Casualties on both sides in the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists

Two years ago, the terrorist organization Hamas launched a brutal attack against Israel, specifically targeting unarmed civilians.

The weapons that the Israel Defense Forces have to wipe Hamas off the map
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October 7, the largest antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust

That attack ended up becoming the largest antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust. The vast majority of the victims were Jewish. Hamas terrorists murdered 1,270 people that day, including 816 civilians (including 29 minors), 382 soldiers, 59 police officers, and 13 emergency services personnel. Additionally, Hamas terrorists kidnapped 251 people, including 37 children. As of today, 48 hostages remain in Hamas hands. The terrorists are known to have murdered 83 hostages, including two children. The bodies of 25 of those killed have not yet been recovered.

Hamas called its terrorist attack "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood." This criminal organization has been providing false casualty figures that do not distinguish between civilians and combatants and that do not indicate the causes of death, whether due to combat action, illness or accidents, and whether the deaths in combat were caused by Israeli forces or by Palestinian terrorists.

Some 24,000 Hamas terrorists have died in this war

As we saw yesterday, Salo Aizenberg, a graduate in Management Information Systems and collaborator of NGOs such as UN Watch and NGO Monitor, has published a detailed analysis of the casualties in Gaza with these conclusions: 24,000 combatants dead (from both Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups) and 33,400 civilians dead as collateral casualties. It's a horrific figure that Aizenberg attributes to Hamas's strategy of using civilians as human shields, a war crime that contrasts with Israel's policy of prioritizing the protection of its civilian population. Still, it represents a casualty ratio of 1.39 civilians for every one fallen combatant.

A military campaign in which the Israeli Army has been very accurate

Obviously, all civilian deaths in a war are terrible: that's why it's best not to start them, especially when the attacked country has forces far superior to those of the aggressor country. The Hamas terrorists didn't care about this: they started a war they knew they couldn't win, hiding behind the civilians of Gaza. A strategy worthy of cowards and unscrupulous people. For the rest, and as I already indicated yesterday, John Spencer, professor of urban warfare studies at the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) at West Point and a war veteran with two tours of duty in Iraq, noted in March 2024 in Newsweek:

"The UN, EU and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world's most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists."

No one accused ISIS's enemies of committing "genocide" in Mosul at the time. If Israel now suffers from that accusation, it is due to a bias that has nothing to do with defending human rights or peace, but rather with antisemitism. The Israeli army has acted with great precision in a very difficult environment. Hamas, which used them as shields, must be held accountable for the civilian deaths in Gaza, just as the nazis were responsible for the civilian deaths in Germany in the war they started.

Israel Defense Forces casualties

As for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) casualties, these are more accurate and detailed than the casualty figures published by Hamas through the so-called "Gaza Health Ministry." The IDF has identified 913 Israeli soldiers killed, 466 of them in the Israeli Army's ground operations in the Gaza Strip, and 6,318 wounded, 942 in serious condition, 1,555 in medium condition, and 3,821 of light condition. The names of the soldiers who fell in combat can be read here. My tribute to all these men and women of Israel, who died fighting for their country against criminals who committed purely diabolical atrocities two years ago.

Who has won this war?

For the rest, one may ask: Has Israel won this war? Obviously, given the casualty figures on both sides, Hamas's human resources have been severely depleted, but they are not extinct. In 2021, Radio France reported that Hamas had 40,000 fighters in Gaza, to which should be added the fighters of other Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza.

Hamas still controls a small part of the Strip and still holds those 48 hostages. Israel, as any civilized country would have done in a situation like this, set two goals for its counteroffensive: free the hostages and eliminate Hamas. As long as Hamas continues to hold dozens of people hostage and as long as it continues to have the means to attack Israel again, there can be no talk of victory or peace. Furthermore, peace will only be possible in the Middle East when Palestinian terrorists and their Iranian sponsors stop trying to destroy the State of Israel and recognize the right of the Jewish people to inhabit the land of their ancestors. To believe that giving a state to terrorists will bring peace to that region is to be deluded or worse.

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Main photo: Yedi Cohen.