{"id":113,"date":"2023-11-17T00:42:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T23:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=113"},"modified":"2025-10-28T18:54:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T17:54:03","slug":"how-long-will-this-war-go-on-at-what-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=113","title":{"rendered":"How long will this war go on? At what cost?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Haaretz reported few days ago<\/a> that according to an IDF source 3.000 Hamas\/PIJ enemy combattants have been killed during the campaign on Gaza (not including the 1100 terrorists killed on October 7th). Such numbers have very rarely been reported on. How does this help us to put the civilian costs of the war into context?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we take the Palestinian Health Ministry numbers, then there are not much more men killed than women. A possible explanation would be that Hamas is not <\/a>reporting all of their killed fighters to Ramallah\u2019s population registry, because this information might be valuable for Israel. So let us say the 11.000 killed (and the US administration reportedly agrees that this shall be a lower bound) do not include all the terrorists. Then maybe the 3.000 killed combattants would be 25% of all fatalities. This would mean that the portion of civilians among those killed (75%) would still be higher than Hamas estimates for the rate of civilians killed in the 2014 war, and much higher than UN and IDF estimates in previous Gaza wars. It has always been contested how many civilians there were among those dead. If among these 3.000 which the IDF claims to be combattants include a significant percentage of Hamas civilian administration workers or some young men who were suspiciously running around (because typically in war times it is young men who take the risks of running around to get some stuff or whatever), then it might as well be 90% civilians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both the daily mortality rates and the estimated percentage of civilians among the dead are significantly higher than during the campaigns against Daesh in Iraq, Syria or on the Philippines, including sieges liberating cities from Daesh. The best comparison would probably be Mosul in Iraq. In the old city in western Mosul during the first months of the siege there were still 600,000 civilians trapped, used by Daesh (which also used hospitals) as human shields and held off from evacuating, so this provides a good comparison to northern Gaza were there are maybe some 300,000 civilians still staying. Yet only around 10,000 civilians were killed over all the months in Mosul, while the majority of those killed were Daesh combattants. The mortality rates and the percentage of civilians killed seem to be more comparable to what happened in north eastern Sri Lanka during the final military campaign against the Tamil Tigers or the siege of Mariupol. A key difference is that Hamas and PIJ have much more fighters than Tamil Tigers in Mullivaikkal or Ukraine in Mariupol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The large number of Hamas\/PIJ fighters might be a crucial reason why the IDF had the urge to proceed that quickly and with that high intensity. However, it also implies that the campaign must not go on like this, if an even larger human catastrophe is to be avoided. Unfortunately the Netanyahu government has shown that it cannot be trusted concerning the humanitarian restraints, as it has openly announced grave breaches of humanitarian international law (using the denial of water as mean of coercion), as it has deceptively appealed to the worries about the fate of the hostages to obfuscate its war objectives and as it has denied the IDF command to execute their humanitarian relief plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robby Berman<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I SUPPORTED BOMBING GAZA HOWEVER ENOUGH IS ENOUGH<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– <\/a>I support Israel’s right to defend itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I support Israel\u2019s right to use disproportionate power to overwhelm Hamas once and for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I support the IAF who dropped leaflets and made phone calls to tell Gazans to flea South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I support Israel\u2019s right – during war time – to drop a bomb at a military target even if there might be civilians killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I support the IAF who when they dropped their 7,000th bomb in Gaza there were only 7,000 dead in Gaza. (That means one person per bomb. Those are pretty good numbers and I’m going to guess \u2013 and I hope \u2013 the majority of them were Hamas terrorists. There are about 30,000 of them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOWEVER\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– However children are innocent, even if they are Palestinian, and great care \u2013 GREATER CARE – needs to be taken NOT to kill them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– However it is hard for me to imagine that Israeli intelligence had so much sigint and humint in Gaza that it had more than 10,000 valid military targets in its bank of targets yet it missed the intelligence bit about the attack on Oct 7th.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I feel extremely uncomfortable and suspicious when Bibi talks about the purpose of this war as PAYBACK for Oct 7 as opposed to the purpose being to PREVENT another Oct 7 from ever happening again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– I feel extremely uncomfortable and suspicious when Bibi refers to Hamas as Amalek, a biblical nation who Jews are commanded to commit genocide and kill them all: men women and children.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haaretz reported few days ago that according to an IDF source 3.000 Hamas\/PIJ enemy combattants have been killed during the campaign on Gaza (not including the 1100 terrorists killed on October 7th). Such numbers have very rarely been reported on. How does this help us to put the civilian costs of the war into context? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}