Zionuts

[wiggin]

Wig, I'll respond to your other points later, but I find it strange that you think a 2/1 civilian-combatant ratio is good for a first-rate military power with modern weaponry. The example American officials were using earlier in this conflict was the Battle of Fallujah. America killed over 1,000 combatants and well under 1,000 civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fallujah

Just because Russia or Syria kills far more civilians than combatants doesn't mean Israel should be compared to those countries.

Mosul is a far better example than Fallujah, and even that is flawed. Civilians in both places had a non-urban environment to leave to - even with the attempts to move civilians around the war zone, Gaza is entirely a dense built-up urban environment and precious few Palestinians are being let into Egypt. So the population of civilians inside is much, much higher.

Credible estimates have suggested that on the order of 10,000 civilians were killed in the retaking of Mosul (no one's really sure), and somewhere on the order of 3,000-12,000 IS fighters (estimates vary widely here, but certainly far fewer IS fighters than Hamas fighters). Although obviously the ground war was largely driven by Iraqi forces and allied militias (who are nowhere near as well trained or well equipped as a modern Western military), a large proportion of the casualties were due to American airstrikes and shelling (I saw estimates of 29k+ American munitions cited by Airwars from US CentCom). West Mosul, where most of the killing happened, houses a far smaller population than Gaza City or Khan Younis, and there was plenty of time for much of the population to flee both during the initial IS takeover and in the subsequent counteroffensive. And - crucially - the Americans and Iraqis had all the time in the world, there was no meaningful clock that meant the Americans had to hurry up and complete the capture in a month or two, a burden the IDF always faces. Lastly, IS used brutal tactics as does Hamas, but they didn't have 17 years to fortify Mosul into a nightmare for urban assault.

So even with many advantages - a smaller civilian population, lots of tactical and strategic flexibility, etc. - the US had somewhere on the order of 50-75% civilian casualties.

Or you could look at the War in Afghanistan. It's hard to get accurate estimates of the number of casualties, but it's believed that on the order of 50,000 Afghan civilians were directly killed in the fighting (I've seen credible estimates as high as 70k+), with a similar number (~50k) Taliban/AQ/etc. fighters. Afghanistan, while a challenging war to fight and win, is much easier to avoid civilian casualties because most of the fighting was happening in relatively remote, low density areas. But they had ~50% civilian casualties.

I'll also remind you that even with much smaller urban battles you regularly get ridiculously high casualties. In 1993 in a single day the US killed on the order of 500-1000 Somalis in Mogadishu - no one really knows how many, and estimates of how many were civilians vary widely, but it's believed to be a lot. They were using essentially machine guns, rifles, and lightly armed helicopters, and only a few thousand total troops were in play by the end of the battle (most of the day it was just a few hundred). Warfare in dense urban environments when the civilians are unable or unwilling to leave is incredibly bloody. When the defenders don't care about the civilian population at all, it gets much worse.

Civilian casualty numbers in Ukraine are very difficult to ascertain but it's almost certainly the case that Russia has killed a lower proportion of civilians to combatants than Israel has. Admittedly, this is likely due to Ukraine having a far superior capability to resist, especially in the air and not for want of trying on Russia's part, but still. I also can't find an example of a conflict where a first world power with a modern military has even gotten close to killing more civilians than combatants, let alone at the 2:1 level (which is likely a bare minimum), so the notion that this is expected in 'this type of urban combat' (whatever that means) doesn't really hold up to even causal scrutiny. The level of destruction that is being unleashed on Gaza is unprecedented, even by Israeli standards.

Large numbers of Ukrainian civilians had been evacuated from the areas of fighting, and most of the current fighting is happening in rural areas. Shockingly, the Ukrainian government and military prioritizes the lives of their civilians. Sure, Russia carries out bombing of infrastructure and terror bombing and the like, but that's always been a sideshow compared to the main engagement.

I am flabbergasted that you can't find an example of a modern military killing more civilians than combatants, just look at the examples I listed above. And that wasn't even looking very hard. You can add the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, or even dinky little wars like the invasion of Panama.

As Minx says, most of the deaths have likely come through air power, and the reason for the heavy toll seems to be combination of massively relaxed rules of engagement when targeting Hamas members ("Hamas's janitor's brother room-mate is maybe in this building? Level the entire block. Oh, he was out? Level where-ever he went too") and the concept of what are euphemistically called 'power targets', basically just civilian infrastructure:

So, it seems the plan is to deradicalize Gazan population with terror bombing: a clearly brilliant plan that only the most nuanced and sensible of geo-political geniuses would even contemplate. That or they just want to ethnically cleanse the place by trashing the infrastructure so badly it's basically impossible to live there. One of those.

An notably despicable episode in a long and cruel war.

The 972 piece was certainly interesting, but I do not think it is definitive - we probably won't have a good idea for years. It's clear that Israel has relaxed their rules of engagement for two reasons: first, in providing air support for troops under fire (happening a lot more in this war), they tend to be far more willing to severely shorten the decision making process. Second, given that the perceived military benefit of destroying Hamas' ability to control Gaza is much higher than in previous wars, they are more permissive. (I should also note that the whole thing about using machine learning to help identify targets is a new spin on an old idea - US intelligence was using similar methods to target insurgents in Iraq over a decade ago, albeit without a fancy trendy algorithm to speed up the process.)

I am sure there will be a lot of learnings from this war on target selection and how to provide appropriate controls in the kill chain while keeping it as short as possible. I have no doubt that Israel is making many errors, some of which may be serious or systematic enough to constitute crimes. But anyone who honestly believes that you could invade Gaza and uproot Hamas without causing many thousands of civilian casualties is living in a fantasy land. There is a very good reason why Israel has refrained from doing so until now - and it isn't the threat to their troops. So far they've lost less than 100 soldiers fighting Hamas inside Gaza. A lot for Israel, certainly, but on par with other major engagements in recent memory (e.g. the 2006 Lebanon War). The difference is that even if you kill thousands of Hamas/PIJ fighters and destroy much of their infrastructure, you're also going to kill many other Palestinians. It's a really bad option, and Israel has avoided it studiously for 17 years. After October 7, the Israeli government (and, it appears, a large majority of their population) has decided that horrific as this option is, the alternatives have now been shown to be worse.

[Dreadnaught]

Do you know what you call someone who tolerates fascists? A fascist.

What are you even saying.