I have not seen this reported outside of JPost (though I'll admit I didn't look too hard, it might be buried somewhere in the Hebrew language media). I would not trust JPost reporting, they're really poor quality and have been for some time. It might be true (and certainly the ICRC hasn't looked all that useful in this mess), but I wouldn't place a lot of credence on this account unless it is sourced elsewhere as well.Originally Posted by Loki
LF, I am not an expert on military tactics. I suspect none of us are. And I think it's highly likely that the specific methods Israel is using are not the local optimum for reducing civilian casualties. But if given a set of premises upon which Israel is working - the geography of Gaza, the nature of Hamas, the goals of the war, and the timeline - I do not think that there is any method of fighting that would not result in massive civilian casualties in Gaza. Could Israel do better? Absolutely, and they should. But it would tweak the numbers, not dramatically change them.
Perhaps there is some magical set of tactics that would eliminate Hamas' ability to control Gaza and attack Israel with impunity (and result in the return of the remaining hostages) on a short timeline, but I don't know what they are.
Estimates of rocket misfires are on the order of 10%. In the first month of the war, about 9,500 rockets were fired (I haven't seen updated summary stats though I'm sure they exist); the rate of rocket fire has slowed down some (and there was the week long pause), but let's guesstimate we're talking about 12,000 rockets. That would suggest well over 1,000 rockets have fallen in Gaza. We know that one of them caused many casualties at a hospital, though it's unclear precisely how many were killed there (the initial Hamas claim of 500+? Later estimates of < 100 by some intel agencies? Somewhere in between?) but I assume that many of those thousand rockets have also killed other Gazans given how densely populated the region is and how the rockets are much deadlier right after launch (due to large amounts of unexpended propellant). I have no way of knowing how many Gazan civilians have been killed by Hamas/PIJ rockets in the last two month, but if you told me it was on the order of 1,000 I would not be surprised. It's happened in previous rounds with much lower rate of fire, I don't doubt it's happening now. I certainly think that 1,000 Gazan civilians killed by Hamas would be notable and would 'move the needle'.
I agree that the collaborators executed probably only number in the dozens. The anecdotes I was referencing were some ill-sourced videos (albeit from reasonably reputable social media accounts with ties to Gaza) showing civilians gunned by Hamas for attempting to evacuate various regions. In the videos I saw there were dozens of bodies, but (a) I have no idea of the circumstances of their deaths, other than the claim made by those filming and (b) I don't know how widespread these events were. We may never know if this is a significant factor.
I mean force on force like you saw mostly outside of urban areas in the early parts of the Iraq war. Early stages of the Iraq War were an incredibly permissive environment for the US military, there was no systematic attempt by the Iraqi military to slug it out with the US inside their cities. The Battle of Baghdad is a good example - very little of the fighting happened in dense neighborhoods, most was focused in dug-in positions outside of the city, at the airport, and a few critical transportation nodes in the city. Using that as a comparator is farcical given how much Hamas is dug in in Gaza. I'll agree that later stages are also not particularly good comparators because the tempo of operations was indeed lower in most cases, which again favored US precision. West Mosul is the best example I have from Iraq, and even that is flawed as I noted above.Three points here:
a) This is "force on force" fighting that Israel is doing. They're invading the Gaza strip with the ostensible objective of destroying Hamas. They're not occupying the Gaza strip, and trying to police it and control the territory and facing an insurgency as a consequence, as the US was doing with the long wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, and those phases of the war are the most appropriate comparisons.
I don't know where you got your numbers for civilian dead in Vietnam (and associated countries e.g. Cambodia, Laos) but those numbers seem absurdly low given a total civilian loss in Vietnam alone on the order of 2 million. Also, relatively little of the mass bombing happened in dense urban areas, which again favored lower casualties. I should note, however, that Vietnam data is notoriously bad on all sides, and it's hard to get a grasp of how many civilians were killed and by whom other than 'a lot'.b) One of the examples I gave was The Vietnam war, infamously brutal and hard-fought, in which the US conducted both conventional warfare and an anti-insurgency campaign, as well as perhaps one of the last conflicts where the US made use of World War II style mass bombing and the U.S still doesn't come close to inflicting the civilian/combatant death ratio Israel has 'achieved' in few months.
I'm not sure that's true. SEAD doesn't need to be all that bloody and plenty of counter-insurgency results in lots of civilian casualties (though I'm sure some would be blamed on Iraqi forces). Given that we're apparently taking 'any perpetrators' for the violence (for comparability to the Gaza data), you see a huge peak in civilian deaths in 2006-2007 (with much great AUC than the first two months of the invasion). And the vast majority of those deaths in the 2006-2007 peak are 'unknown perpetrators', which is good honesty from IBC but makes it hard to know the true toll of US operations.c) There is no real reason to simply assume counter-insurgency warfare intrinsically involves more civilian casualties than conventional warfare, since in a conventional war against an opponent with a conventional military, U.S doctrine is to begin by targeting the air-defence network and then command and control facilities etc, which are usually in civilian areas and can only be reached by intrinsically less discriminatory air power, before ground combat even commences, where in a counter-insurgency campaign the enemy has no such infrastructure and the occupying force is usually trying to protect the civilian population, which they are now responsible for, and air-power only used in tactical role. Most people that died in Iraq after the invasion were not killed by the coalition, and the coalition inflicted far higher civilian casualties during the invasion than it did at any point in the occupation afterwards (see: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/)
I don't place much credence on specific data provided by Hamas. And a 17 year old gunman for Hamas is still counted as a 'child' in those statistics. Even if we take the demographic data at face value, we don't know the circumstances of those deaths given the widespread disinformation and the unwillingness of anyone in Gaza to provide some sort of accounting of who is a combatant, and how various people died. I will freely admit that lots of civilians have been killed by Israel, but I don't actually know how many.We've known the ratio of woman and children in the death total for quite some time which can be used to approximate the number of civilians the total makes up and it's always been two thirds of the total.
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