The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry has released what it claims is a comprehensive list of all Palestinians killed during the current war. And guess what. Even according to Hamas's own data, combat-age males are vastly overrepresented among the casualties, demonstrating that Israel has done a remarkable job of targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad combatants and sparing uninvolved Palestinian civilians throughout the war. According to an analysis by @levanonisrael, of the 50,021 individuals Hamas claims have been killed during the war, some 16,229—or almost exactly a third—were likely combatants. Taking into account the possibility of female combatants or terror operatives, inaccuracies in age reporting (of which the ministry has been proven guilty in the past), and likely exaggerations (of which the ministry has also been proven guilty), the number may well be closer to 20,000. In any event, the civilian casualty ratio in Gaza appears to be somewhere between 2:1 and 1:1 – a far cry from the 9:1 ratio reported by the UN for conflicts around the world over the past 40 years. Again: this isn't Israeli data. It's not American data. It's Hamas data. And it demonstrates that, far from bombing Gaza indiscriminately, Israel is engaged in a highly targeted effort to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups in Gaza while doing whatever it can to spare civilian lives. Every Palestinian civilian casualty is a tragedy, attributable to Hamas's heinous practice of intentionally endangering civilians by embedding itself among them, fighting from behind them, and using them as human shields. But Israel's record throughout this war compares favorably to the records of other Western militaries that have engaged in urban warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. Indeed, senior military officials from other countries have said repeatedly that Israel employs measures that their own militaries never have or would to protect Palestinian civilians, often putting operational objectives or the lives of Israeli soldiers at risk in the process. This data handily disproves the most outlandish claims about Israel's conduct during the war and should be used to refute those despicable allegations. Israel's war is just, it has been pursued justly – and Hamas's own data just proved it.
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