Civilian Casualties in Gaza
Interview with Adar Weinreb
I’m sorry for the ongoing lack of content, but:
So, combined with baby, productivity is at an all time low. However I did do an interview with Adar Weinreb about civilian casualties in Gaza, specifically about his contention that the civilian to combatant ratio is extremely high in the context of modern warfare.
Adar is a big lefty, but facts are facts, on the condition that they are really facts. He make a strong case, so listen and see if you agree.
I’ll close by underlining what I said at the end. If you have good reason to believe that the civilian to combatant ratio is indeed either low or normal in the context of warfare over the past fifty years (and you are not an illiterate buffoon or a deranged crank), then you can guest post an article, or, if you prefer, I’ll interview you. Or I’ll pass on your details to Adar and you can debate him.
I've done a decent amount of analysis on the MoH data. As a data nerd it's certainly attractive to do analysis on the data you have - I looked for obvious things like men categorized as women (using LLMs to gender-categorize arabic names) and couldn't find a meaningful amount outside of what one would expect from random errors. At the same time it is quite concerning, to say the least, that we have no way of verifying this information. Adar makes a good point that Israel should be able to verify the info, but given how little effort has gone into any real information war / PR, I am actually skeptical there are people in the (say) IDF spokesman’s office with access to (say) cell phone records who would be able to falsify or validate the data. On the other hand, if it is accurate, I would love to understand how that came to be the case. The single most powerful piece of propoganda in the war is the death toll, and Hamas doesn't realize this? Hamas has nothing to do with the production of this data? They just have such integrity that they leave the MoH alone to do its work? They resist the temptation to delete and add entries, or otherwise change the data? It just makes no sense. That doesn't mean it's definitely false, but it does mean that an argument that relies solely on that data (which Adar's does, other than the one stat on 2500 rifles) is suspect.
An important and informative interview about a very important subject. Anyone with an interest in those topics should listen to it all, not just “if you have nothing better to do”.