrorists and civilian casualties. All victims are classified as civilians which is obviously very, very far from truth. So what is the ratio? Obviously nobody (except maybe Hamas to some extent) has exact numbers. Nevertheless both parties try to count them and sometimes admit/ reveal their calculations. In April 2024, 6 months into the war, Hamas made a statement to Reuters:
"More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, Gazan medical officials say. Hamas has said 6,000 of its fighters are among the fatalities. Israeli officials say the Palestinian combatant death toll is more than twice as high."
At the time Israelis were estimating terrorists among casualties of the war at 14,000. We may go about the estimation in two ways:
a) proportionately to the time of the war going on (therefore estimating after 2 years the number of terrorists killed as 24,000 according to Hamas and 56,000 according to IDF) or
b) proportionately to the number of casualties (therefore estimating after 2 years the number of terrorists killed as 10,000 according to Hamas - 18% of 55,000 killed, and 23,000 according to IDF - 42% of 55,000 killed)
It is noteworthy to say that if we would count this percent from the number of all victims as given by Hamas - 18% (or 42% according to IDF) of 69,000 the number of killed terrorists would have been significantly higher (12,400 according to Hamas or 29,000 according to IDF in relation to former data, so I try to be all the time very conservative to not overestimate in any way the number of killed terrorists. By the way we know that many a time individual victims were counted by Hamas as civilians even when they were known terrorists. Here is one example, and there are more, but I concentrated here on statistics rather than individual cases.
So, continuing our very Hamas-numbers-friendly correction starting by admitting total death number over last two years as 69,000, and correcting it by 14,000 natural deaths (yes, during war people still die because of old age, heart failure, traffic accidents, cancer etc.) to 55,000 we can agree for approximately 42,500 civilian casualties as per Hamas. Yes, these may be civilian casualties (if we will really really fall for Hamas narrative) and of course each and every life is precious, but that means on average less than 58 civilian casualties a day. You think it is a lot? It is definitely too many (the best would be none at all on both sides) but compare it with 1,195 Israeli casualties during ONE DAY (the first day of this war) and figure it out. Moreover, the number of killed terrorists is obviously vastly underestimated in this calculation as we know that 3,800 terrorists from elite Nukba force were sent to Israel on October 7. many of them were killed during first 2 days still on Israeli territory. So it is almost impossible for the same number to be killed over 6 months of regular war as Hamas wants it to be.
If the above calculation would be true we'd have a civilian to terrorist ratio among killed as 3.4:1. That would have been quite an achievement for any army, but in fact this ratio is probably far far better and more humanitarian. But if you for whatever reason will not be convinced by what I will present below keep this overestimation in mind. And please, remember that according to UN the civilian victims of warfare constitute on average 90% meaning 9:1 ratio.
The next point is the ratio of minors and women among casualties. Here we need some data. While in most societies the ratio of men to women is vastly 1:1 with slight differences; the ratio of minors (per Hamas up till 18 years, which agrees with legal definition in many Western countries, but does not take into consideration factors connected to cultures, including Islamic one) might be very different in different countries. For example: in the USA people under 18 between 2022-2024 constituted approximately 22%; in UK people under 18 between 2022-2024 constituted approximately 19%; in Israel people under 18 between 2022-2024 constituted approximately 33%; in Gaza in 2023 people under 18 constituted approximately 50% of the society. Therefore if in UK among casualties of any calamity 50% would be people under 18 they would have been tremendously over represented. In Gaza they would be just in mathematical proportion. Of course in ideal world no children should be harmed by war, but they always are, and we always have to take into consideration what is the average age of the population in any given country. Are all Gaza minors civilian casualties of the war? Unfortunately not. Hamas was training minors for a long time and continues to do so, from the very early age indeed. Starting from the age 15 they are included in terrorist actions. Therefore many of the "minors" were, sadly, 15, 16 and 17 years old terrorists. Were they victims? Absolutely! But not of Israel or of IDF. They were and remain victims of Hamas. When we hear about child-soldiers in African countries, often forced to join militias after they murdered their parents, and who occasionally are 12 or 13 years old we consider them victims of sadistic cruelty, and rightly so. But they are victims of these militias and not of peoples who they murder. They can be (and usually are) both victims (forced to join the armed forces and kill) and perpetrators (killing others). Such is the history of many Gaza minor casualties of the war. They may be in some instances minor, but they are no more civilian than Wehrmacht (in last stage of II world war conscription in Germany started at 16), Werewolf (Nazi partizans after May 1945, some 14 or 15) or Viet Cong partisans. If somebody carries the gun and shoots others with it during the war they are no civilians. Some of the women were as well members of Hamas, probably not in combat forces but nevertheless no civilian victims.
And that does not even take into account the major discrepancies in reporting the ratio of minor and female casualties. And Hamas did many of those, probably believing (unfortunately for a good reason) that few will bother to check their data. Still, some did check.
Above we have two pictures illustrating the claimed number of Palestinian victims from early days of war. One from December 8, and one from December 27, 2023. Both include the Hamas data as stated (Ministry of Health in Gaza). UN OCHA repeated this data without questions, but in fact while the total number of deaths had risen by 3,623, the number of women and children allegedly killed remained constant, and the percentage of women and children killed also remained steady at 70%. In reality, when combined, the figures of the allegedly dead women and children on December 8 account for 73.6% of the dead, while on December 27, they account for only 61% of the allegedly dead.
Having made the decision to blindly adopt and UN-wash the Hamas propaganda statistics, UN OCHA even reported the blatant lies presented by Hamas.
Thus, for example, on March 29, 2024, UN OCHA reported a total of 32,623 Palestinian casualties, of whom at least 9,000 were women and 13,000 were children.
A week later, on April 5, 2024, UN OCHA reported that the death toll had risen to a total of 33,091, of whom more than 9,500 were women (a rise of 500 dead women) and approximately 14,500 were children (a rise of roughly 1,500 dead children).
In other words, inexplicably, out of the 468 total additional deaths from March 29 to April 5, at least 2,000 (!) of them were women and children.
You may check it yourselves on UN OCHA webpages.
Following the pattern of adopting and UN-washing the Hamas terror propaganda, on May 6, 2024, the UN OCHA report included its usual info-graph showing that since the beginning of the war, there had been 34,735 reported Palestinian casualties, of whom more than 9,500 (27.3%) were women and more than 14,500 (41.7%) were children.
Suddenly, on May 8, 2024, UN OCHA dropped a bombshell. In its new report, UN OCHA suddenly clarified that of the total alleged casualties, only 24,686 had been identified. The number of women killed suddenly plummeted from over 9,000 on May 6 to 4,959 on May 8. The number of children killed also plummeted from over 14,500 on May 6 to 7,797 on May 8.
UN OCHA still reported the higher, unconfirmed data about death toll and continues to do so, but suddenly, on May 8, 2024, its shown ratio of victims changed as you may see below:
And what about real ratio for civilian to combatant killed? Well, I have shown that UN regards "normal" ratio (as if there is anything normal about the war, but unfortunately wars happen) as 9:1, according to Hamas statistics shown above it's 3.4:1, but subsequently I have provided some critical analysis of Hamas provided data. What about IDF provided data? I have no way of verifying it but there are no obvious flows and in-consequences. According to this data the ratio of civilian to militant casualties is less than 2:1, which is really remarkable. For comparison, while in earlier wars (II WW, Korean war) the ratio of civilian casualties was really high in recent wars involving Western armies (Afghanistan, Iraq) this ratio was much lower (thankfully) but still constituted approximately 2.4-2.7:1. If you will go with Hamas's data IDF is slightly worse than American forces in Afghanistan, if you go with IDF data it is slightly better, but none of these pictures indicates genocide. On the contrary, considering it is urban warfare with Hamas using civilian infrastructure as launching pads and civilians as human shields, not mentioning that Hamas terrorists are not using any kind of uniforms this ratio - according to any data available you choose - is remarkable, showing IDF's consideration for civilian lives.
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