The Devil is in the details.

 

If some reason you missed my weekly post you can view it by accessing my blog site -

https://benisisraelinewsletter.blogspot.com/

A piece in the Christian Science Monitor dedicated to the role of women in the IDF warrants more than a passing mention

“As Israel grapples with war and trauma, women’s rights advocates say the conflict may serve as a turning point in society’s views of their roles, especially as soldiers in combat.

Gender has been a central element of the war since it was sparked by the Oct. 7 attack, in which Hamas employed systematic sexual and gender-based violence on a scale unknown in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Women have long been drafted into the IDF, but the majority traditionally have served in administrative, support, or training positions.

In Israel’s pre-Oct. 7 debate over women serving in combat roles in mixed-gender units, resistance was especially strong on the far-right and in some religious establishments.

In a November 2022 poll by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, 53% of Israelis supported women serving in combat roles, with 35% against.

Last week, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum provided the International Criminal Court in The Hague with 1,000 pages of testimony from released hostages and eyewitnesses, along with forensic evidence, alleging torture, gender-based violence, and sexual violence by Hamas.

It was the latest in a campaign by families led by mothers, sisters, and forensics and legal experts to pressure for hostages’ releases and have Hamas’ leadership tried for war crimes.

Leading Israeli women rights and legal experts are assisting the campaign and coordinating with United Nations’ special rapporteurs on torture and sexual violence to build a legal case.  

“My goal is to have Oct. 7 go down in history side by side with those previous cases of weaponizing women and sexual violence in war such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo],” says Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, an expert in gender studies and international law and director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University.

As members of the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, Professor Halperin-Kaddari and others are documenting crimes and reaching out to experts in gender-based violence used as a tactic in previous wars.

“It is needed for Israeli society at large. I think this recognition is important in terms of recovery from the collective trauma,” she says.

In the past a large part of the opposition to women serving in combat units came from the IDF higher echelon doubting that women were physically capable of fighting as well as men.

Since then, women conscripts and career soldiers have removed all the barriers. Notably In the armoured corps, the airforce and elite combat units.

Recently a woman officer was appointed commander of one the IDF’s main airforce bases. Last but not least, a number women conscripts are training for the gruelling demands required for acceptance in the prestigious General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, more commonly known as Sayeret Matkal.

 A report in The Hill claims President Biden is shifting his tone as Israel’s war against Hamas rages on.

The president announced during the State of the Union address that the United States military will build a floating seaport to enable aid delivery to Gaza, where more than 30,000 Palestinians have died since Israel began its military campaign in October. Hundreds of thousands more face dwindling food and supplies; displaced Palestinians are struggling to feed their children.

The White House has warned Israel against a planned ground and air attack on Rafah in southern Gaza where more than a million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge. U.S. officials have expressed doubt that Israel can develop an effective plan to move the civilian population out of harm’s way ahead of the assault  according to a report  in The Wall Street Journal. 

The looming operation is a potential showdown between the White House and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which sees the assault as vital for the defeat of Hamas

In a Saturday MSNBC interview,  Biden said that an Israeli attack would cross a “red line” and left open the possibility that the U.S. might withhold some types of military assistance to Israel if the operation caused extensive civilian casualties.

“It is a red line, but I am never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So, there is no red line I am going to cut off all weapons, so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them,” Biden said “But there’s red lines that if he crosses…You cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead.”

A brief margin note - Somewhere I read that on the tripwire of a ‘red line,’ It’s often presidents who trip. Barack Obama drew one for Syria. George W. Bush drew several, for North Korea and Iran. Now President Biden has drawn one for Israel. The hard part is figuring out what to do when they are crossed.

Back to the main text and ‘How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers’ posted in Tablet magazine by Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative.

Digging into why the Hamas-compromised Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers are highly suspect. Wyner’s work is digestible, incrementally working through what data are available. Perhaps best of all, he makes no claims as to what the casualty numbers might really be.

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough:

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity.

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behaviour of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported.

The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and others in Mosaic online magazine is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of non-combatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centres, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,

 

14th of March, 2024