Freshers

Hands up. Even I, the arch sceptic of Hamas fatality claims, may have been overestimating the number of civilian casualties in Gaza. We know the figures Hamas push out don’t include their own fighters. As of yesterday, Israeli Defence Minister Gallant claim 60% of Hamas’ fighting forces have been killed. Does that stand up to scrutiny? I think so. Hamas themselves admitted (to Reuters)to losing 6,000 fighters as of February 2023. At the same time, the IDF were claiming 15,000. Let us split the difference and say that Hamas lost 10,500 fighters in those first four months. If the fatality rate has remained steady across the period of operations since October 2023, now, in July 2024, that rate gives us 26,250 Hamas fighters killed. We know Hamas had roughly 40,000 fighters at the start of the war. That’s 65%. But: the IDF has slowed the pace of operations slightly, with a long pause before Rafah, so 60% would make sense. 60% of Hamas fighters is 24,000. As of 8th July, Hamas claim 38,193 deaths in Gaza. That’s before we knock off the 10,000 totally unverified deaths they claim as part of that 38,193 figure. It’s not difficult, but even if we’re supremely generous and leave the 10,000 on, once you remove 24,000 dead fighters, the approximately 4,500 natural deaths you would expect in a population of Gaza’s size in this time period, and civilian deaths caused by Hamas themselves… Civilian fatalities are well, well below 10,000. This blows any genocide nonsense completely out of the water. It kills stone dead any complaints about proportionality. And, of course, it proves what I’ve been saying all along - the IDF are winning in Gaza, on every conceivable metric. It’s not even close.