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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

This is a good rebuttal to the claim that no part of Mosul was struck hard or leveled. But nobody claimed that.

From your linked AP article:

"Nearly a third of the Old City [a specific neighborhood] was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery"

From MSF re Rafah:

"Over 15 months of all-out war on Gaza have left 92 percent of housing units and about 70 percent of all structures destroyed or damaged."

So we have 1/3rd of a particularly hard-hit neighborhood destroyed in Mosul versus 70% of the entire city of Rafah.

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/destruction-hom...

This is very obviously a completely different scale and comprehensiveness of destruction.

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You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.

That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.

That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.

Gaza in total had a population of about 2 million people and about 70,000 casualties. Israel's own estimate in 2025 claimed 8,900 of those were combatants.

Mosul had 1.5 million people at the time of the battle and ~10-20k civilian casualties + ~10-20k combatants.

Hard to do direct comparisons and all the numbers are obviously squishy, but your claim that Israel's war results in significantly fewer casualties seems... dubious at best.

And in any case, we actually know for a fact that Israel's non-combatant casualty cut-off value (NCV) -- i.e. their accepted rate in decision-making -- is several multiples higher than the coalition forces were.

> Peter Gersten, former deputy commander of operations and intelligence for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, states that “[w]ith Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV value of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he was head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the war against ISIS, would personally be called to authorize an operation with a “high” NCV of 14 or 15.

Re the Jabalia Camp attack:

> Satellite visual analysis of the attack site shows at least five large craters, including two approximately 40 feet wide, consistent with the impact of 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The attack destroyed not just one residential apartment building, but a whole block.

> Even without specific further intelligence, on the basis of this information Israel’s CDE must have resulted in a very high estimate for civilian casualties. Given the location, population spread, and choice of weapons, the actual toll of hundreds of civilians killed or wounded would have been a reasonable expectation.

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