Do the math Barbie!

As I noted yesterday, in 1941 Hitler’s SS Einsatzgruppen, using basic infantry weapons, murdered over a million people. One person, with a military rifle can easily kill dozens of people a day. If there are round ups, thousands.

We know that no more than 1400 people died in the Gaza war. This number is beyond dispute. So if even 10 Israeli soldiers committed serial acts of murder in Gaza, during the 21 days of fighting, the casualty figure would be at least twice the actual casualties. 10 x 10 x 15 (ten soldiers, ten days of fighting and 15 victims per day). If Israel had been rounding up people for a Hitler-style massacre, it is easy for a few dozen soldiers to force march 2-300 defenseless civilians and slaughter them and do this 5-6 times a day. Given Gaza is the most “densely populated place in the world,” finding and dispatching victims would be militarily trivial. But then the numbers are an order of magnitude higher: 5 x 200 x 10, ten thousand dead (5 massacres, 200 dead per war crime and ten days of fighting).

There is the possibility that a couple of Israeli soldiers committed unlawful acts but if they did, there is zero statistical evidence it happened. Roughly 30,000 soldiers were in Gaza, less than 5% killed anyone (one soldier per KIA). We know that 3-400 of the casualties were killed in the initial airstrike and we know that Israel used thousands of precision munitions that sure must have killed at least half of the remaining KIA so, at MOST, 2% of the IDF troops killed anyone. This is the definition of fire discipline.

Had 4% of the troops killed anyone, there would have been 505 more ground fire casualties.

These numbers are not perfect. It is impossible to reverse reconstruct a war in complete detail but it is possible to state the obvious: no commander could have ordered serial war crimes or the statistics would be much higher. Even if only 15000 IDF troops were in Gaza, the data suggests that any unauthorized killing was de minimis.

To Israel’s detractors who falsely accuse her or massacres, I say do the math and kiss my ass.