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Notes -
Worse? By orders of magnitude?
"By 31 August 2026, OHCHR had recorded 70,950 civilian casualties in Ukraine since 24 February 2022: 17,257 killed and 53,693 injured"
Israel has killed about 70k Palestinians out of 2.3 million living in the Gaza Strip. To match Israel in magnitude, Russia would have to kill at least 913 thousand Ukrainians. Even if you add Ukrainian combat losses (let's say, 212k KIA+MIA), that's only 230k, or just 25% of the reference target set by Israel.
As an utilitarian, I would compare the total death tolls rather than the average. Someone who murders 10% of a population of 10M is even more evil than someone who murders 10% of a population of 1M, in my view.
I will totally grant you that 70k vs 230k is merely a factor of three, so "half an order of magnitude", not "orders of magnitude", and I have edited my post to reflect that.
I guess an Israeli apologist might say that comparing Gaza to Ukraine is an apple to orange comparison in any case, because the Gaza war is simply punitive in character rather than a territorial expansion, and the apples-to-apples comparison would be their Lebensraum project in the West Bank vs the Ukraine war. (Ok, perhaps they might not use exactly that phrasing.)
To which a Russian apologist might reply that this comparison is unfair because unlike the Palestinians, the Ukrainians are fighting back (with Western support) rather than quietly being ethnically cleansed, obviously suppressing an enemy armed with NATO tech will be bloodier than suppressing an enemy armed (partly) with stone slings.
Yes, but not because of anything you said: the nature of the war environment in Gaza & the methods of Hamas are both significant drivers in the amount of civilian casualties.
There's also a general ignorance on the scales involved. Many people can point to the 70k fatalities estimate. Almost no one cares to remember or cite the overall size of Hamas in Gaza pre-2022.
(Answer: ballpark 80k, around half of that being the militant wing and half the civil-administrative supporting the militant wing. This does not include other militant groups involved in the fighting.)
70k is a big five-digit number. However, the estimates of number of combatants killed also focus on the 5-digit number range.
Even if you lowball that to 10k combatants, a 1-to-6 militant-to-civilian ratio in dense urban warfare where the militants actively seek to leverage civilian cover isn't exactly breaking historical norms, even before bystander cover propaganda strats.
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