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| Hamas shooting rockets in civilian clothing |
If we take Hamas at its word, though, their claims of civilians killed are impossible.
Hamas claims that 70% of those killed in the war are women and children, which would mean about 20,000 of the 29,000 they claim were killed. This is roughly the proportion of women and children in the total population of Gaza.
Hamas' overarching narrative has been that Israel killed indiscriminately.
If we take them at their word, that leaves 9,000 adult males killed by Israel.
Roughly two thirds of Gaza adult males, about 370,000, are fighting age - under 40. So if we assume Israel is killing adult males indiscriminately as well, we could expect 2/3 of the adult males killed were of military age.
That means about 6,000 military age males would have been killed - the same number of terrorists the Hamas official is admitting.
But only about 10% of Gaza's adult males of military age are members of armed groups. These numbers seem to indicate that 100% of the males of fighting age who have been killed were members of Hamas, and zero innocent adult males were killed - while at the same time all other demographic groups are killed indiscriminately.
Israel is perfectly efficient at picking out Hamas members among young males and terrible at distinguishing them from women and children.
Needless to say, this is statistically impossible.
Hamas has been exaggerating the number of civilians killed by orders of magnitude. And no one in the media is bothering to do even a cursory examination of the statistics Hamas is putting out.
