Haviv Rettig Gur
I can’t help feeling this guy is just trolling. He throws in “since the late 20th century” hoping you won’t notice. The average of recent war - John has agreed on all of this - is between 1:1 and 2:1. We specifically talked about Fallujah and a couple other modern examples, where those were the ratios. If I remember correctly, one example of 10:1 was from the Japanese in the Philippines. The larger point was simply that the best data we have from Gaza suggests that Israel is within that range. The figure bandied about by lying liars of 72% women and children among the dead was a simple fiction debunked by Hamas’s own latest numbers. That was the point. If this is really the level of your trolling, I’m just going to block you. All you do is namecall and mischaracterize. And since you’re just a random foreigner screaming his emotions, whereas I’m actually living through this and trying to find an end result that’s safer for my kids - no Hamas and a rebuilt, deradicalized Gaza - your view is not important enough for me to tolerate empty pablum from you. Either teach me useful things or you’ll be blocked.
History Speaks
Of course that Haviv fellow (@havivrettiggur) takes charlatan John Spencer (@SpencerGuard), the single most influential peddler of misinformation on the Gaza War, deeply seriously. Haviv, did you ask charlatan Spencer why—if he has studied 'every urban war' in history as he apparently told Netanyahu—he believes and promotes the ludicrous pop myth that the average ratio of civilians to combatant casualties in war is 9:1? (The actual ratio, as serious researchers such as the folks at the Uppsala Conflict Database show, is about 1:1 in warfare and below 2:1 in urban warfare, on average since the late 20th century. The point of promoting the 9:1 pop myth - as charlatan Spencer has repeatedly - is to make Israel look better in comparison.) I mean for goodness sake, the Nazis at Stalingrad and Leningrad (genocidal urban warfare) had far below 9:1 ratios, as did Hamas in the Second Intifada and on October 7. The Hiroshima nuclear bombing was probably not far above 9:1, maybe even slightly below 9:1 (though probably not). Even Wikipedia debunks this pop myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio. The economist Mike Spagat, an actual leading scholar of wartime civilian casualties and civilian-harm mitigation, debunks it in more statistical detail here: https://aoav.org.uk/2024/netanyahu-got-it-wrong-before-the-us-congress-idfs-clean-performance-in-gaza-is-a-lie/. "But muh UN press release said 9:1." Yeah, UN Press releases are wrong about a lot of things. 9:1 is a pop myth beloved by bureaucrats and the general public. But serious researchers of military history or the history of urban warfare—a category that decisively excludes charlatan Spencer—do not take the meme seriously.
