A screenshot of a Hamas diagram, filmed as part of an IDF video from 2009's Operation Cast Lead, showing how weapons are hidden by mosques. Photo: IDF / Screenshot.

Despite everything that is claimed by anti-Israel NGOs, the IDF has maintained a ratio of about 1:1 civilians to terrorists killed.

We can calculate this from adding together two sources and a little extrapolation.

Last week, as I reported, out of the first 193 killed in Gaza, 72 were known to be terrorists, 80 were civilians, and 41 were unclear.
That is as of Tuesday, July 15, at noon.

Tuesday, July 22:

Israel said it has killed 183 militants in its ground operation over the last four days.

That adds up to 255 terrorists from before July 15 and since (presumably) July 18.

Add the three missing days of casualties (roughly 40 total, assume 20 terrorists), plus some percentage of the 41 who were undetermined last week, and it is clear that roughly half of the dead in Gaza are in fact terrorists – despite the horrific reports of entire buildings collapsing on families that seem to indicate otherwise.

For those who claim that the IDF is lying, in the past the IDF estimates have turned out to be true – even Hamas admitted that roughly half of those killed during Cast Lead were terrorists, months after the fact.

There’s another salient fact as well.

Some percentage of the dead were killed by terrorist actions, whether rockets that fell short, mortars and bullets aimed at Israelis, “work accidents,” and weapons caches exploding. No NGO in Gaza is checking up on those, because they have a vested interest in making Israel look as bad as possible. The new “Goldstone Report” is being planned already. So indeed the ratio of civilians to terrorists killed by Israel may be even less than 1:1.

To have a ratio of only one civilian per terrorist killed, in an environment where Hamas purposefully hides among civilians and tells civilians to stay where the terrorists are, is nothing short of miraculous.

The people who are accusing Israel of indiscriminate targeting of civilians are engaged in slander, not in reporting nor research. Israel’s numbers stack up against any conflict in history, including the Western-led armies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

As Col. Richard Kemp said after Cast Lead:

No one has been able to tell me which other army in history has ever done more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone.

In fact, my judgments about the steps taken in that conflict by the IDF to avoid civilian deaths are inadvertently borne out by a study published by the United Nations itself, a study which shows that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.

The UN estimate that there has been an average three-to one ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide. Three civilians for every combatant killed.

That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan: three to one.

In Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to be four-to-one. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia.

In Gaza, it was less than one-to-one.

This extremely low rate of civilian casualties flatly contradicts many of Goldstone’s original allegations, and the bleating insistence of various human rights groups about Israel’s alleged crimes against humanity.

Don’t believe the lies. The IDF is as moral an army as has ever existed in history.