Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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In the Iraq War documents, incident reports of the US army detail the deaths of 100k Iraqis at the hands of their own forces, of which about two thirds are civilian. These deaths, further, go above what other attempts at documenting war deaths reported, and they provide the most conservative estimate as they only include deaths drawn up in incident reports (i.e. if a helicopter launched a missile at a building and killed a bunch of people, this wouldn't find its way into incident reports, which are based on individual soldier reports of their interactions with the Iraqi public, nor would deaths caused by the chaos and privations of occupation), which are also likely to be biased by the soldiers reporting them.
The lessons learned from this I would say apply to the Israeli military operations. There is likely to be a far greater actual number of deaths than what's reported, as well as a huge number of civilian deaths relative to combatant, perhaps in the area of 2:1 at best, in all likelihood far worse.
That would be true if "reported" number were the number that matches the known casualties. Nobody in Hamas is interested in reporting anything like that. Thus, actual numbers bear no relation to what Hamas is reporting - it could be much less, it could be much more, Hamas reported numbers are just propagandist exercises. Sure, they can't report 1 millions people died from an airstrike on a single house, so they have some constraints on their reporting, but if they say 47 people died, nobody is going to contradict them. "Actual" isn't even seen in the vicinity of it.
This is a completely baseless assumption. IDF takes a lot of precautions to allow civilians to evacuate before engaging in certain areas. These efforts are well documented. They do not avoid casualties completely, and sometimes there's just no possibility of it - like having an active fight with Hamas striking from the midst of civilian population (there are numerous instances of rocket launches from "humanitarian zones" - it makes sense, if IDF says they won't strike certain area, that's exactly where you want to deploy your most precious resources, doing otherwise would be stupid) or high-value target is located in the presence of their family, etc. So yes, of course there are civilian casualties, and a lot of casualties (since Hamas is an irregular military) for which their status is impossible to determine, but numbers like "far worse than 2:1" are completely baseless. US army btw is much less sensitive to civilian casualties in overseas conflicts than the IDF - for the simple reason they can pretty much always get away with it.
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