By rights, this should be the moment that the humanitarian case against Israel’s campaign in Gaza goes into terminal collapse. From now on, there can be no equivocation. Those who persist in opposing the war based on the number of civilian casualties are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. Or both.
Earlier this month, the United Nations halved its assessment of the numbers of women and children killed in Gaza. Then: 9,500 women and 14,500 children dead. Now: 4,959 women and 7,797 children. In a further seven months’ time, perhaps another few thousand will be resurrected.
A moment’s thought reveals that it is impossible to quickly produce reliable figures. People might be missing but, in the chaos of war, how do the authorities know they haven’t fled, gone into hiding, or died of natural causes? Casualties may be buried under collapsed buildings, vapourised, burnt, or so disfigured that it would take complex forensic analysis to identify them. That is why it took months for Israeli investigators to arrive at a final figure for the victims of October 7, with some remaining unaccounted for.
With war raging, this kind of detailed work is impossible. Yet for months, the UN has trusted figures produced by the same savages who butchered poor Shani Louk and drank chilled water from an Israeli fridge while watching a dying young boy comforting his little brother who was missing an eye. At long last, it has taken a first step towards sanity. But it continues to rely on figures from Hamas as a touch-point.
Do those sanctimonious UN officials not realise how ridiculous they look? Have they forgotten how war works? Two decades after our invasion of Iraq, death tolls remain intensely disputed, ranging enormously from 100,000 to 600,000. Yet we’re expected to believe that Hamas, as it squats underground with its Jewish sex slaves, has the professionalism to provide statistics within hours, reliable to the single digit.
Statisticians have debunked the data. Yet the narrative remains unchanged, even by President Biden. Clearly, the sheer volume of the footage of suffering civilians – all projected by Hamas, which censors pictures of dead or wounded combatants – has caused us to lose our minds. When we fought in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, nobody debated civilian casualties. Yet when it comes to Israel, it’s all anybody talks about. We are being played.
This is why Gazan civilians are barred from the safety of the tunnels, even though the whole population would fit inside them. This is why they do not have a single air raid shelter. Hamas’s leaders have been doing their best to get their people killed on camera, then fabricated the figures. They have been doing so to brainwash the international media, political leaders, celebrities and the protesters on our streets, to believe the lie of Israeli “genocide”. They want Jerusalem to be pressured to stop the war, leaving them to plot the next act of savagery.
Every humane heart must bleed for Gaza. Even a single innocent death is appalling. But unless you are a pacifist, the tragedy of the individual civilian in a warzone – no matter how heartrending – is not what sways the argument. What should do so is the bigger picture. It is the principle of a just war, which always involves civilian casualties. Israel did not choose this conflict any more than Britain chose to fight Nazi Germany. Such is the curse of the world that democracies are sometimes faced with an ugly enemy and the only way to respond is with force. Churchill knew this. So does Israel. Do we?
Those of sound judgment must insist that the emperor has no clothes. The Jewish state is estimated to be killing proportionately fewer civilians than any other democracy in the history of warfare. To argue otherwise is simply wrong. Now let’s talk about destroying jihadism.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of ‘Israelophobia’
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