I like to wait three days before reacting to any news.
Right now we are in the fog of war. This is exactly why Hamas stores missiles in hospitals and places like that. So it will get these headlines. They genuinely are willing to kill themselves in order to kill Jews; so this makes sense according to their ethics.
"I repeat: attacks that are killing mostly combatants do not create casualty statistics that look anything like the age pyramid for the population as a whole." I really, really do not think that this holds in a population whose median age is 18 and whose function of people of X age is steadily decreasing with age, which means that the non-combatant groups on the higher end are small-ish. (Also, I wouldn't really put it past Hamas to deliberately kill small children specifically and blame them on Israel's attacks - Medieval world has little value for a human's life and especially a child's.)
"In theory, almost anyone can be a combatant. Children can be combatants. However, although children have received military training, they do not seem to be mobilized en masse from what I can tell." This requires a long discussion on "who counts as combatant", but I'd argue that 14-17 is most likely a huge subgroup of combatants (if you have halfway-reliable data saying otherwise, I'd love to see them: it's not like Hamas will publish data on age distribution of their militia or like we can trust said data if they do, because these are easier to fudge with "hey, they're just trained but not yet part of").
A query about the data. It is stated that your dataset is based on Download / share link: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/pal/gaza-names-of-killed.xlsx which lists some 6747 names and information. On the other hand the "Original data from: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/here.pdf" contains 2665 names and identity information. The former 6,747 appears consistent with other graphs in here.pdf but the names and identities are not given. Most likely there is an update? If I have not erred, could philosophybear possibly supply full original dataset?
There's no way to evaluate Hamas run ministry of health announcements. These are the people that declared 500 killed in the Al Ahli explosion, and external assessments are in the 40-100 range. Hamas use child soldiers, and either way considering 17-20 as children would mean that most Israeli combatant casualties are also 'children'. The main difference is that Israel clearly divides combatants from civilian casualties on its side, publishes the names and ages, and Hamas numbers are "Palestinians" with no distinction and no attribution.
There are over a thousand dead Palestinian death squad members and pogrom rabble on the Israeli side of the border alone, which makes the numbers from Hamas truly imaginary.
This 4:1 was a statistic I read for WWII but this suggests it's only for allies, which surprised me since the allies destroyed whole cities & most people in them. But it's Russia that suffered the most, with huge numbers of civilians killed. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293510/second-world-war-fatalities-per-country/
Readers click through and look at Ro's stats, very interesting.
I like to wait three days before reacting to any news.
Right now we are in the fog of war. This is exactly why Hamas stores missiles in hospitals and places like that. So it will get these headlines. They genuinely are willing to kill themselves in order to kill Jews; so this makes sense according to their ethics.
I have two criticisms:
"I repeat: attacks that are killing mostly combatants do not create casualty statistics that look anything like the age pyramid for the population as a whole." I really, really do not think that this holds in a population whose median age is 18 and whose function of people of X age is steadily decreasing with age, which means that the non-combatant groups on the higher end are small-ish. (Also, I wouldn't really put it past Hamas to deliberately kill small children specifically and blame them on Israel's attacks - Medieval world has little value for a human's life and especially a child's.)
"In theory, almost anyone can be a combatant. Children can be combatants. However, although children have received military training, they do not seem to be mobilized en masse from what I can tell." This requires a long discussion on "who counts as combatant", but I'd argue that 14-17 is most likely a huge subgroup of combatants (if you have halfway-reliable data saying otherwise, I'd love to see them: it's not like Hamas will publish data on age distribution of their militia or like we can trust said data if they do, because these are easier to fudge with "hey, they're just trained but not yet part of").
A query about the data. It is stated that your dataset is based on Download / share link: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/pal/gaza-names-of-killed.xlsx which lists some 6747 names and information. On the other hand the "Original data from: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/here.pdf" contains 2665 names and identity information. The former 6,747 appears consistent with other graphs in here.pdf but the names and identities are not given. Most likely there is an update? If I have not erred, could philosophybear possibly supply full original dataset?
Original data is in fact in "here.pdf". Got it. Apologies for error
There's no way to evaluate Hamas run ministry of health announcements. These are the people that declared 500 killed in the Al Ahli explosion, and external assessments are in the 40-100 range. Hamas use child soldiers, and either way considering 17-20 as children would mean that most Israeli combatant casualties are also 'children'. The main difference is that Israel clearly divides combatants from civilian casualties on its side, publishes the names and ages, and Hamas numbers are "Palestinians" with no distinction and no attribution.
There are over a thousand dead Palestinian death squad members and pogrom rabble on the Israeli side of the border alone, which makes the numbers from Hamas truly imaginary.
90%, belike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio