The casualty data from Hamas

he Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

Basically, the reported daily numbers are remarkably consistent from day to day: in the real world you'd expect considerable variation. Also, you'd expect the women and the children casualties to correlate, depending on the amount of destruction of residential buildings on a particular day – but they don't. And there's an inexplicable negative correlation between the number of men killed and the number of women killed.

While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed….

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.