Comment by decohen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by decohen | Hacker News Reader

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Not parent, but let's take each side's numbers at face value:

The Gaza Ministry of Health says as of today that 35,562 people have been killed [0]. The Israeli Ministry of Defense in March said it has killed 13,000 Hamas operatives [1].

Leaving aside the two month gap between these figures, the civilian casualty ratio is 1:1.7.

I tried to find a source for what a "typical" casualty ratio is in urban conflicts. This source [2] claims that 90% of overall casualties is a typical number. That would be a ratio of 1:9.

John Spencer, who chairs the Modern Warfare Institute at USMA, and seems to be an authority on the subject, has a tweet addressing this specifically [3], in which he cites the Battles of Mosul, and Manila as having casualty rates of 1:2.5, 1:6 respectively.

I don't think proving the negative of "lowest civilian casualty rate in modern history" is feasible, but a nearly 5x improvement in civilian casualties compared to the assumed norm, and lower civilian casualties than Spencer's comparisons seems to indicate that the claim is not without merit.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham... [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-says-gaza... [2] https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urb... [3] https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1786612914117349769

It’s hard to believe those numbers when (according to anonymous Israeli military officers) the Israelis are willing to routinely accept civilian casualties of 20 to 1. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Neither the Gaza Ministry of Health, nor the armed wing of Hamas have released the number of combatant casualties, leaving the IDF's number as the only estimate available. If that estimate is incorrect, they could and should challenge it by putting forth their own.

The source you provided says "for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians". This is clearly an upper bound, and makes no claim about how close to this they actually come.

In the same way, I might offer my customers an SLA of two nines in their contract, but never drop below three in practice. Part of effective planning is describing the worst case scenario, but that doesn't imply it will actually happen.

The IDF counts every grown man that they kill as a "Hamas operative"

Hamas counts every Hamas operative younger than 18 who dies as a child.

Neither the Gaza Ministry of Health, nor the armed wing of Hamas have released the number of combatant casualties, leaving the IDF's number as the only estimate available. If that estimate is incorrect, they could and should challenge it by putting forth their own.

This is an outrageous and horrifying accusation, can you share your source for it?

The battle of Manila stands out as one of the most horrifying in modern history, hardly a good standard to be targeting.

Modern History is already quite good compared to the entirety of history. The bog standard Siege of La Rochelle ended up starving the civilian population of 27,000 to 5,000. War is brutal, and when you dealing with brutal enemies like Hamas it's never going to an orderly affair.

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