A new report by UK #NGO #Airwars has extensively analysed all available data about the victims of 606 "incidents of civilian harm" (mainly Israeli airstrikes) that were recorded in #Gaza over the first 25 days of the escalation back in October 2023.
The newly published report found that a minimum of 5,137 civilians were confirmed killed in the strikes. (There were likely considerably more whose bodies were never recovered, or who have subsequently died of their injuries, or who have died due to the collapse of the healthcare system that began in these strikes). The victims included over 1,900 children, a toll for children around seven times greater than any previous month of warfare anywhere in the world analysed by Airwars (which was established in 2014). Gaza is by far the most intense and deadly conflict for civilians over this period.
Out of all those confirmed killed in the 606 incidents analysed in the report, Airwars found the number of #Palestinian militants (Hamas or otherwise) was between 30 and 58, meaning combatants were only 0.6%–1.1% of all deaths (=98.9–99.4% civilian death rate for these airstrikes).
This data does not point to a military that is attempting to limit civilian casualties, rather than opposite.
The newly published report found that a minimum of 5,137 civilians were confirmed killed in the strikes. (There were likely considerably more whose bodies were never recovered, or who have subsequently died of their injuries, or who have died due to the collapse of the healthcare system that began in these strikes). The victims included over 1,900 children, a toll for children around seven times greater than any previous month of warfare anywhere in the world analysed by Airwars (which was established in 2014). Gaza is by far the most intense and deadly conflict for civilians over this period.
Out of all those confirmed killed in the 606 incidents analysed in the report, Airwars found the number of #Palestinian militants (Hamas or otherwise) was between 30 and 58, meaning combatants were only 0.6%–1.1% of all deaths (=98.9–99.4% civilian death rate for these airstrikes).
This data does not point to a military that is attempting to limit civilian casualties, rather than opposite.
EndemicEarthling •
So if you took a random sample of 5,000 people in #Gaza at that point, you would have picked more #Hamas militants than the Israeli military managed to target in hundreds and hundreds of airstrikes.
The #Airwars report includes a detailed explanation of their methodology and links to their full dataset, and is available for free here: https://gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org/.
The report has been usefully summarised by UK journalist #OwenJones in this 9 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrhGKDpH0vA.
Airwars Gaza Patterns of Harm
gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.orgHeretical_i •
shitty choice of words when discussing a LIBERATION ARMY). There are AID WORKERS AND POLITICIANS and others who constitute THE LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT OF PALESTINE, So this is just so much statistical garbage. @palestine #Hamas #Palestine #Palestinians
Heretical_i hat dies geteilt
EndemicEarthling •
My point is that if you take that claim at face value (made repeatedly by Israeli military and political figures and cited endlessly in Western media) then you would expect that a random sample of 5,000 people in Gaza in early Oct 2023 would contain a minimum of ~1.3% people who might be considered combatants.
So the fact that this report found that these 606 incidents of civilian harm killed a far lower proportion of combatants than that shows that the Israeli military are either utterly atrocious at targeting, or are not really targeting combatants at all. The latter would be completely unsurprising to anyone who had been paying attention to the scores of examples of Israeli political and military leaders making outright genocidal statements during this period.
Heretical_i •
EndemicEarthling •
And it's important to have this kind of analysis because I suspect that there will come a day when western media and political elites seek to distance themselves from their full-throated support for this genocide, and one predictable line of (false) argument would be to say that the escalation of Israeli violence from the 7th October was initially targeted against the perpetrators of various war crimes, and only later devolved into genocide and ethnic cleansing, hence western support for this violence was also initially justifiable. But that will be a(nother) lie, because there was little attempt made by Israeli political and military figures to hide their genocidal intentions from the outset, and because the pattern of civilians harms documented in this report show definitively what was possible to grasp simply from looking at pictures of the devastating intense bombing campaign that began on 7th October: namely, that their stated intentions were being put into horrific reality.
Heretical_i •
And it's important to have this kind of analysis because..."
...Because Palestinian Evidence to that effect is ignored.
Sorry. Not buying the 'Must be western evidence or it'll be ignored' trope ur insinuating. The Palestinians LONG-AVAILABLE Evidence needs to be shoved down western politicians throats ... FORCE-FED, or you GET NOTHING.
EndemicEarthling •
This doesn't ignore the testimony of Palestinians—quite the opposite. It takes their reporting with utmost seriousness, and attempts to synthesize an overview of their evidence gathered from thousands of individual testimonies and records.
I am not aware of any current Palestinian academic or journalistic efforts to quantify the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths amongst thousands of casualties across hundreds of incidents backed by a publicly-accessible database from a group with a track record of applying equivalent methodology to multiple other geopolitical conflict zones over many years that are currently available online for English-speakers.
If you know of anything like this, I would love to amplify them.