American Professor Lies with Statistics to Demonize Israel
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/american-professor-lies-with-statistics-to-demonize-israel; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
Now the IDF, which is very careful to count the combatants it has killed, after six months of war, concluded that it had killed about 15,000 Hamas and PIJ combatants.
In the first six months of the Gaza war, Kuperman claims — accepting uncritically the figures put out by the Hamas-run Health Ministry — that there were 33,000 people killed in Gaza. (After the seventh month of fighting, that figure has risen to 34,000). But he failed to note that a great many of those killed were not civilians at all, but Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. The IDF, which has always been very conservative in its estimates of enemy death, determined that by that point in the war, about 15,000 Hamas and PIJ terrorists had been killed. That would mean, if we were to accept Hamas’ figure — 33,000 — of the total number of dead after six months, that only 18,000 of those killed were civilians. That would give us a monthly average of 3,000 civilians killed.
During the two years of massacres in 2003 and 2004 by both the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed militias, hundreds of thousands of black Africans, all of them civilians, were killed. Some put the total at 400,000. That would mean an average of 17,000 monthly deaths. Compare that figure to the 3,000 civilians killed on average each month in Gaza during the first six months of the war. The deaths that Kuperman says were “much greater” in Gaza than in any other recent example of mass killings, turn out to be far less, both in monthly averages, and in the total.
The deaths of civilians in Darfur continued long after the actual fighting was over. Black Africans in Darfur were not combatants but farmers and pastoralists simply trying to stay alive in a subsistence economy. The Janjaweed not only murdered civilians, but deliberately destroyed all the crops the Darfur farmers had planted, cut down their trees, stole their livestock, and burned down their villages, so that any Africans who survived their attacks would find it difficult to continue to live. Thus many died of starvation in the months following the end of hostilities, in a slow-motion genocide. A total of two million black Africans — all civilians — died in the Darfur war. So far, after seven months of war, fewer than 20,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza. See the difference?
Here are the facts, for those who need reminding:
1. Hamas started this war, a war Israel did not want, when 3,000 of its operatives smashed into Israel on October 7, accompanied by some non-Hamas Gazans who came along to join in the fun of raping and killing. Hamas operatives proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis. They kidnapped and taken back to Gaza about 260 Israeli hostages.
2. In conducting its war in Gaza, the IDF has made colossal efforts to minimize civilian casualties. It has done so by dropping 14 million leaflets, sending six million messages, and making four million robocalls, all in order to warn civilians to leave areas, or specific buildings, such as schools, apartment buildings, mosques, and hospitals, where Hamas has embedded itself and hid its weapons and rocket launchers. In warning civilians to leave places about being targeted, the IDF is also, unavoidably, warning Hamas. No other army in the world warns its enemies of where it plans to strike next.
3. Israeli pilots have called off hundreds of strikes after they detected the presence of too many civilians in the target area.
4. For these reasons, British Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded the British forces in Afghanistan and fought in a half-dozen other campaigns, has described the IDF as the “most moral army in the world” in its sustained effort to minimize civilian casualties.
Similarly, West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer has written that “ Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare than any other military in the history of warfare.”
5. Even if we were to accept the figures on casualties put out by the Hamas-directed Ministry of Health, we arrive at a figure of 3,000 monthly deaths of Gazan civilians during the first six months of the war. But in Sudan, during the period of the Arab Janjaweed attacks on black Africans, the monthly average was nearly six times as high — 17,000 deaths each month.
It’s a cautionary tale. Pay close attention to the numbers being cited by those who make astonishing claims about the deaths of Gazan civilians that, they insist, have been far greater than the civilian deaths caused by the Janjaweed in Darfur or in similar recent cases of mass death, as in Burundi. Don’t let yourself be hornswoggled.