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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>It's rather unfashionable these days to bring up the fact that Hamas purposely disguises themselves as civilians and operates almost exclusively from civlian buildings, and makes sure their compounds aren't separated from civilian infrastructure.

And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.

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I guess they are actually just people who live at home with their families. Aren’t most resistance fighters exactly that: civilians who are willing to fight to enable their families to live in freedom?

Their revealed preference is not to live in freedom, but instead to take potshots at Israel in an attempt to preserve their local support.

It’s also “unfashionable” because the criteria for who qualifies as Hamas varies depending on how you ask.

See jhallenworld’s comment elsewhere in this post: > “Hamas terrorist” criteria: a male or fighting age…

Of course there will be males of fighting age among civilians, many of them _are_ civilians

>See jhallenworld’s comment elsewhere in this post: > “Hamas terrorist” criteria: a male or fighting age…

Notably, this is not a criterion used by IDF, even though Hamas does everything to make it so.

Consider the usual criteria used to distinguish members of military organizations:

[ ] uniforms

[ ] operating from military bases separate from civilian buildings

[ ] name tags / military IDs

[ ] vehicles clearly identifiable as military (by markings, plates, etc)

All of those are required by international law.

I checked off all of the ones that Hamas uses.

Can you link to the criteria the IDF uses, and/or the international law(s) that requires those criteria be used?

I mean, honestly I don’t really think anyone cares about international law when decide to murder a bunch of people (any conflict, not just this one). That’s the problem really, you can shout as much as you want that they don’t have uniforms etc, but this is not some battle field with the solders lining up on each side. The article also explicitly states that they have a program called: “where is daddy” that targets males when they are home with their families.

>And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.

See, that's how you feel, because you aren't thinking or looking at data. And perhaps because you interpret "up to" as the actual ratio.

According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1].

Meanwhile, the estimates for Israel operation in Gaza is ~9000 militants killed out of ~25000 total[2].

The entire problem in discussing the issue is that the way people feel isn't driven by reality on the ground, but on what sounds nice.

[1] https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm

[2] https://twitter.com/yaakovkatz/status/1749870793486405750

>>According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war

I don't know what you are trying to say though - that this is ok? Normal? Expected? All of the above?

Like I'm not going to just shrug my arms and say "well it's war, what are you going to do".

> According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1]

That's not exactly what it says:

"Conflict continued to cause widespread civilian death last year, notably in densely populated areas, where civilians accounted for 90 per cent of the casualties when explosive weapons were used, compared to 10 per cent in other areas."

Why would you omit the qualifiers?

If that's the only case where this is true, then both the headline and the first sentence of this article are misleading or incorrect. The headline states "Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians" with no qualifiers. The first sentence starts "With civilians accounting for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties..." with no qualifiers.

It's disappointing that this UN report is so poorly written as to seem to contradict itself. Do you think ultimately the 90% refers exclusively to explosive use in urban areas, or all war casualties? I'm frankly not sure which thing the article is claiming.

>Why would you omit the qualifiers?

Because we're talking about Gaza, to which the qualifer ("notably in densely populated areas") most definitely applies.

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