Update: See latest analysis as of July 23rd here.
Some of the claims I am seeing online include how the vast majority of Gazans killed are civilians, and how Israel is deliberately targeting them.
Regarding the latter, we all know this is nonsense – if Israel wanted to kill civilians it would carpet bomb Gaza. It is precisely because we want to avoid civilian casualties, that we opt for pinpoint strikes and ground operations, at risk to our soldiers’ lives.
But what about the first claim? Are the vast majority civilians?
Without having all of the terrorist obituaries or intel to prove who was a terrorist, this is hard to analyze. But what we do have is a list of the names and ages of those killed so far, which does provide us with some insights.
An anonymous Israellycool reader and her family spent countless hours going over this list from Al Jazeera – a media outlet that can’t be accused of slanting things Israel’s way. The reader’s main findings regarding the casualties to date are as follows:
As you can see, over 80% of Gazans killed so far have been male, with almost half of these males being in the 18-28 age group. One can imagine many of these being “combatants.” A further 20% of these males are between 29 and 48, an age group one could envisage may also contain many Hamas members.
In other words, these figures bring into question how many of those killed were really innocent civilians.
What these figures also indicate is if Israel was indiscriminately killing Gazans, the representation in terms of gender and age would be broader (with relatively more children killed than the approx 18%, considering nearly 50% of Gazans are under the age of 14).
Update: Even way back in 2008, Israellycool linked to Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal who noticed Palestinian sources have always reported far too many male casualties to back up the claim of indiscriminate killing by the IDF, let alone the crazy charge of deliberately targeting civilians.
