The global experts on urban warfare say that the achievements of the IDF in the Gaza Strip are no less than phenomenal, also in the sense of the little damage to civilians. So how is it that Israel is accused precisely against this background in which it makes every effort to protect the innocent?
In his “State of the Nation” speech, US President Joe Biden informed the world that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and most of them are not members of Hamas. Because many thousands of innocent men, women and children.” He also consoled the Muslims in his best wishes – “The war in Gaza has caused the Palestinian people terrible suffering. More than 30,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.”
The question that arises is – how does the president of the USA accept the figure on the number of deaths that come from the hands of the Palestinians as the absolute truth???
The claim is that they gain credibility because they come on behalf of the Ministry of Health in Gaza (which, by the way, is controlled by Hamas).
Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and the Mashgav Institute, and former head of the Palestinian Division in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, presents two problems with the Palestinian data that should be noted:
If there are more than 30,000 dead, they should be buried somewhere. Where exactly were they buried? After all, there are satellite photos. You can see if there are sites of mass burials. Have cemeteries grown or expanded dramatically? Where exactly are all these people buried?”
“When you get to the number of wounded, for example, 65,000 wounded and even more are reported. Where exactly are all these wounded hospitalized? According to a World Bank report, on Yom Tov there are about 3,000 hospital beds in all the hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Let’s assume they crowded in and put in 6,000 or even 10,000 hospital beds. Even if we assume that they used field hospitals, and turned all kinds of clinics and all kinds of schools into inpatient facilities, we will reach 20,000 inpatient beds. But they are talking about 65,000 wounded. Where exactly are all these 65,000 wounded?
In addition, one must ask – “If out of the 30,000 dead reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health at that time, at least 13,000 dead are terrorists, we are left with something like 17,000 dead civilians. If 70% of the dead in Gaza are women and children, as the Palestinians claim, then that means that all the rest of the dead are women and children. This is an impossible figure.
Professor Kobi Michael also adds – “We also know that quite a few have been killed by the Palestinians themselves. After all, we know that in every round of fighting that has taken place, rockets have fallen. Between 10 and 12 percent of the total rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel are failed rockets falling inside the Gaza Strip. An example of this is the incident on October 17 at the Al-Ahli hospital where a rocket of the Islamic Jihad resulted in the death of 30 Palestinians.”
“We know that in the first five months of the fighting, more than 13,500 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip. If at least 10 percent of them are rockets that fell in the Gaza Strip, this means that about 1,350 rockets fell in the Strip. If we assume that 50 percent of them fell in open areas, say which hardly exists in the Strip, because it is one of the most densely populated places in the world, it is about hundreds of rockets that fell on the heads of the Palestinians. And if one rocket killed 30 Palestinians in the Al-Ahli hospital, how many were killed by hundreds of other rockets? That means at least 17 thousand dead , how many thousands were killed by the Palestinians and not by the IDF.”
Avraham Weiner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, also decided to check the data himself, precisely from the point of assumption that they are correct and this is what he says –
Prof. Avraham Weiner, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
“I started checking them and nothing made sense to me as a statistician. It doesn’t seem to be true. It’s clear to anyone who understands how numbers work and how statistics work.”
What I immediately saw in the numbers provided by the Palestinians is that there are some illogical anomalies. The first is that the number of people who died each day during this period, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, was almost the same as the number of people who died the previous day.
When the analysis of the data continues, additional anomalies are discovered. One of them is related to the correlation between the number of women who died and the number of children who died. It should be understood that children do not exist without women. They don’t live alone, they live with their parents. Therefore, if the IDF bombs residential buildings, for example, both women and children are supposed to die from the bombings, because they come together. For example, for every five children there is one mother, two mothers, uncles, whatever. Therefore, on a day when many children die compared to a normal day, many women should also die compared to a normal day. On the other hand, on a day when only a few children died – it means that few women died.
“If, for example, we assume that each woman has three children, that means that for every 300 dead children I will see 100 dead women, but that is not what the data shows. The data shows 30 children and 300 women. There are also days with 300 children and 30 women. When you look at the data, there is no consistent relationship, but a relationship that changes irrationally.”
Not only that, but in a civil society there should be a relationship between the number of women who die and the number of men who die. But in the data of the Ministry of Health I ventured, not only is there no connection, but sometimes there is a negative connection. That is, there are days for example with almost 0 dead men and almost 125 dead women. It doesn’t make sense, these are not real data.”
It seems that Hamas determined in advance that 70 percent of the daily death toll would be women and children (good for global publicity), and then randomly filled in the data to match this ratio.
“These data are rubbish,” he concludes. The numbers are at the very least clearly inaccurate and probably completely fake.”
“If on the Israeli side they would make sure to pump up this matter in a systematic way, present the data and ridicule the reports, it is possible that Biden would not have said these things, or would not have said them so firmly. But we are not doing anything significant in this matter.”
The global experts on urban warfare: John Spencer, head of the urban warfare field at West Point’s Modern Warfare Institute – the US National Military Academy; and Colonel Richard Kemp, who was the commander of British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. They say that the achievements of the IDF In the Gaza Strip they are no less than phenomenal, also in the sense of the military achievements, but also in the sense of harming civilians. The ratio in this war is 1 to 1.3 or 1.7. I mean, for every terrorist they kill, 1.3 or 1.7 unarmed civilians are killed. This is a relationship that does not exist anywhere else, and has never existed in all the wars we know.
“The UN talks about a ratio of 1 to 9 in Mosul in Iraq, and a ratio of 1 to 7 or 1 to 5 in Raqqa in Syria. There are debates, it is not clear how many people were killed in Mosul, and it is not clear out of these dead, how many are civilians and how many are ISIS. That is why Spencer and Kemp say that what the IDF is doing is a phenomenal achievement.
It’s not that there aren’t mistakes, it’s not that innocent civilians weren’t killed, including children. But the efforts the army is making to reduce the collateral damage, and the learning processes the army is going through this war, are impressive by any measure. This is the most complex combat arena ever. It’s the most crowded place in the world, and it’s fighting against an organization on a massive scale.
“ISIS did not reach a third of the size of Hamas, and was not assimilated into the civilian population. Hamas has also managed to build crazy underground infrastructure, causing about 85 percent of the buildings above ground to be infected with terrorist activity. Most of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have Hamas terrorist infrastructure. It’s crazy what’s going on there. And yet the IDF manages to produce significant achievements with a low casualty ratio. This is what the US president should have talked about. Our interest, our duty, is to produce such a system of consciousness that they will talk about it and emphasize it.”
