Hamas's current tally of the killed is around 26,000. Israel's current tally of combatants killed is around 9,000. Neither total is reliable, and both sides have reasons for exaggerating the totals on their sides, but since both totals are probably exaggerated, we can assume that the percentages between the two are roughly correct.
That means a few things:
1. As barbaric as it is to speak in these statistics, let's register that Israel kills less than two civilians for every 1 combatant. That is an unprecedentedly low total, even in spaces much larger than Gaza.
2. Supposing that Hamas is counting with some integrity, what does Hamas count as killing? Are people who die of bad sanitation killed by Israel? Are patients already terminally ill killed by Israel if they die a few weeks sooner because they don't have sufficient medical care? Are Palestinians accidentally killed by Hamas soldiers killed by Israel? You'd think these are academic questions, but when the totals are so murky, everybody is left to speculate how they came up with the totals they did.
3. Supposing the Israeli army is reporting correctly that 9,000 Hamas combatants were killed, who then is considered a combatant? An army takes all kinds. An army of 30,000 soldiers takes just as many people to run weapons to them, to convey messages, to manage the payroll, or to do simple things like putting out fires (assuming Hamas wants them put out...). Are these people combatants, or is it just the people who fire the weapons.
Ultimately, we have no idea what's going on in Gaza, and that old phrase, 'the fog of war' means that nobody knows what's really going on, even the people fighting it. There's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle that goes through every aspect of war. The full truth is never meant to be known by human perception. Whatever the objective truth, we will never know it except in outline. What goes on in war is entirely in the perception of the mind's eye: everyone brings their own beliefs to war, and everybody affects how a war is conducted through the decisions they make based upon their beliefs.
Machiavelli wrote much about how a leader must be virtuous in his conduct of state affairs, but obviously Machiavelli did not mean 'virtuous' as we understand 'virtue.' A closer English translation might be 'virtuosity.' Statecraft requires an awareness of a thousand different challenges at the same time: all the ways war threatens to break out, all the ways war alters the mind's perception, all the ways diplomacy can work to your advantage, all the ways force must be threatened, all the ways you have to understand your competitors' threats, all the ways your competitors' can be exploited: both in their excessive desire for peace and their excessive desire for war.
What's required is a virtuoso's dexterity to stay afloat amid thousands of challenges, surviving only by instinct because there are so many challenges for which one can never know until it's too late to prevent their explosion. Netanyahu has obviously proven that dexterity in peacetime, but while he's invaded Gaza in the past, he's never truly faced a war until now: no Israeli Prime Minister truly has since Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin 50 years ago. The challenges of peacetime are very different, and in putting your own political survival above your state's, you may have caused your state to spill over into war.
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