Is Israel Indiscriminately Killing in Gaza? Data says No
JERUSALEM (Worthy News)– While protests around the world condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate” killing of civilians, the hard data does not support their assessment. In the latest figures coming from Gaza, a disproportionate number of men ages 20 to 29 — which represent a mere 9 percent of the population, represented nearly 35 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip over the past month. At the same time, 725 men were killed compared to 214 women.
Citing figures released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the BBC’s head of statistics Anthony Reuben found that the number of civilian men killed in the fighting outnumbered the number of women by a factor of nearly 3.5:1.
According to the UN, 725 men were killed in the conflict as opposed to 214 women. When the 216 confirmed “members of armed groups” were included in the figures, the disparity grew even larger. Israeli military officials said 750-1,000 Hamas and other gunmen had been killed in the fighting as of Tuesday, August 5.
“If the Israeli attacks have been ‘indiscriminate,’ as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women,” Reuben noted dryly.
The question echoes a New York Times analysis from earlier this week, which showed “that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.” — Source