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What Raqqa Says about Gaza's Death Toll

(Commentary) Evelyn Gordon - According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, over 3,000 people were killed in Raqqa, including about 1,130 civilians, during the course of a four-month battle. In the 2014 Gaza war, according to UN figures, 2,251 Palestinians were killed. But a comparison of raw numbers is meaningless; the relevant comparison is casualties as a proportion of the population. According to the New York Times, Raqqa had a population of 300,000 when ISIS took it over. In comparison, Gaza's population in 2014 was 1.79 million, according to official Palestinian statistics. In other words, the casualties in Raqqa represented 1% of the city's pre-ISIS population. The casualties in Gaza represented 0.12% of the population. Thus, as a proportion of the population, casualties in Raqqa were 10 times higher than those in Gaza. Moreover, roughly 6% of buildings in Gaza were destroyed or badly damaged. New York Times reporter Ivor Prickett wrote last week, "when I visited eastern Raqqa, it was hard to find a street or building that had not been damaged by the fighting." ISIS and Hamas employed virtually identical tactics. Both dug extensive tunnel networks under civilian buildings, wired civilian buildings with explosives, stockpiled arms in civilian buildings and fought from the midst of a civilian population. Yet despite the enemy's similar tactics, Israel produced vastly lower casualties as a proportion of Gaza's population and much less property damage than the Western coalition against ISIS did. In other words, the very Western countries that accused Israel of "disproportionate" and "excessive" harm in Gaza were guilty of far greater harm in Syria and Iraq.
2017-10-31 00:00:00
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