“70,000 Gazans killed in war” is being blasted across headlines and social media, even though Israel has not released new casualty figures or officially verified that number.
What has been discussed all along is the breakdown. For more than a year, Israeli officials have cited roughly 25,000 Hamas combatants killed and a civilian-to-combatant ratio of about 2 to 1. Do the math and you arrive at roughly 70,000 total deaths. That was never the point of contention.
The real issue was Hamas’ refusal to distinguish between civilians and combatants, its claim that most of the dead were women and children, and its failure to account for civilians killed by failed terror rockets and terror groups or for non-war-related deaths.
