How many people would have died if Israel dropped bricks randomly on Gaza cities? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

How many people would have died if Israel dropped bricks randomly on Gaza cities?

Last month, Islamic Jihad published this graphic saying that Israel had dropped 87,000 tons of explosives on Gaza.

If Gaza's health ministry is telling the truth about fatalities, that is about 1.8 tons of explosives for every fatality.

If Israel intended to kill people, that is a remarkably inefficient use of explosives.

It is like dropping three grand pianos filled with explosives for every death.

So I wondered, if Israel would have dropped bricks instead of bombs, and if it was done randomly in urban areas where most of the explosives were dropped, how many people would we expect to be killed?

I put together a scenario where 70% of the Gaza population live in urban areas, and assuming that about one-third of Gaza land is urban. That comes out to a population density of over 16,000 per square kilometer, which is pretty close to the density of Gaza City.

If the people are randomly distributed in those areas, and if a falling brick has a 50% chance of being fatal if dropped within a half meter radius of a person (a falling brick would hit the ground from a plane at about 150 km/hour), and Israel dropped 87,000 tons of bricks which is about 35 million bricks, 450,000 bricks would land on or right next to people and about 225,000 people would be killed by falling bricks - five times the official Gaza numbers for the same mass of high explosives!

Israel could have killed a lot more people and saved a lot of money if they chose bricks instead of bombs.

Now, of course most people would be indoors and the bricks would likely only penetrate the top floor or two of a building. On the other hand, Israeli pilots have computer guidance systems that could clearly aim bricks to enter through windows or walls on any floor of a building if they intended to kill people. My numbers are for random distribution of bricks; intentional aiming of bricks at people would result in far more casualties!

The silliness of the exercise does not detract from the serious point: if 47,000 people were killed in Gaza with huge bombs and precise munitions, this disproves the slander of genocide - because clearly Israel did not intend to kill innocent people. This brick exercise shows that takes a great deal of effort not to kill hundreds of thousands of people in an urban area with 87,000 tons of bombs.

This is one more proof that anyone who claims Israel intentionally kills innocent people is not a serious person. Which is a nice way of pointing out that they are just Jew-haters.