Comment by kuhewa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuhewa | Hacker News Reader

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> Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.

You are begging the question still. Citation needed.

> In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.

That dog won't hunt. ~58k Ukranian soldiers killed + 12k civilians = 70k total [1]. 633 Ukrainian children killed [2]. 20% of the population is children but they make up < 1% or those directly killed in the conflict. You will probably take issue with the degree of urbanisation etc., but it was your example.

> Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!)

I suggest you are strawmanning the argument here — I don't think Israel is actively targeting children is an accurate representation of the concerned 'side' overall (I'm sure you can find a tweet making it). But it is plain their actions are pretty indiscriminate wrt the combatant:civilian kill ratio.

> they just a normal amount of evil.

You haven't supported this claim, and its a considerable leap from 'Gaza has a pyramid-shaped age structure'. Yet, there is data available on recent urbanised conflicts and what the 'normal amount' is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

[2] https://www.savethechildren.org.au/media/media-releases/chil...

Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately?

Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something to that effect.

Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.

> arguments being made here

Being made where though? I google '65% of women children gaza' and among the front page of results, all but one reporting that figure do not indicate that women and children were selected for. Civilian infrastructure yes (e.g., "Israeli military has relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival." which is true, considering 14 hospitals were hit directly). The exception is the State of Palestine ("The Israeli aggression continues to target civilians in Gaza Strip" [1]), and I don't believe the wording is even incorrect — when you bomb a hospital knowing there are civilians inside (whether or not there were militants), you have targeted civilians.

> Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.

Consider that is a subjective interpretation, others might find it indicates a strikingly indiscriminatory approach such that targeting is moot. That was my impression reading that figure. Let that be an answer to your initial question in the parent comment

I suspect that this is about to begin going in circles since no new arguments or evidence are being presented for your claims. So to conclude: I will reiterate that this is a matter that can be informed by empirical data, and the only data that has been provided in this thread with which we can interrogate the norms and outcomes of warfare (numbers from the example you invoked of Ukraine and other recent bloody and heavily urbanised conflicts in the Oxfam link) weighs heavily against assuming that mortalities should reflect the civilian population's demographics in a military action It strikes me as an undercooked, and insofar as it reflects reality, an appalling assumption.

Even assuming every adult male is a militant, they are killing two women/children per 1 militant. Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming: it does not matter if the goal of the dropped bombs is to preferentially kill women and children.

[1] https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4614#_edn1

> Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming

Oh, I agree! The problem Israel faces is that HAMAS fighters don't wear uniforms, are often under 18 years old, and uses civilian buildings for protection.

The dilemma I see as an outsider is that I honestly don't know what else could have happened after October 7th. A bunch of dominos were set up, someone knocked over one, and things unfolded along a nigh-inevitable path from there.[1]

IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault. It's like kicking a dog repeatedly. Eventually, it will bite you, but once a dog has its teeth sunk into your calf, you're not going to treat it nicely.

Let me ask you a simple question. Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done? What alternative choices do you think would have been available to you, that the people would accept? What decisions could you have made that would "stick", that wouldn't result in you being kicked out of your position of power on the 9th and replaced by someone else willing to do something horrible that is certain to result in civilian deaths? Keep in mind that to this day there are many abducted civilian Israelis being held in Gaza as hostages.

I've been thinking about this for months and I honestly can't come up with anything.

[1] Look at what the US did after 9/11! Same setup, same story, same depressing outcome.

> Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done?

Steering well clear of the greater picture and focusing just on the man himself there are a number of people, including a block of Israeli Jews, that would strongly suspect he quietly, behind closed doors, fist pumped in delight and had a moment with a few in his circle.

They'd charge he had knowingly and with forethought been inching up the pressure on Palestine for some time in order to provoke an extreme reaction that served to justify righteous overkill.

This goes to your:

> IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault.

which I'd mostly agree with save I'd lay the blame as mostly the fault of a ruling extreme faction in Israel.

Palestine itself has also had to broadly deal with the consequences of the actions of smaller core extreme.

Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.

So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.

Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.

Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.

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