Over the past week or so the media keep repeating these generic casualty figures such as X number of Palestinians and Y number of Israelis. Like most stories in our syncophantic media it's not the real story. But usually even the rubbish that passes for journalism tends to include useful titbits of fact among the spin and opinion. The last figures I saw included an interesting split between civilians and combatants.
At that point the Israelis had killed 5 Palestinian combatants for every IDF soldier lost. Meanwhile they had killed 300 Palestinian civilians for every Israeli civilian killed. Two conclusions can be made from that. First if you are 60 times more effective at killing civilians than at killing soldiers (300 divided by 5) then any claims to be trying to avoid civilian casualties are hogwash. Second, and I think more important to Israelis in the long run, if the IDF can only kill Hamas militants at a 5:1 ratio in a battle-zone which is surrounded by the Israelis, then the hitherto unbeatable reputation of the mighty IDF is looking very shaky. And that would worry the Israeli establishment much more than any hand-wringing about dead Arab civilians.
At that point the Israelis had killed 5 Palestinian combatants for every IDF soldier lost. Meanwhile they had killed 300 Palestinian civilians for every Israeli civilian killed. Two conclusions can be made from that. First if you are 60 times more effective at killing civilians than at killing soldiers (300 divided by 5) then any claims to be trying to avoid civilian casualties are hogwash. Second, and I think more important to Israelis in the long run, if the IDF can only kill Hamas militants at a 5:1 ratio in a battle-zone which is surrounded by the Israelis, then the hitherto unbeatable reputation of the mighty IDF is looking very shaky. And that would worry the Israeli establishment much more than any hand-wringing about dead Arab civilians.
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