Israeli television says: “We killed 8,326,000 terrorists“That means 8,000 Palestinians, including Hamas militants.
After three weeks, Israel published the number of its dead, with names, surnames and photos for almost everyone, and it could be read in Israeli newspapers. If you count well, There are 900 and not 1,400, as the Italian media keeps repeating. You can count six people under the age of 14 (more precisely between the ages of 5 and 13), not the “40 beheaded” that all the media are talking about. At least about a third are soldiers and 90% are young people of military age; you see very few older people. We repeat that this is an updated list that can be read in Israeli newspapers with first and last name and photo.
Therefore, based on the data provided in Israeli newspapers, The ratio would be approximately 9 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli. The problem is that 40% of Gaza’s population is under 14 years old and of the 8,000 dead so far, only about 1,500 were Hamas militiamen. Even without believing the Palestinian data, but based on Gaza’s demographics, probably: At least 2,500 teenagers and children under 14 died in the bombs. So far, six Israeli children and teenagers have been killed in lists of names published by Israeli newspapers. It therefore appears that 2,500 (at least) Palestinians under the age of 14 died, compared to 6 Jewish teenagers or children. This means that for every Israeli, around 400 Palestinian children died.
Is that acceptable? Many countries around the world ask this, but less so in Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, a brief reflection is permitted. If you count the Germans who died in the bombing of World War II, a few hundred thousand were minors, and instead of English children, almost none died in the bombing, so the proportion was much higher. Even in Italy, for example, in Naples, Milan and Verona, entire school classes were wiped out in the bomb attacks that hit the centers of Italian cities in broad daylight. In Naples, the Allied bombing raids claimed around 20,000 lives, including many minors.
This has practically never happened to the English. But it is not a justification because it was not at all necessary from a military point of view, as all historians recognize. No historian claims that these bombings of civilians hastened Germany’s surrender. The statement “but civilians were also bombed in the Second World War” is more of a reason to discuss this aspect again now, not to say that it needs to be repeated.
In the case of Hamas, it has suffered casualties for 17 years without ever managing to hit more than five or at most ten Israelis per year with its rockets or incursions, if you look at the UN data. According to the United Nations, approximately 6,400,000 Palestinians have been killed since 2008.
For some reason difficult to understand, Israel offered virtually no resistance on October 7 when Hamas broke through the barriers and suffered hundreds of deaths for the first time in history. But now again Hamas is blockedas it always was, given Israel’s overwhelming military superiority. There is therefore no urgent military need to massacre thousands of Palestinian civilians to kill all Hamas fighters. For 17 years, Hamas always fired rudimentary rockets that caused two or three deaths, and periodically, such as in 2008 and 2014, Israel bombed heavily, causing 1,300 and 1,100 deaths in the Gaza Strip, respectively. Now Israel has caused 8,000 deaths and the death toll continues to rise every day. This leaves the Christian West largely indifferent, but in most countries around the world we find that retribution is on the order of 10 to 1 and even much higher if we take children and young people into account.
Finally, saying that Israel must be defended because it is still a constitutional state (assuming that this was the case as far as the separation of powers was concerned until the Israeli government was heavily criticized for its judicial reform a few months ago) does not change that fact of this retribution which goes beyond any criterion of proportionality.
Paolo Becchi and Giovanni Zibordi, October 1, 2023