Israeli's most depraved lie exposed

Israel's claim that it protects civilians was always an obscene lie - and now a new report has utterly buried it.

This was always Israel’s most obscene lie during the genocide, and should always been acknowledged as such: that its military seeks to protect civilians from harm. A new report into Israel’s bombing campaign against the people of Gaza definitively buries it.

This new report is produced by Airwars, a UK-based organisation founded a decade ago. It came to prominence by tracking and archiving the aerial bombardment of so-called Islamic State, ISIS, and other such jihadi groups in Iraq and Syria in particular.

They’re run by a term of experts and their impact goals, as described on their website, include to:

Pressure governments and military actors to acknowledge and take responsibility for the full human toll of their actions

Ensure measures to prevent human suffering, particularly amongst civilian populations, are centred in military policy and practice

This report focuses on the first 25 days of the onslaught against Gaza, after Israeli president Isaac Herzog declared that “an entire nation out there is responsible” and it wasn’t true civilians were “not involved”, when the defence minister and the Israeli general charged with civilian affairs had described those civilians as “human animals” and “human beasts” who, as the latter put it, would get only “damage” and “hell”. In other words: the Israeli authorities could not have been less subtle that they regarded the entire civilian population as their target.

According to Airwars, at least 5,139 civilians were killed in October 2023. Of those, at least 1,900 children were killed. That is seven times the number of children killed in a single month in any other armed conflict it has studied. Bear in mind the vast majority of this was before the ground invasion. According to the report:

“It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

The statistics speak for themselves, and leave any suggestion the Israeli state has sought to prevent civilian harm exposed for what it is - the unforgivable sin of atrocity denial.

The statistics are more hideous than many will imagine. Airwars looked at 606 incidents of civilian harm in this 25 day period. In those 606 incidents, in which at least 5,139 civilians were killed, the total number of militants Airwars found were killed? Between 30 and 58. Bear in mind that the Israeli state claims to have one of the most technologically sophisticated armies on earth.

An academic who goes under ‘History Speaks’ on Twitter has done a piechart graph which exposes the murderous absurdity of this crime.

As the graph shows, 99.4% of these incidents killed civilians, with 0.6% killing militants. The most moral army in the world, ladies and gentlemen.

Indeed, what these statistics expose is a naked war of extermination.

They find that when a named individual is killed, an average of 14 members of his or her family were also killed.

In the first year, over 900 entire Palestinian bloodlines in Gaza - that is entire extended families, from little babies to great grandparents - had been exterminated by the Israeli military.

If just one extended family in Britain - with a population over 30 times bigger than Gaza’s pre-war population - were all violently wiped out, that would be national tragedy, remembered as such long after the horror happened.

As Airwars found, civilians are being killed en masse:

“Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in residential buildings. In more than 95 percent of all cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed.”

Airwars looked at where Palestinian civilians were being killed. And overwhelmingly they were being killed in their own homes - often in their own beds. In the period studied, over 90% of female or child fatalities took place in residential buildings

A little note here. Obviously it’s the case that so many Palestinian men are not “legitimate targets”.

In this context, women and children are referred to because we are automatically able to conclude they are civilians without further discussion. That doesn’t mean we should disregard how many men have been butchered: for example, the first responders on the scene who are victims of ‘double tap’ attacks by the Israeli military.

Israel’s defenders have repeatedly claimed that this mass slaughter is caused by the use of so called ‘human shields’. Even on its own terms this is a nonsense - under international law, potential harm to civilians can only be justified as proportionate to a military advantage, and where necessary precautions are taken.

But, in any case, the evidence for human shields is not there: the justifications go along the lines of: “there’s a big block of flats, in that flat there is someone we have decided - or an artificial intelligence system has decided - is a legitimate military target - we’re going to blow up that block of flats and kill a load of civilians, and then we’ll behave as though all the people killed in that block were human shields.”

As it is, Gaza is one of the most densely populated communities on earth. And when Iranian missile strikes targeted Israel, CNN journalists were amongst those discussing how a hit on Mossad HQ could imperil civilian lives because it is surrounded by civilian infrastructure. - The same applies to IDF headquarters, which is surrounded by civilian flats, shopping malls, and so on. Does that mean Mossad and the IDF are using human shields?

Also there is overwhelming evidence even covered by the likes of the New York Times and CNN that it is in fact Israel which keeps using Palestinian civilians as human shields - because every accusation is a confession.

And we know from Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, artificial intelligence systems are used to identify targets without any human input, including one called ‘Where’s Daddy’, which literally blows up those deemed targets, however low grade, as they return to their homes: blowing them up with their children, their family, their neighbours.

As Airwars found, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 other members were killed alongside them. They note this is higher than any other conflict they have documented.

They show a graph comparing how many Palestinian civilians were killed in October 2023 with the most lethal month recorded in Iraq during the war on ISIS, during the Battle of Mosul - March 2017, where they find 1,470 civilians were killed by the US-led coalition, compared to over 5,000 in Gaza in the first 25 days.

Notable the war with ISIS has often been used by apologists for Israel’s genocide for purposes of deflection.

Airwars find that in the Battle of Raqqa - for the whole 4 month period - there were less than half the civilian fatalities as in Gaza in that first 25 days

This isn’t a ‘war’. It’s a genocide. This is what extermination looks like. There is no attempt to protect civilians from harm.

But here’s a key point. As we know from other conflagrations, the vast majority of civilians are not killed by the violence - by the bombs or the bullets - but by other causes, by the destruction of society itself - from the healthcare system to housing. That is what will kill the largest number of Palestinians in what is, and what must be recorded, as one of the worst atrocities of our age.