Haaretz’s vile antisemitic propaganda

The IDF said they killed ~9000 terrorists as of mid-January.

By March 10th, the IDF’s most recent assessment, the number had grown to 13,000.

This doesn’t count the 200 killed (much less 500 captured!) armed combatants at Al Shifa, since that happened after 3/10.

So why is the Haaretz using the IDF’s 3 month old combatant casualty estimate, while using Hamas’s current casualty “estimate?”

Because they want to paint Israel as a genocidal nation, even though all of the available evidence demonstrates that Israel is doing everything possible to minimize civilian casualties.

And they’re doing such a good job of it, under the worst circumstances, that even accepting Hamas’ lies about casualties, and even using 3 month old reports from the IDF, the ratio of combatants killed to civilians in Gaza under the worst possible circumstances is better than most modern urban combat. I’m not just talking about such instances as Russia’s indiscriminate massacres in Grozny, Mariupol, and so forth. I’m talking about American efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Fallujah and Hue.

Using the current estimates, even ignoring that Hamas is lying about them, and ignoring the fact that many have been inflicted by Hamas and PIJ (not only in failed rocket attacks, but also the deliberate targeting of civilians who try to flee), Israel is demonstrably inflicting fewer civilian casualties than almost any example of modern urban combat in history. The only exceptions are a handful of instances of conventional conflict in Ukraine where the civilian population was able to flee before the battle. Even then, Russia managed to kill about as many civilians in Mariupol as the total number killed in 5 months in Gaza, including combatants and civilians killed by Hamas/PIJ. And they did it without the sort of overwhelming conventional advantage Israel has.

The claim that Israel is engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilians, or is even indifferent to the deaths of civilians in their dogged pursuit of terrorists, is so far out of line with the evidence, that I don’t see any way to consider it good faith.