this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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The current death toll in Gaza is close to 42,000, but experts believe that figure is likely a gross undercount.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I thought originally that you were suggesting a simple syntactic manipulation of the fraction but you're not. I don't understand why the equation you propose is reasonable.

[–] ArbitraryValue -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Let me try to explain it another way.

We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.

If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That fails to take into account any effort by the idf to minimize child casualties, which is absolutely happening. It assumes an equal amount of adult and children civilian deaths when there is no marker whatsoever that shows that to be the case, other than the overall ratio of children to adults in Gaza. You have made a huge leap in your logic.

[–] ArbitraryValue -1 points 2 days ago

That's true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children's greater frailty skews it the other way. I don't know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.