Is There Really a ‘Disproportionate Death Rate’ Among Gazans?

The “allegedly disproportionate death rate” among Gazans is a claim based on three things:

1) a willingness to accept Hamas’ figures about casualties, which have not been confirmed by any other body. Such unquestioning acceptance is curious, given that Hamas has a record of lying about such things, as in its description of the so-called “Jenin massacre” in which, it claimed, “500 civilians” had been killed. The actual number of those killed turned out to be 52 terrorists. Hamas also claimed this past October that an Israeli airstrike hit the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, “killing 500 civilians.” The truth turned out to be quite different: it was not an Israeli airstrike, but a rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from Gaza, that misfired and fell on the parking lot of the Al-Ahli hospital, and not on the hospital itself, which remained unscathed. And Western intelligence sources concluded that not 500 people were killed, but between 10 and 50. Yet Hamas continues to insist on its original story of 500 dead as a result of an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli hospital. Hamas never corrects its tall tales. We have no idea how many civilians have really been killed in Gaza; we only know the figures put out by Hamas, a group that consistently lies.

2) Hamas provides a total figure for dead Gazans, but does not break it down further between civilians and combatants. This figure is parroted by the Western media — they currently report “more than 20,000 dead in Gaza” — without that media explaining that this figure comes from Hamas and has not been independently verified. Furthermore, the media misleads people into believing that those “20,000” dead consist entirely of civilians. Nowhere in the mainstream media will you hear that the IDF believes it has killed, by the end of December, about 9,000 members of Hamas (up from 7,000 three weeks ago), which means the total number of Gazan civilians killed is about 11,000. The ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in Gaza — 11 to 9 — is an unheard-of figure in modern urban warfare. Even the Americans could not bring their own military’s performance in Iraq below 3 civilians killed for every combatant.

Israel does not deliberately target civilians anywhere in Gaza. They are collateral damage, greatly regretted by the IDF, that does everything it can to limit their number. It does this in three ways. First, the IDF warns large numbers of Gazans away from areas that are soon to become part of. the battlefield. It dropped 1.5 million leaflets over northern Gaza in the first weeks of the war, urging residents to move south, beyond the Wadi Gaza, to avoid being caught in a battle zone. Nearly one million Gazans heeded the warnings and moved south. Hamas tried to prevent them from leaving; it wanted to hold onto as many human shields as possible. It even fired on, and killed, civilians trying to flee along Salah al-Din Street, the north-south corridor that cuts straight through Gaza. Second, when the IDF is about to target a civilian structure — school, mosque, apartment building — it warns residents of those buildings, and other civilians nearby, to leave those structures. It does this by means of messaging, telephoning, leafletting, and use of the “knock on the roof” technique. Tens of thousands of civilian lives in Gaza have been saved as a result of those warnings.

Of course, Israel pays a stiff price for such a policy: it not only warns civilians, but Hamas members, about where Israel will soon attack, giving them time to hide in their underground tunnels. It’s a price the IDF has been willing to pay. Third, when Israeli pilots see signs of many civilians present at or near an impending target, they frequently call off the mission. None of these ways that Israel minimizes casualties has received anything like the attention they deserve; such information would help make others realize that the IDF is doing a great deal to lessen harm to civilians, and its bombing — pace Joseph Biden — is not “indiscriminate” but exceedingly precise. For many people who are consumed with anti-Israel animus, such a revelation would never do.

As of December 9, the IDF believes it has killed 7,000 combatants. That would mean that that 10,00 civilians had been killed, and 7,000 combatants, resulting in a civilian-to-combatant ratio of 10 to 7. Furthermore, the UN itself claims that in all the wars fought since World War II, the civilian-to-combatant ratio has been 9 to 1. Many countries — Russia, China, Syria, Turkey — make no to minimize civilian casualties. The American and British armies are different; in Iraq the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths was 3 to 1; in Afghanistan, it was between 3 and 5 to 1, according to the commander of the British troops in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp. But Israel’s achievement in Gaza, of a 10 to 7 civilian-to-combatant ratio, is astounding, without parallel in the annals of urban warfare.