Derec here were responses to your bulge observation.
I will respond below.
Yeah, showing that the IDF kills mostly males - who are there targets - doesn’t show they are killing mostly terrorists.
*their
If the killing was really indiscriminate, there would be no large difference between male and female figures, and the age structure would follow the age structure of the overall population.
We see that the female graph follows the population pyramid, which, in Gaza, is actually pyramid shaped despite relatively high life expectancies due to extremely high birth rates. That shows that women who got killed are largely unfortunate collateral damage of urban warfare. We see a pyramid shape for very young and old men. But in the middle - the age when many teenagers and men engage in combat, we see a large bulge.
Natural interpretation of that is those are the combatants IDF targets, like the terrorists who emerged from a tunnel in Rafah a few days ago. Or the
terrorists who shot and wounded an IDF soldier yesterday.
To assume that this must be because IDF targeting random young men, and not combatants, is just an attempt to smear Israel for political reasons.
I have to agree with you. For the reader's sake, some portion of suspects are innocent. The suspects will tend to be military-aged males because that will be used by soldiers as a factor in determining threat, not to mention that AI was also used and could also make mistakes. I don't expect the majority of "the bulge" or artifact in the graph to be non-militant persons, but it isn't clear precisely how many.
Nothing is perfect, of course. Note that some military-age male fatalities are civilians, but they are accounted for in the "pyramid" portion of the graph, not the "bulge" portion. The "bulge" is just the excess military-age fatalities. I have not seen any evidence that a significant portion of the "bulge" is due to misidentified suspects.
We could say that a reasonable upper bound number of terrorists could be the difference between the male and female numbers, but this would only be an upper bound. A more recent dataset gives 68226 Gazans killed. 21706 were female. If we suppose that females were innocent of being armed militants and innocent males were at least this number, then we have 2 x 21706 = 43412 lower bound innocent Gazans killed. We also have an upper bound of terrorists killed of 68226 - 43412 = 24814. We could say that the upper bound of terrorists killed was 36.4% and lower bound of innocents killed was 63.6%.
I would not expect too many female combatants in Islamist groups like Hamas or PIJ. But secular groups like PFLP have recruited female terrorists. So it's not appropriate to assume all females are innocent non-combatants.
That said, of course the Gaza war had a large share of non-combatant fatalities. Part of it is due to it being urban warfare, and that is always hell for the civilian population. But another part of it is that Hamas and its allies deliberately operate from civilian areas, even going as far as putting rocket launchers and weapons caches in the midst of tents in places like al-Mawasi.
They do that because they know they can rely on useful idiots in the West (including media outlets, universities, and not few politicians) to do their bidding by blaming Israel for the civilian casualties caused by Hamas' actions.
www.cbsnews.com
apnews.com
www.haaretz.com
