Aizenberg: Everything You Need to Know About Gaza’s Fatality Numbers
Everything You Need to Know About Gaza’s Fatality Numbers In recent weeks, two talking points have spread rapidly across media and social platforms. The first is the claim that the IDF now accepts Hamas’ assertion that 70,000 people were killed in Gaza. This was widely framed as a decisive moment, a supposed confession by Israel that Hamas’ figures were correct all along. That narrative is false. The IDF did not affirm Hamas’ fatality count and explicitly rejected the idea that a vague remark by an unnamed official constituted confirmation of anything. More importantly, even if one were to accept a headline figure of 70,000, a number not inconsistent with Israel’s stated civilian-to-combatant ratio, it would still resolve none of the questions that actually matter, including who was counted as a civilian versus a combatant, how natural deaths were treated, and how Gazans killed by Hamas itself were accounted for.. The second talking point claims that a newly announced Hamas compen...
