Binyamin Netanyahu last month claimed before the US Congress that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are, in effect, winning the urban warfare Olympics. “Despite all the lies you’ve heard,” the Israeli Prime MInister said, “the war in Gaza has one of the lowest ratios of combatants to non-combatant casualties in the history of urban warfare.”[1]
Netanyahu appeared to be echoing the claims of John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, a man who frequently portrays the IDF performance in Gaza as reaching historic heights of cleanliness. As Netanyahu said: “Israel, [Spencer] said, has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history and beyond what international law requires.”
At least two good articles have rebutted Spencer’s claims about IDF precautions so there is no need to add to that pile on here. What is of merit, instead, is to expose the weakness of Spencer’s quantitative claim of a historically low non-combatant-to-combatant casualty ratio for the IDF in Gaza.
A Dangerous Canard
Spencer regularly spreads the lie that civilians suffer 80-90 % of the casualties in modern conflict. AOAV has shown that civilians constitute roughly 90% of all casualties when explosive weapons are used in densely populated areas, that is, when specific weapons are use in a specific environment.
This is a very different from saying that civilians are 90% of the victims regardless of weapons and environment.
The 80 – 90% of all casualties being civilians is, then, a well-known myth for which we even have an origin story which Adam Roberts laid out clearly in an article that contains the prescient remark.
“The proposition,” Roberts wrote, “intended to alert the world to the importance of protecting civilians, has probably had the unintended effect of reinforcing cynicism about efforts to limit the human costs of war.”
Spencer and Netanyahu deploy the 80-90% canard in precisely this cynical fashion. They say that modern militaries typically kill far more civilians than combatants, so we should congratulate the IDF for not sinking all the way down to this abysmal level. In fact, continues the argument, urban environments are worse than non-urban ones so even a 9 to 1 civilian-combatant ratio in Gaza’s urban environment might be viewed favourably, although it would not rise to the lofty standards of the IDF.
What is the reality of civilian-combatant ratios in modern wars generally and in urban wars in particular?
Fortunately, we have a massive dataset that is well suited to address this question, although it does have its limitations. The Cities and Armed Conflict Events (CACE) of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) provides death counts disaggregated into civilians, unknowns and combatants for all conflicts in the world between 1989 and 2017. Crucially, CACE has a variety of markers that specify whether its events occurred within urban environments. The primary limitation of this dataset is that many deaths fall, inevitably, into the category of “unknown”.
The truth about civilian-combatant ratios
The bottom row of the above table shows that civilians comprise about half of the deaths in modern wars if we exclude the unknowns. If a high percentage of the 20.7% of deaths classified as “unknown” are civilians, then the percentage of civilians could rise to, perhaps, 55%.
But 80% is out of the question.
The top four rows of the table give the analogous figures for four variations on urban warfare that are described in detail in the CACE codebook but are largely self-explanatory. The most obvious point to take home from these four rows is that it is much harder to distinguish civilians from combatants in urban environments than it is to do so in non-urban ones. This ambiguity complicates the following discussion.
If we assume that ¾ of the unknowns are civilians, then civilians would account for roughly 60% to 70% of deaths in urban warfare. If, on the other hand, only ¼ of the unknowns are civilians then civilians would constitute roughly 40% to 55% of the deaths. Thus, the evidence leans gently toward higher civilian percentages for urban warfare than for warfare in general but a figure of 80% for civilians seems highly implausible.
The Gaza War
The Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) has just released the fifth in a series of detailed lists of people it says have been killed in Gaza, covering deaths occurring between October 7 and June 30.
41.2% of the deaths listed in the latest MoH list were males between the ages of 15 and 69. Few victims outside this demographic could be combatants. We must guess at the fraction of combatants among the 41.2%. But the age range of 15 to 69 is wide so I think that a generous estimate for the IDF would be that half of the 41.2% were civilians. If so, then roughly 80% of all MoH-recorded deaths would civilians. Of course, lower and higher percentages are possible.
Conclusions
So what can we take from this?
First, the percentage of civilians among the dead in the Gaza war is well above the average for modern warfare in general.
Second, it is at possible that the percentage of civilians among all those killed in the Gaza war is about average for urban warfare, but the evidence suggests that this percentage is probably a bit higher than average.
Third, we can categorically reject the strong Netanyahu-Spencer claim that, for urban combat, the IDF is achieving historically low ratios of non-combatants to combatants killed.
[1] It is safe to assume that Netanyahu meant to say “highest,” since his stated claim would have been nothing to boast about.
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