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.
Like let’s say, unique in wartime, the Gaza MoH has managed to publish timely accurate numbers free of Hamas influence. That would be a remarkable feat, worthy of study and quite notable. So the onus is on the person using this data to show that it’s accurate, not vice versa. And again I would be more convinced by Adars argument that Israel can simply check if I saw any analysis coming out of official Israel whatsoever. All I see is parroting of John Spencer, which tells me that nobody is actually working on anything.
Also, what is presumably verifiable (again if some Israeli bureaucrat actually was proactive enough to verify it, which I am skeptical of) is that these people exist, not that they are still alive / have died. That’s much harder to verify or falsify.
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”.
I don't know much about this issue, but I'm not too impressed by Weinreb's analysis, because, if I understand correctly, he seems to assume that military-age men are noncombatants to the same proportion as military-age women, which obviously isn't true. In other words, the method appears to be to be to take the percentage of women in a particular age group who the IDF killed as a "noncombatant percentage" and then apply this to men in the same age group, then calculating the "combatant percentage" as the remainder, but this is wrong, because of course more men than women in the same age group are combatants.
Superb interview, articles, and so much more. Thanks!
What if Zionism was just a bad way to deal with antisemitism which was bound to fail? What if, similar to Socialism, Zionism was just a bad idea that for very understandable reasons lured many bright and well-intentioned people down a path that could only lead to chaos? What if just like the Soviet Union was ultimately a failed state due to an ultimately erroneous ideology, Israel is also a failed state due to a flawed ideology?
Consider the following. Antisemitism is just a set of intellectual errors, which, like all errors, can only be overcome via reason, logic, sympathy for the misguided, etc., just like we overcame slavery, unequal treatment of women, etc. Zionism never attempted to understand and overcome antisemitic fallacies, instead it said that antisemitism was some mythical irrational and incomprehensible evil which could only be dealt with via the monumental fallacy of asking Jews to abandon the humble synagogues and towns and local languages... where they were really from, to create a 'Jewish State' and coerce millions into living with a Jewish anthem and flag and other cultural concepts they were understandably adamantly opposed to.
What if the solution to our problems is to simply admit that Antisemitism AND Zionism are both understandable intellectual errors that fuel each other? And to use reason, logic, sympathy, and to trust the competition of ideas that emerges from freedom to be what will find the best possible solution?
Please consider reading this post.
'An Analysis And Comparison Of The Socialist And Zionist Ideological Calamities'.
• Oct 7: ~ 800 civilians, ~400 soldiers and security personnel —> 67%
Obviously that factors in Israeli response and civilian casualty-limiting defensive measures without which the ratio would otherwise be higher, but it’s remarkable to me that the ratio works out to be fairly constant across eras going back decades.
" In pursuit of its overriding goal of comforting and soothing the Jew by indulging his masochistic fantasies of universal irrational hatred oozing out of the cosmos for no other purpose than to be targeted at him". - Seriously ???
Which part do you think is BS? As he goes on to mention, all these people are ID’d on a database that Israel has access to, so we know that they exist. And Israel has not denied that any of them are dead. So what, exactly, is your issue with his claim?
I guess I get frustrated with this rationalist parsing of a situation that has no middle ground. The world is moving into existential mode. Liberal responses seem ever weaker and more cowardly - a refusal to face reality. This conversation / interview moved no one, achieved nothing except a kind of comfort blanket for wishful thinkers. There are no pleasant options
The Gaza Ministry of Health and IDF had similar overall death figures. The IDF clamed about ½ the civilian deaths that the Gaza Ministry of Health did. But the IDF’s civilian counts were the outlier, and most other organizations agreed with the Gaza Ministry of Health.
There are no accurate numbers. And there is no accurate way of distinguishing civilian from combat and deaths, not least because Hamas have spent 20 years teaching kids as young as five to become martyrs…. The presentation of “facts” from a hamas sympathizer
Speaks for itself. But then there is the comparative piece. The cases and examples which are not cited and don’t make the news. Those which are covered up by the progressive media. Most obviously right now, Islamist mass killings of Druze families or the murder of 60 Christians in Nigeria last week. Any personal organization who focuses only and exclusively on Israel is by definition, presenting soiled goods. I’m 100% certain that the IDF has done bad things. Because any time you get young men fighting, pep up. … adrenaline flowing us versus them…. That’s what happens. I’m also fairly certain that the IDF and Israel are on the least pathological and least murderous end of the spectrum if there is such a thing. I don’t remember British bombers preceding runs over Dresden with leaflets telling people to get out. Nor the Americans in Cambodia. In fact, I can’t remember any war where an army was forced to take responsibility for feeding the opposition. There were no food drops into Germany in late 1944. So yes, I call bullshit. The whole debate is bullshit.
What is unusual about the IDF is that they have much greater forcer projection than some African militia. So, while they are undoubtedly much less murderous, they have the ability to kill more people. Of course, there are happenstances whereby this doesn't operate, such as the Rwandan genocide, but, in general, people with primitive approaches to warfare are outgunned by more civilized forces.
And your point is what? That Israel should lay down its arms and make things fairer? Go at Hamas more murderously but with less force projection by using machetes? I don't care what anyone says as long as they treat Israel EXACTLY the same as any other state; and put EXACTLY the same effort into protesting other conflicts. My parents were quakers and pacifists -- and to be fair this WAS true of them. They would have protested Israel in Gaza, but also Turkey, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, UK, US, Burma ..........But 99% of those attacking Israel have never protested any other state, not once.
I think, if it is indeed true that the civilian to combatant ratio is unusually high, Israel should take greater precautions not to kill civilians, and change its tactics and strategy to do so.
‘unusually’….’civilian’….When allied soldiers were confronted with teenage SS youth soldiers they shot them. They had to. When those girls were paraded through Gaza to be raped tortured and killed, the entire population turned out.
The ordinary Gaza. people (if there was such a thing) could end it tomorrow by simply telling the Israelis where the hostages are. They don’t
And how COULD Israel prosecute the war differently. DO you think that Israel should lose 3 or 5 or 10x the number of soldiers to account for the faux one-sided squeamishness of western liberals? Be honest — how many Israeli casualties would make the war fair? Some young soldiers are being targeted from a house? Should they bomb the house, or take it room by room …because there may be civilians ? If that was your own son or daughter…what would you say?
What do other militaries do? Name me a military which does not make the same decision?
How about the Syrian army before or after the regime change? Iran?
The entire population of Gaza did not turn out. While it is very shocking and disgraceful that thousands did do so, and certainly illustrates the shitty culture of Palestinians, there are two million people in Gaza.
The issue is that Israel surrounds Gaza on all sides and has explicitly arrogated to itself the role of deciding what food and resources go in to Gaza, and who is allowed to leave. In a normal war, even an urban war, the civilians can typically leave to a place where the war is not happening. But that is not happening here because Israel will not let them exit to the most proximate territory, Israel.
Now you can also criticize other countries for not making any effort to take in Palestinian refugees, which I'm sure Israel would be only too happy to let them do, but the proximate restraint here is Israel.
So naturally Israel is responsible for feeding and sustaining the civilian populace in a way other combatants are not.
That is not true. Egypt has refused the responsibility for people who were its own citizens until 1967. If Hamas would accept demilitarization by a third party -- Israel would accept with alacrity. And Gaza is not starving. The militant terrorists themselves are looking positively FAT and show videos of themselves with food and drink ......Israel would be delighted if Egypt would open the border and let them leave. Problem solved. Talk to Egypt. What happened to UMMA?
You're kinda just throwing out a bunch of stuff that is incorrect/irrelevant (e.g. Gazans were not citizens of Egypt before 1967), but I would just ask:
Why does the onus fall on Egypt (the country not fighting a war in Gaza) to take care of Gazans before it falls on Israel?
It would be nice if benevolent third party states decided to take bullets for Israel, but why should Israel expect them to do so? Why does their failure to do so absolve Israel of any responsibility for Israel's actions?
The All-Palestine Government within the All-Palestine Protectorate, was basically an Egyptian client state that lasted until 1959 including Gaza. It was recognized by nearly all members of the Arab League. Later the Republic of Egypt and the Second Syrian Republic merged to form a single sovereign state known as the United Arab Republic. The Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip ended entirely during the 1967 Six-Day War, after which it was occupied by Israel
Why does it fall in Israel? The Egypians created the problem by invading Israel - twice. That's the only reason why Gaza become an Israeli headache.
'Taking a bullet for Israel' -- that is the problem. Hamas......It is not Israel's problem. It is Gaza. Just as Germans could blame no one when their cities got bombed - but the Nazis. Other Germans. It is not Israel's responsibility. If you feel motivated ....or another country feels motivated .....Let them step in. If Sweden had felt like parachuting aid packages to germans in 1944 -- they could have done so. They didn't. Nor did Switzerland.
Gazans can solve the problem over night.....by informing Israel where the hostages are and kicking out Hamas.
This is a tough option -- and dangerous....but less so that Germans trying to depose the Nazis in 1944. Some still tried.
In short I reject the entire premise of your question
This kind of logic is typical of the Israeli right. Basically, a self-pitying claim that the whole situation shouldn’t exist because the Arab world should have accommodated the Jewish conquest of Israel and resettled or accepted refugee populations so Israel would not have to deal with them. Maybe so — but they didn’t. This leaves Israel responsible for those populations and if your solution to that is to kill them all then that is genocidal thinking
>The All-Palestine Government within the All-Palestine Protectorate, was basically an Egyptian client state that lasted until 1959 including Gaza. It was recognized by nearly all members of the Arab League. Later the Republic of Egypt and the Second Syrian Republic merged to form a single sovereign state known as the United Arab Republic. The Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip ended entirely during the 1967 Six-Day War, after which it was occupied by Israel
I don't understand why this is relevant, either to the question of "were Gazans citizens of Egypt before 1967 (A: no)" or why the citizenship of Gazans before 1967 is relevant today (A: it's not).
>Why does it fall in Israel? The Egypians created the problem by invading Israel - twice. That's the only reason why Gaza become an Israeli headache.
It falls on Israel, primarily, because Israel invaded Gaza, has destroyed virtually every piece of infrastructure in Gaza, surrounds Gaza on all sides, and refuses to let any aid into Gaza without its approval. It does not fall primarily on Egypt because Egypt is not doing those things.
I understand that all effects have causes that go back to the beginning of time but normal people deal with proximate causes. As between Egypt and Israel, the proximate cause of the issue is Israel.
>'Taking a bullet for Israel' -- that is the problem. Hamas......It is not Israel's problem. It is Gaza. Just as Germans could blame no one when their cities got bombed - but the Nazis. Other Germans. It is not Israel's responsibility. If you feel motivated ....or another country feels motivated .....Let them step in. If Sweden had felt like parachuting aid packages to germans in 1944 -- they could have done so. They didn't. Nor did Switzerland.
Other countries are in fact trying to feed Gazans; they are the ones donating the bulk of the food and funding the NGOs. The issue is that Israel maintains a monopoly on access to Gaza and does not allow other countries to supply aid to Gaza without coordinating with Israel, and Israel does not do a very good job of doing so. For example, in March 2025, Israel blocked all deliveries of aid.
Granting that this is true, how does this accomplish anything? Egypt has no incentive to take in Gazans and none of these arguments are going to convince bystanders. Find better reasons, give Egypt an incentive, or accept that people will hold Israel responsible for whatever happens to Gazans.
That’s crazy. Israel controls all access to Gaza, preventing any food from entering, so therefore the choice is that the entire population of Gaza starves to death or else Israel feeds them in some way. Are you saying you prefer the entire population of Gaza to starve?
Warring parties are in fact liable for feeding prisoners under their control, so it is entirely routine to demand this of Israel, as Gaza is effectively an Israeli-run prison
This is the argument Adar addresses in the first 15 minutes. I think a debate between Rettig Gur and Adar would be great, but I'm not big enough for him to pay attention to me yet.
I partly agree with Adar that the 1:1 ratio is probably optimistic, and that males engage in risk-taking behaviours more often and not necessarily in a belligerent capacity. But it's also a little naive to imagine that 0% of 45-year-olds (or even 13-year-olds) would be contributing to the Hamas war effort, so the cause of the excess mortality outside of usual military age is debatable.
I'm also a little puzzled by Adar's claim that there's "no evidence" for Hamas using human shield tactics? Maybe you or he are more up to speed on the subject than I am, but there seemed to be credible reports on Hamas using tunnels beneath Al-Shifa and Khan Younis hospital.
More generally, if Hamas really didn't want to put their own civilians in jeopardy, there's a simple way to do it: proactively evacuate all their own civilians from a given area, declare a field of battle and tell the IDF "here we are, come get us". They'd be crushed, but there would be a 0:1 civilian-to-martyr death ratio. This has clearly not been their priority.
There's some ambiguity about what human shield means. In the classic sense of literally hiding behind civilians so that the enemy doesn't shoot, I don't think it's very relevant to this war because (a) Israel isn't deterred by such tactics this time around and (b) it's much safer in the tunnels. As Adar says there doesn't seem to be a documented case in two years of human shield tactics in this sense. In a broader sense, yes, it is clear that Hamas views positively a high civilian death toll, but that's a good reason IMO not to create one.
I agree Hamas aren't literally draping themelves in armour made of babies at the moment, but if you put your command posts in the middle of refugee camps, under hospitals or next to water-treatment facilities this is effectively still a form of "human shield" tactic.
I broadly agree that Israel can be blamed for not laying out a clear plan as to who was supposed to take responsibility for actually governing Gaza's population, but it's not clear to me that any feasible mutation of Israel's war strategy would have driven casualties down to the point where deranged leftoids wouldn't be screaming about "genocide".
I think that in previous wars, Hamas really were deliberately embedding themselves in civilian-rich areas on the assumption that Israel would not strike them, i.e. human shields. But this time around, I think its mostly lack of space, and probably some legacy infrastructure. As Adar says, the tunnels are just better shields. I lot of civilian casualties come from striking Hamas soldiers where they live; I don't think you can call seeing your children once in a while using human shields.
It's true that leftoids would literally have called any response genocide, and even no response, since they say there has been a genocide for 70 years. They really do poison everything.
The point is not really to convince deranged leftoids, but to keep onside (i) American public opinion generally; (ii) a majority of the Democratic Party who hold high office; (iii) the governments of countries like the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Canada etc. i.e. countries that are usually friendly to Israel; and (iv) the left/center left Jewish intelligentsia that was Zionism friendly who play an outsized role in the news.
More broadly global opinion on Israel has moved a bunch of units over on the spectrum towards "Israel is bad" and it would have been good if it had moved over fewer units in that direction.
Don't get me wrong- I think Netanyahu should probably be in prison and that the Haredi need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century for the sake of their own nation. Obviously I don't want the only country with sustainable secular fertility rates to destroy itself through geopolitical stupidity.
At the same time, I have to wonder how much of the global shift of opinion on Israel is downstream of deranged leftoids having way too much power.
Yeah I do think there are a lot of non military aged combatants like Sinwar himself, that there are Hamas commanders assassinated at home with their families in Where’s Daddy (demography would look representative but targeting wouldn’t be indiscriminate), and as Adar said Hamas is hiding some people. It’s probably less than a third but more than 13%. So not 1:2 but also not 1:6. Maybe 1:3 or 1:4? I think that’s normal, yes?
I’m curious what the gender ratio of dead people was in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
I don’t feel well qualified to estimate the number. I’d need to look into a bunch of things and try to estimate everything. How many killed in Where’s Daddy? And so on.
I also think you should give the IDF some slack here. The Taliban didn’t have tons of tunnels, Afghanistan wasn’t so dense, and the Taliban didn’t use hospitals as command centers. Gaza is a hell of a battlefield.
But anyway maybe I’ll do a deep dive at some point and try to estimate the number. It might be good to ask some people who are good at forecasting which is who I trust to be objective on this.
This is the key point: how many of the civilians killed were families of Hamas fighters who are in the house with them when they are airstriked. Them being directly related to a terrorist doesn't make them a legitimate target in themselves, but surely puts them in a different moral category of collateral than uninvolved civilians. Seeing as Hamas guys spend all of their time either underground or meeting in densely populated areas, taking them out when they're at home is surely the best option, but will reflect badly on a purely statistical analysis.
I wasn’t thinking about the moral category, just that if you kill a Hamas guy, his wife, and their 2 or 3 children it looks indiscriminate from just analyzing gender but it’s not.
OK, but this isn't a big chiddush. The are two criteria: the principle of distinction and proportionality. An airstrike on a Hamas person may be fully compliant with the first and not at all compliant with the second.
I recall vaguely getting the impression from skimming something written by Michael Spagat that indeed not being very scrupulous about avoiding deaths of Hamas family members in targeted strikes was a contributing factor, but I also recall not being able to get a solid number of what the ratio of civilians: combatants killed looks like if you exclude those deaths (not to say that you should exclude them necessarily, but just to see how big of an effect that has).
I'm not sure Where's Daddy type strikes have continued to be used to the same degree as at the beginning of the war; if there's been enough of a shift in tactics, maybe looking at the change in civilian deaths between the early stages and later stages would help pinpoint that?
I tried to take a look at airwars, and and other sites to get a first look at this but I'm on my phone wasting time at work, so didn't have much success.
I wasn’t thinking about the moral category, just that if you kill a Hamas guy, his wife, and their 2 or 3 children it looks indiscriminate from just analyzing gender and age but it’s not. The IDF did things like this many times. If you target a Hamas guy on the road you might miss and you might kill random civilians.
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.
Like let’s say, unique in wartime, the Gaza MoH has managed to publish timely accurate numbers free of Hamas influence. That would be a remarkable feat, worthy of study and quite notable. So the onus is on the person using this data to show that it’s accurate, not vice versa. And again I would be more convinced by Adars argument that Israel can simply check if I saw any analysis coming out of official Israel whatsoever. All I see is parroting of John Spencer, which tells me that nobody is actually working on anything.
Also, what is presumably verifiable (again if some Israeli bureaucrat actually was proactive enough to verify it, which I am skeptical of) is that these people exist, not that they are still alive / have died. That’s much harder to verify or falsify.
Write a post!
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”.
I don't know much about this issue, but I'm not too impressed by Weinreb's analysis, because, if I understand correctly, he seems to assume that military-age men are noncombatants to the same proportion as military-age women, which obviously isn't true. In other words, the method appears to be to be to take the percentage of women in a particular age group who the IDF killed as a "noncombatant percentage" and then apply this to men in the same age group, then calculating the "combatant percentage" as the remainder, but this is wrong, because of course more men than women in the same age group are combatants.
When you opened your substack you wrote that 'next summer you will lay out your plan'.
The summer is is mostly over now.
Just a reminder...
Superb interview, articles, and so much more. Thanks!
What if Zionism was just a bad way to deal with antisemitism which was bound to fail? What if, similar to Socialism, Zionism was just a bad idea that for very understandable reasons lured many bright and well-intentioned people down a path that could only lead to chaos? What if just like the Soviet Union was ultimately a failed state due to an ultimately erroneous ideology, Israel is also a failed state due to a flawed ideology?
Consider the following. Antisemitism is just a set of intellectual errors, which, like all errors, can only be overcome via reason, logic, sympathy for the misguided, etc., just like we overcame slavery, unequal treatment of women, etc. Zionism never attempted to understand and overcome antisemitic fallacies, instead it said that antisemitism was some mythical irrational and incomprehensible evil which could only be dealt with via the monumental fallacy of asking Jews to abandon the humble synagogues and towns and local languages... where they were really from, to create a 'Jewish State' and coerce millions into living with a Jewish anthem and flag and other cultural concepts they were understandably adamantly opposed to.
What if the solution to our problems is to simply admit that Antisemitism AND Zionism are both understandable intellectual errors that fuel each other? And to use reason, logic, sympathy, and to trust the competition of ideas that emerges from freedom to be what will find the best possible solution?
Please consider reading this post.
'An Analysis And Comparison Of The Socialist And Zionist Ideological Calamities'.
https://civilizedapes.substack.com/p/an-analysis-and-comparison-of-the
Looking at Israeli deaths from Palestinian violence, the civilian-to-soldier fatality ratio is a strikingly constant 2:1.
• First Intifada: ~120 Israeli civilians, ~60 soldiers—> 67%
• Second Intifada (B’tselam #s): 731 civilians, 332 soldiers —> 68%
• Oct 7: ~ 800 civilians, ~400 soldiers and security personnel —> 67%
Obviously that factors in Israeli response and civilian casualty-limiting defensive measures without which the ratio would otherwise be higher, but it’s remarkable to me that the ratio works out to be fairly constant across eras going back decades.
The death tolls and nature of those conflicts were a lot of different so it can't be used to directly compare to the current war.
The question isn't if it's high or low but if it's necessary.
" In pursuit of its overriding goal of comforting and soothing the Jew by indulging his masochistic fantasies of universal irrational hatred oozing out of the cosmos for no other purpose than to be targeted at him". - Seriously ???
‘Civilian’
Stats direct from Hamas
I call BS
Which part do you think is BS? As he goes on to mention, all these people are ID’d on a database that Israel has access to, so we know that they exist. And Israel has not denied that any of them are dead. So what, exactly, is your issue with his claim?
I guess I get frustrated with this rationalist parsing of a situation that has no middle ground. The world is moving into existential mode. Liberal responses seem ever weaker and more cowardly - a refusal to face reality. This conversation / interview moved no one, achieved nothing except a kind of comfort blanket for wishful thinkers. There are no pleasant options
How is believing in a massacre of civilians in Gaza a comfort blanket for wishful thinkers? I don’t get it
Ok himmler
Didn't their numbers from 2014 prove to be correct after the fact?
They vindicated IDF numbers...and actually that pattern has been repeated many times.
The Gaza Ministry of Health and IDF had similar overall death figures. The IDF clamed about ½ the civilian deaths that the Gaza Ministry of Health did. But the IDF’s civilian counts were the outlier, and most other organizations agreed with the Gaza Ministry of Health.
That’s like saying most of the MSM agree with the guardian. The so called ministry of health has death to Jews it’s mission statement
So what, other than Hasbara, is evidence that the IDF is honest and forthright?
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fatality-data-has-become-completely-unreliable Hamas lies as a matter of course
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-857193
https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HJS-Questionable-Counting-%E2%80%93-Hamas-Report-web-v2.pdf
There are no accurate numbers. And there is no accurate way of distinguishing civilian from combat and deaths, not least because Hamas have spent 20 years teaching kids as young as five to become martyrs…. The presentation of “facts” from a hamas sympathizer
Speaks for itself. But then there is the comparative piece. The cases and examples which are not cited and don’t make the news. Those which are covered up by the progressive media. Most obviously right now, Islamist mass killings of Druze families or the murder of 60 Christians in Nigeria last week. Any personal organization who focuses only and exclusively on Israel is by definition, presenting soiled goods. I’m 100% certain that the IDF has done bad things. Because any time you get young men fighting, pep up. … adrenaline flowing us versus them…. That’s what happens. I’m also fairly certain that the IDF and Israel are on the least pathological and least murderous end of the spectrum if there is such a thing. I don’t remember British bombers preceding runs over Dresden with leaflets telling people to get out. Nor the Americans in Cambodia. In fact, I can’t remember any war where an army was forced to take responsibility for feeding the opposition. There were no food drops into Germany in late 1944. So yes, I call bullshit. The whole debate is bullshit.
What is unusual about the IDF is that they have much greater forcer projection than some African militia. So, while they are undoubtedly much less murderous, they have the ability to kill more people. Of course, there are happenstances whereby this doesn't operate, such as the Rwandan genocide, but, in general, people with primitive approaches to warfare are outgunned by more civilized forces.
And your point is what? That Israel should lay down its arms and make things fairer? Go at Hamas more murderously but with less force projection by using machetes? I don't care what anyone says as long as they treat Israel EXACTLY the same as any other state; and put EXACTLY the same effort into protesting other conflicts. My parents were quakers and pacifists -- and to be fair this WAS true of them. They would have protested Israel in Gaza, but also Turkey, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, UK, US, Burma ..........But 99% of those attacking Israel have never protested any other state, not once.
I think, if it is indeed true that the civilian to combatant ratio is unusually high, Israel should take greater precautions not to kill civilians, and change its tactics and strategy to do so.
‘unusually’….’civilian’….When allied soldiers were confronted with teenage SS youth soldiers they shot them. They had to. When those girls were paraded through Gaza to be raped tortured and killed, the entire population turned out.
The ordinary Gaza. people (if there was such a thing) could end it tomorrow by simply telling the Israelis where the hostages are. They don’t
And how COULD Israel prosecute the war differently. DO you think that Israel should lose 3 or 5 or 10x the number of soldiers to account for the faux one-sided squeamishness of western liberals? Be honest — how many Israeli casualties would make the war fair? Some young soldiers are being targeted from a house? Should they bomb the house, or take it room by room …because there may be civilians ? If that was your own son or daughter…what would you say?
What do other militaries do? Name me a military which does not make the same decision?
How about the Syrian army before or after the regime change? Iran?
In short what planet are you on?
The entire population of Gaza did not turn out. While it is very shocking and disgraceful that thousands did do so, and certainly illustrates the shitty culture of Palestinians, there are two million people in Gaza.
I wrote a bit about what Israel could have done differently here: https://nonzionism.com/p/could-israel-have-done-something
The issue is that Israel surrounds Gaza on all sides and has explicitly arrogated to itself the role of deciding what food and resources go in to Gaza, and who is allowed to leave. In a normal war, even an urban war, the civilians can typically leave to a place where the war is not happening. But that is not happening here because Israel will not let them exit to the most proximate territory, Israel.
Now you can also criticize other countries for not making any effort to take in Palestinian refugees, which I'm sure Israel would be only too happy to let them do, but the proximate restraint here is Israel.
So naturally Israel is responsible for feeding and sustaining the civilian populace in a way other combatants are not.
That is not true. Egypt has refused the responsibility for people who were its own citizens until 1967. If Hamas would accept demilitarization by a third party -- Israel would accept with alacrity. And Gaza is not starving. The militant terrorists themselves are looking positively FAT and show videos of themselves with food and drink ......Israel would be delighted if Egypt would open the border and let them leave. Problem solved. Talk to Egypt. What happened to UMMA?
You're kinda just throwing out a bunch of stuff that is incorrect/irrelevant (e.g. Gazans were not citizens of Egypt before 1967), but I would just ask:
Why does the onus fall on Egypt (the country not fighting a war in Gaza) to take care of Gazans before it falls on Israel?
It would be nice if benevolent third party states decided to take bullets for Israel, but why should Israel expect them to do so? Why does their failure to do so absolve Israel of any responsibility for Israel's actions?
The All-Palestine Government within the All-Palestine Protectorate, was basically an Egyptian client state that lasted until 1959 including Gaza. It was recognized by nearly all members of the Arab League. Later the Republic of Egypt and the Second Syrian Republic merged to form a single sovereign state known as the United Arab Republic. The Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip ended entirely during the 1967 Six-Day War, after which it was occupied by Israel
Why does it fall in Israel? The Egypians created the problem by invading Israel - twice. That's the only reason why Gaza become an Israeli headache.
'Taking a bullet for Israel' -- that is the problem. Hamas......It is not Israel's problem. It is Gaza. Just as Germans could blame no one when their cities got bombed - but the Nazis. Other Germans. It is not Israel's responsibility. If you feel motivated ....or another country feels motivated .....Let them step in. If Sweden had felt like parachuting aid packages to germans in 1944 -- they could have done so. They didn't. Nor did Switzerland.
Gazans can solve the problem over night.....by informing Israel where the hostages are and kicking out Hamas.
This is a tough option -- and dangerous....but less so that Germans trying to depose the Nazis in 1944. Some still tried.
In short I reject the entire premise of your question
This kind of logic is typical of the Israeli right. Basically, a self-pitying claim that the whole situation shouldn’t exist because the Arab world should have accommodated the Jewish conquest of Israel and resettled or accepted refugee populations so Israel would not have to deal with them. Maybe so — but they didn’t. This leaves Israel responsible for those populations and if your solution to that is to kill them all then that is genocidal thinking
>The All-Palestine Government within the All-Palestine Protectorate, was basically an Egyptian client state that lasted until 1959 including Gaza. It was recognized by nearly all members of the Arab League. Later the Republic of Egypt and the Second Syrian Republic merged to form a single sovereign state known as the United Arab Republic. The Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip ended entirely during the 1967 Six-Day War, after which it was occupied by Israel
I don't understand why this is relevant, either to the question of "were Gazans citizens of Egypt before 1967 (A: no)" or why the citizenship of Gazans before 1967 is relevant today (A: it's not).
>Why does it fall in Israel? The Egypians created the problem by invading Israel - twice. That's the only reason why Gaza become an Israeli headache.
It falls on Israel, primarily, because Israel invaded Gaza, has destroyed virtually every piece of infrastructure in Gaza, surrounds Gaza on all sides, and refuses to let any aid into Gaza without its approval. It does not fall primarily on Egypt because Egypt is not doing those things.
I understand that all effects have causes that go back to the beginning of time but normal people deal with proximate causes. As between Egypt and Israel, the proximate cause of the issue is Israel.
>'Taking a bullet for Israel' -- that is the problem. Hamas......It is not Israel's problem. It is Gaza. Just as Germans could blame no one when their cities got bombed - but the Nazis. Other Germans. It is not Israel's responsibility. If you feel motivated ....or another country feels motivated .....Let them step in. If Sweden had felt like parachuting aid packages to germans in 1944 -- they could have done so. They didn't. Nor did Switzerland.
Other countries are in fact trying to feed Gazans; they are the ones donating the bulk of the food and funding the NGOs. The issue is that Israel maintains a monopoly on access to Gaza and does not allow other countries to supply aid to Gaza without coordinating with Israel, and Israel does not do a very good job of doing so. For example, in March 2025, Israel blocked all deliveries of aid.
Granting that this is true, how does this accomplish anything? Egypt has no incentive to take in Gazans and none of these arguments are going to convince bystanders. Find better reasons, give Egypt an incentive, or accept that people will hold Israel responsible for whatever happens to Gazans.
That’s crazy. Israel controls all access to Gaza, preventing any food from entering, so therefore the choice is that the entire population of Gaza starves to death or else Israel feeds them in some way. Are you saying you prefer the entire population of Gaza to starve?
Warring parties are in fact liable for feeding prisoners under their control, so it is entirely routine to demand this of Israel, as Gaza is effectively an Israeli-run prison
Except no one is starving
What are you talking about lmao. Even pro Israeli media is admitting hunger is becoming a serious issue in Gaza.
Estimate that I haven't delved into: https://xcancel.com/Aizenberg55/status/1947289007420755988#m
Did you see this?
https://x.com/havivrettiggur/status/1904890005547524439
I haven’t listened to your video yet.
This is the argument Adar addresses in the first 15 minutes. I think a debate between Rettig Gur and Adar would be great, but I'm not big enough for him to pay attention to me yet.
I partly agree with Adar that the 1:1 ratio is probably optimistic, and that males engage in risk-taking behaviours more often and not necessarily in a belligerent capacity. But it's also a little naive to imagine that 0% of 45-year-olds (or even 13-year-olds) would be contributing to the Hamas war effort, so the cause of the excess mortality outside of usual military age is debatable.
I'm also a little puzzled by Adar's claim that there's "no evidence" for Hamas using human shield tactics? Maybe you or he are more up to speed on the subject than I am, but there seemed to be credible reports on Hamas using tunnels beneath Al-Shifa and Khan Younis hospital.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-reveals-tunnel-under-gaza-hospital-says-body-sinwars-brother-found-there-2025-06-08/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-tunnel-under-al-shifa-hospital-used-by-hamas-for-cover-weapons-storage/
More generally, if Hamas really didn't want to put their own civilians in jeopardy, there's a simple way to do it: proactively evacuate all their own civilians from a given area, declare a field of battle and tell the IDF "here we are, come get us". They'd be crushed, but there would be a 0:1 civilian-to-martyr death ratio. This has clearly not been their priority.
There's some ambiguity about what human shield means. In the classic sense of literally hiding behind civilians so that the enemy doesn't shoot, I don't think it's very relevant to this war because (a) Israel isn't deterred by such tactics this time around and (b) it's much safer in the tunnels. As Adar says there doesn't seem to be a documented case in two years of human shield tactics in this sense. In a broader sense, yes, it is clear that Hamas views positively a high civilian death toll, but that's a good reason IMO not to create one.
I agree Hamas aren't literally draping themelves in armour made of babies at the moment, but if you put your command posts in the middle of refugee camps, under hospitals or next to water-treatment facilities this is effectively still a form of "human shield" tactic.
I broadly agree that Israel can be blamed for not laying out a clear plan as to who was supposed to take responsibility for actually governing Gaza's population, but it's not clear to me that any feasible mutation of Israel's war strategy would have driven casualties down to the point where deranged leftoids wouldn't be screaming about "genocide".
I think that in previous wars, Hamas really were deliberately embedding themselves in civilian-rich areas on the assumption that Israel would not strike them, i.e. human shields. But this time around, I think its mostly lack of space, and probably some legacy infrastructure. As Adar says, the tunnels are just better shields. I lot of civilian casualties come from striking Hamas soldiers where they live; I don't think you can call seeing your children once in a while using human shields.
It's true that leftoids would literally have called any response genocide, and even no response, since they say there has been a genocide for 70 years. They really do poison everything.
The point is not really to convince deranged leftoids, but to keep onside (i) American public opinion generally; (ii) a majority of the Democratic Party who hold high office; (iii) the governments of countries like the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Canada etc. i.e. countries that are usually friendly to Israel; and (iv) the left/center left Jewish intelligentsia that was Zionism friendly who play an outsized role in the news.
More broadly global opinion on Israel has moved a bunch of units over on the spectrum towards "Israel is bad" and it would have been good if it had moved over fewer units in that direction.
Don't get me wrong- I think Netanyahu should probably be in prison and that the Haredi need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century for the sake of their own nation. Obviously I don't want the only country with sustainable secular fertility rates to destroy itself through geopolitical stupidity.
At the same time, I have to wonder how much of the global shift of opinion on Israel is downstream of deranged leftoids having way too much power.
Yeah I do think there are a lot of non military aged combatants like Sinwar himself, that there are Hamas commanders assassinated at home with their families in Where’s Daddy (demography would look representative but targeting wouldn’t be indiscriminate), and as Adar said Hamas is hiding some people. It’s probably less than a third but more than 13%. So not 1:2 but also not 1:6. Maybe 1:3 or 1:4? I think that’s normal, yes?
I’m curious what the gender ratio of dead people was in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Write an article!
I don’t feel well qualified to estimate the number. I’d need to look into a bunch of things and try to estimate everything. How many killed in Where’s Daddy? And so on.
I also think you should give the IDF some slack here. The Taliban didn’t have tons of tunnels, Afghanistan wasn’t so dense, and the Taliban didn’t use hospitals as command centers. Gaza is a hell of a battlefield.
But anyway maybe I’ll do a deep dive at some point and try to estimate the number. It might be good to ask some people who are good at forecasting which is who I trust to be objective on this.
This is the key point: how many of the civilians killed were families of Hamas fighters who are in the house with them when they are airstriked. Them being directly related to a terrorist doesn't make them a legitimate target in themselves, but surely puts them in a different moral category of collateral than uninvolved civilians. Seeing as Hamas guys spend all of their time either underground or meeting in densely populated areas, taking them out when they're at home is surely the best option, but will reflect badly on a purely statistical analysis.
It does put them in a different moral category. I don't think it puts them in a different legal, category, but perhaps that doesn't matter.
I wasn’t thinking about the moral category, just that if you kill a Hamas guy, his wife, and their 2 or 3 children it looks indiscriminate from just analyzing gender but it’s not.
OK, but this isn't a big chiddush. The are two criteria: the principle of distinction and proportionality. An airstrike on a Hamas person may be fully compliant with the first and not at all compliant with the second.
I recall vaguely getting the impression from skimming something written by Michael Spagat that indeed not being very scrupulous about avoiding deaths of Hamas family members in targeted strikes was a contributing factor, but I also recall not being able to get a solid number of what the ratio of civilians: combatants killed looks like if you exclude those deaths (not to say that you should exclude them necessarily, but just to see how big of an effect that has).
I'm not sure Where's Daddy type strikes have continued to be used to the same degree as at the beginning of the war; if there's been enough of a shift in tactics, maybe looking at the change in civilian deaths between the early stages and later stages would help pinpoint that?
I tried to take a look at airwars, and and other sites to get a first look at this but I'm on my phone wasting time at work, so didn't have much success.
I wasn’t thinking about the moral category, just that if you kill a Hamas guy, his wife, and their 2 or 3 children it looks indiscriminate from just analyzing gender and age but it’s not. The IDF did things like this many times. If you target a Hamas guy on the road you might miss and you might kill random civilians.