How Many Palestinian Civilians Have Been Killed in Gaza?

How Many Civilians Have Been Killed in Gaza?

Urban warfare is absolutely no fun for anyone involved. It is no surprise that the most unpleasant and bloodiest battles in human history are almost universally urban battles (ignoring the unique horror of the First World War, they all are)

Statistics and numbers are easy to write and read, but come with some drawbacks that need to be considered:

1. There is no such thing as an accurate combat report. No one who has ever fought in any engagement needs to be told about the fear, adrenaline, and focus that is the constant pulse of combat. You can’t count dead bodies, you can’t track bullets, and even if you could, we all use the same NATO 5.56 rounds and M4’s, theirs stolen from us. Once a bullet has been fired, there is no conclusive way to tell who fired it. In the Second World War, Fremde Heere Ost, the German military intelligence agency, reduced combat reports of tank kills by 30% to 50% of reported kills in their final reports. The United States reduced theirs by 20% to 30%, and the Soviets by nearly 70% during the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa. Eyewitnesses are the least reliable sources of battles, too much is going on to keep track of, and all of it falls into the category of “significant emotional events”. Accurate battle casualty counts take, at a minimum, months; if someone claims to have an exact number of people killed in an airstrike five minutes after it happens, they’re lying.

2. National security obfuscates facts. This is a good thing, not every citizen should have the security clearance to know exactly how many people were killed and how many munitions were expended. Hamas numbers can’t be trusted, ever, Israeli numbers can start being trusted when all documentation is declassified in twenty years. The fog of war is very real.

3. Who is a combat soldier? A scared 10 year old picks up a rifle, combatant? A medic gives covering fire to his platoon under pressure, combatant? An unarmed Palestinian living in an apartment building with a hostage in the basement, combatant? What if he knows the hostage is there, what if he doesn’t? International law dictates that all combatants must always be wearing clear and discernable uniforms, which Hamas does not do, terrorists being unbound by the Geneva Conventions. When the rubble is cleared and the bodies counted, who says which body is a civilian and which is a combatant? A building is destroyed and seven bodies are found in the rubble, along with two guns, five knives, and a heavy machine gun lying next to them. How many combatants killed is that?    

That being said, let’s look at the top two:

1. The Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943), Estimated casualties: 1.5 to 2 million casualties.

2. The Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), Estimated casualties: 1.5 to 4 million casualties.

Have you noticed any above questions about those two sets of numbers? For instance: how one could misplace 500,000 to 2.5 million people?

The casualty estimates for the Gaza War stand at around 70,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Israelis (both these numbers include the events immediately surrounding October 7th). How many of those 70,000 are civilians and how many are combatants?

We have absolutely no idea. The statistics will take years of peace to become firm, and given that Hamas is a terrorist organization beholden to no external or internal fact checkers, we may never know.

So how many Palestinian civilians have been killed? 

I have no clue.

And neither do you.

So stop speaking with such confidence.