• DarthJon@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Stop throwing around baseless accusations.

    Many military experts have commented that Israel has done a very effective job at minimizing civilian casualties. If if were truly indiscriminate, the death toll would be much, much higher.

    And you have absolutely no evidence for your claim that “the current government of Israel would like to see all Palestinians dead., and is willing to act on that desire whenever they think they can get away with it.” This is an ignorant statement with no basis in reality. If this were true, all Palestinians would be dead. It should be very obvious to you that Israel has the ability to do far more damage than they have done.

    • Many military experts have commented that Israel has done a very effective job at minimizing civilian casualties. If if were truly indiscriminate, the death toll would be much, much higher.

      The IDF has killed more women and children in the past year than any other conflict in the past two decades: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-children-killed-gaza-israeli-military-any-other-recent-conflict

      According to research in The Lancet, the number of total deaths is at ~186000. That’s everyone including those who died of preventable causes, e.g. hunger or prevetable disease, e.g. direct and indirect deaths.

      According to professor Michael Spagat, the estimated percentage of civilians is around 80% (https://aoav.org.uk/2024/netanyahu-got-it-wrong-before-the-us-congress-idfs-clean-performance-in-gaza-is-a-lie/). Even conservative estimates put it at at least 61%, which is the worst for any modern conflict since WW2.

      Based on calculations of the demographic of the dead and the living (e.g. how much does the general population differ from the dead? Are there more dead men of fighting age than in the genral population, etc…), it appears that whilst Israel may target Hamas fighters, it takes next to no effort to avoid civilian casualties in the process. For example, the IDF often targets homes of suspected Hamas fighters, taking out entire families.

      So I don’t know which “military experts” think Israel is doing a good job on this, because the ones I’m seeing seem to agree on the opposite.