Adin Haykin is an Israeli who – just as he did last year – has been documenting every single Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year, and identifying their terrorist affiliations or, absent any, their participation in attacks.
Elder of Ziyon put Haykin’s current thread on a Twitter Thread Reader post. You can find listed every one of those killed, and the terror group to which they belonged or, for those without such an affiliation, the attacks in which they were actively involved. The handful who were uninvolved civilians, caught in crossfire, are also listed.
42. Hamza Al-Ashqar
Lion's den operative pic.twitter.com/wAm1AmvcqL— Adin – עדין (@AdinHaykin1) February 7, 2023
More on the significance of this data can be found here: “92.5% of Palestinians killed this year were members of terror groups or actively involved in attacks,” Elder of Ziyon, March 12, 2023:
Out of 80 [Palestinians] killed this year, I [Elder of Ziyon] count six who were uninvolved civilians. (I’m counting a father who was shot while trying to stop his son’s arrest as a civilian.)
That means that 92.5% of those killed were actively part of hostilities, or members of armed groups. And that includes every single minor who was killed this year.
It is also entirely possible that some of the civilians listed were killed by Palestinian fire, which as we’ve seen has been quite wild.
A far as I can tell, never in the history of urban fighting has the percentage of innocent civilians killed been this low.
In contrast, over 50% of those killed in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland by the British Army were uninvolved civilians.
Western troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have never achieved anything close to this record.
The mainstream media emphasizes the uninvolved, as they should. But they do not contextualize their deaths with these facts that the IDF is far exceeding what is considered acceptable by any other army in history, especially when it often operates in an extremely challenging environment when there stone throwers and firebombs coming from attackers on all sides.
If any other army went under the same microscope that the IDF does, they would look horrible by comparison.
For example, the New York Times reported in 2021 about an attack by US forces five years earlier that no one knew about:
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
Do you remember reading about this incident, or the dozens of others that were uncovered in that story using Pentagon records? No, the story disappeared from the news media radar in no time….
Israel’s critics do not want you to know this context when they accuse Israel of war crimes. They do not want you to see how Israel compares to other armies. They never make 3D models of US bombing of wedding parties.…
Let’s go over Adin Haykin’s careful compilation of the data one more time. Eighty Palestinians have been killed since January 1, 2023. Of those 80, all but 6 were either members of terror groups – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and Lions’ Den – or were actively taking part in an attack on Israelis. That is, 92.5% of those killed were either members of known terror groups or were actively trying to kill Israelis. Of the six who were neither, some may have been killed by fellow Palestinians, who are known to fire wildly out of excitement or fear.
Not a single Western media outlet — save for the Internet website Elder of Ziyon — has made public these figures on the affiliations of the Palestinians who were killed. But even if they had revealed that at least 92.5% of those killed were terrorists, or were attacking Israelis, that figure cannot be rightly comprehended unless we have the context. That context is the percentage of innocent civilians killed in other conflicts. Are they above or below 92.5%, and by how much? We know that in Northern Ireland, in Operation Banner, more than 50% of those killed by the British Army were uninvolved civilians. 70,000 civilians were killed during the war in Afghanistan, out of total deaths of 240,000. That is, about 30% of those killed were civilians. In Iraq, estimates of the total number of those killed by American and other Western forces vary, but there is more certainty about the number of civilian deaths – approximately 200,000. Using the figures published by the British journal The Lancet, there were about 600,000 total Iraqi deaths. This means that one out of every three killed in that war was a civilian. In Vietnam, as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides died, as did 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. In other words, 60% of those killed – on both sides — were civilians. We could continue toting up figures for other wars, but the point has been made. No army, anywhere, including the American and British armies, has kept civilian deaths as low a percentage of total deaths as has the IDF. And yet this is never mentioned in any of the obsessive media coverage about Israel’s putative misdeeds, just as there is often no mention of the terror affiliations of those simply identified as “young men” who were killed by those criminal Israelis.
Deodata says
Hardly surprising when they are incapable of anything else because they have not been taught any different.
Deodata says
Sorry didn’t think this had posted
Deodata says
Hardly surprising as they know nothing different, that’s all they have been taught. Hence, the non-existent infrastructure in Palestine, unless Israel did it.
exsgtbrown says
it seems like the Palestinian immigration plan to keep non Muslims out is working, just don’t see too many people trying to sneak in…