06 August 2006
Israel & Lebanon, by the numbers
I've been generally keeping up with the appalling situation in Lebanon, with Israel using the flimsy excuse of two captured soldiers to invade another country and kill hundreds of civilians. How Israel thinks this will in any way make them safer is beyond me. What's happening instead is a unification of the Arab world behind a group that was on its way to being marginalized both by other countries and its own countrymen. Why, even in our own Iraq v2.0, there have been widespread demonstrations denouncing both Israel and America. I'm waiting for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to tell us that this is all part of the plan.
But apart from any other analysis at the moment, I'm struck by the casualty numbers on both sides, and how they show the incredibly wanton and irresponsible nature of Israel's actions.
As of today, 93 Israelis and 591 Lebanese have been killed in this violence (source: AP). But just take a look at how the numbers break down:
- Total Israeli deaths: 93
- Israeli military deaths: 57 (61% of total)
- Israeli civilian deaths: 36 (39% of total)
- Total Lebanese deaths: 591
- Lebanese Hezbollah deaths: 53 (9% of total)
- Lebanese military deaths: 29 (5% of total)
- Lebanese civilian deaths: 509 (86% of total)
Hezbollah, this supposedly evil group, is in fact doing a much more efficient job of killing only combatants: 61% of their killings have been Israeli troops, compared to Israel's paltry 9% number of Hezbollah members killed.
Another way to put it: Israel has killed 14 times as many civilians in this conflict as has Hezbollah.
And perhaps most damning of all, from an Israeli perspective, is that as of today (and this may well change), more Israeli soldiers have been killed than have Hezbollah militants. If that isn't an omen for this ill-considered invasion, I don't know what is. They've been at this for three weeks now, and it's already a quagmire.
A likely rebuttal for what I've been laying out is that Hezbollah has a history of violence, so to isolate these casualty numbers is misleading. It's true that Hezbollah's military wing has an alleged (though mostly unproven) history of violence, but all the killings that Hezbollah has been accused of over the years is actually a lower number than the number of Lebanese civilians already killed by Israel in this current conflict. Which makes me think of the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians our military has killed in supposed revenge for just under 3,000 American deaths at the hands of a group of Saudis.
With numbers like this, it's little wonder that Hezbollah and its counterparts throughout the Middle East exist.
