Talk:Civilian casualty ratio/Archive 2

Israeli–Palestinian conflict - Line lacks credible source
I am proposing that this line be at least temporarily suspended from the sub article pending a better source: "Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah report 1,518 Palestinian children killed from the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013."

The current source it uses and all sources I have found seem to be citing each other rather than any official page. I have even found earlier sources that slightly contradicts the others expressing that it was "nearly" 1518, whereas the later sources omit the word "nearly". http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2BcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2Bi1s7urQL2uAuHuttnZuSyFKGTWKFIQp7UY%2Bb%2BmFVSOz4gCLpS5AVxVDg5yTfYJWl%2B59/seLzg8/tsbAhwSnazoCgQ7vdxQf%2BJnynQOZytM4ga7s%3D

I am unable to find any official report after extensive searching. The logical place would be the official Ministry of Information website: http://www.minfo.ps/English/index.php In spite of an apparently updated news feed, I am unable to find any report nor any indication of such a report being issued. Considering the lack of any official record, I'd suggest removing the line until the report can be sourced from an official authority.

Additionally that such a statistic has not been reported by any leading official newspaper or reporting agency seems to indicate that there is a lack of foundation for it. One should therefore explore the possibility that it is a fabrication that got picked up along the way by various agenda based media outlets. Yarron (talk) 17:08, 15 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The article on the Ministry of Information's site is here (in Arabic).
 * You need to read WP:NOTADVOCATE and comply with it. Also, be aware that articles in the WP:ARBPIA topic area are covered by WP:1RR.
 * Statistics from B'Tselem for the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel over the same period for interest
 * 29 September 2000 - 26 December 2008 = 955 (source)
 * 27 December 2008 - 18 January 2009 = 345 (source)
 * Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces in the Occupied Territories, after operation Cast Lead (up to April 2013) = 77 (source)
 *  Sean.hoyland  - talk 18:08, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the link which solves the issue. I would suggest this link be included as an official source. I find your accusation of my non compliance with WP:NOTADVOCATE unjustified. If you feel I am not in compliance please point out the specific points rather than applying a broad accusation. The B'tselem reports presented as a response to my concern seem to indicate your own non-compliance with WP:NOTADVOCATE under Soap-boxing. These reports are not relevant to the specific concern. Otherwise thank you for the official link. For my part this specific matter is closed. Respectfully. Yarron (talk) 18:43, 15 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Also, using the term "occupying" is not non-neutral. See WP:NPOV for what the word neutral means in Wikipedia.  Sean.hoyland  - talk 18:24, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

The term "Occupying" is not in dispute. Rather the term "Israel Occupying Forces". The objective term for Israels military is the "Israel Defense Force". Essentially there is no objective entity known as the "Israel occupation forces". The logic of applying this term would be the equivalent of calling the 'British Armed Forces', instead the 'British Occupation Forces' as a result of the South Sandwich Islands sovereignty dispute. To do so would be applying a non-objective term in place of the actual objective term. As such the only definitive term within an encyclopedic entry should be the 'Israel Defense Force' which is the universal term. To nutshell the concept: Arguendo - Even if Israel are considered occupiers, this does not entitle her military's name to be changed ; particularly so for an encyclopedia entry. Yarron (talk) 11:31, 16 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Arguments like this have little value here. It isn't how decisions are made in Wikipedia. There's no such thing as objectivity or "definitive" language or a "universal term" in this context, nor is there entitlement. There is the information published by reliable sources, the sampling of that information by editors and the decision procedures described by policies and guidelines. What comes out of that process can and will on occasion produce language and terminology that some editors may regard as non-neutral, non-objective and non-definitive. That's just how it is. It's simply a fact that many reliable sources refer to the Israeli military in the occupied territories as "occupying forces". It's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. In this instance the source is the State of Palestine itself, so it's hardly surprising that they would use that terminology (قوات الاحتلال) rather than the language of the State of Israel. You can attribute it to the Ministry itself if you prefer although I think there is really no need (but remember WP:1RR). Also, the term "Israel Occupying Forces" and related terms with the IOF acronym, capitalized as a proper name and used in place of IDF by a subset of sources, many of which are advocacy organizations, isn't in dispute because it wasn't used.  Sean.hoyland  - talk 12:33, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The article is dealing with civilian to combatant casualty ratios. The Ramalla Ministry of Information report however does not indicate how many of those minors were combatants. This report should therefore be considered irrelevant to this specific article since it does not offer any indication of the Civilian:Combatant ratio. Perhaps this report should instead be placed in a different article dealing with casualties rather than casualty ratios? At the very least to prevent ambiguity it should include a sentence stating "This report however did not indicate how many of the minors were combatants and non-combatants." However I would like to hear a reasoning for keeping the report at all for this specific article (since it does not elaborate on civilian:combatant ratios rather only casualties). Yarron (talk) 12:00, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Having further thought about my above proposal, I can consider that the report may have some bearing in the article as it is a casualty statistic. Though since the article is about civilian:combatant casualties it does require a follow up stating that the report does not mention how many were combatants. However doing so opens the door for other articles indicating the amount of minors that are combatants. I would like to therefore consider others thoughts before adding the line: "However the report does not indicate how many of them minors were combatants." Yarron (talk) 09:55, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Article is biased
I find the article problematic. Why is Alan Dershowitz' (a very well known pro-Israel advocate) opinions in the lead without any opposing views? What is worse why are colonel Kemp's highly controversial opinions in the lead without any of the numerous opposing views? There are copious mainstream organisations and sources that would heavily dispute Kemp's opinion - but it is just presented in the lead without any alternative opinion.

Also the 1:30 figure is not the only one for 2007. It should not appear without the reference to the alternative figures. For instance the head of the Israeli security services was reported by RS as saying the figure was more like 1:3 for the two year period 2006-2007. 

My suggestion is that the discussion of Israel is moved to the Israeli section where all the significant views published by RS can be explained without bias. For a start I would like to add something along the lines of:-

The head of the Shin Bet later reported to the Israeli Cabinet that of the 810 Palestinians killed in 2006 and 2007, 200 were civilians (a ratio of approximately 1 in 4). Haaretz assessed this to be an underestimation, using B'tselem's figures they calculated that 816 Palestinians had been killed in the two year period, 360 of whom were civilians. Dlv999 (talk) 19:16, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Also what is the justification for concentrating on only the civilian casualty ratio in Israel's campaign of extrajudicial killings and not on the casualty figures in the conflict as a whole? Concentrating only on extrajudicial killings falls outside the definition of civilian casualty ratio defined in the lead: "The measurement can apply either to casualties inflicted by a particular belligerent, or to casualties in the conflict as a whole." Note is is not said to apply only to one aspect of the killings by one belligerent in a conflict.Dlv999 (talk) 18:00, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Why are there no statistics mentioned of how many Israeli civilians are killed for every Israeli soldier? This seems to make the article lacking and break NPOV — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.29.253.97 (talk) 10:29, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Agree that the article is quite strongly biased in favour of the IDF. The article states that "the IDF has the lowest (civilian casualty) ratio in the world", citing an IDF source. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8245433.stm. Clearly the ratio is a matter of much dispute. Battleofalma (talk) 15:36, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Honestly? The whole article seems to have written with the aim of absolving Israel of killing a high number of civilians. If you look at the way it is structured,everything leads to that goal. So it's inherently biased and no amount of correction can change that. I propose that it should be rewritten completely by someone who has not axe to grind. I have an interest in civilian/soldiers casualty ratios in history and I'm begining to feel frustrated by this constant obsesion of pro-Israel editor of turning everything into a propaganda war. Is this too much to ask? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.49.191.149 (talk) 12:48, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Noted, but you don't provide specific examples of statements that are worded non-neutrally, nor of any WP:UNDUE weight given to sources or content that would support your concern. If you can do that, we can figure out whether the concern is warranted, and if so, what the appropriate action should be. Dovid (talk) 14:47, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Haha. Using all Israeli sources is totally balanced guys. I don't have a horse in this race either way but it sounded like the article was written by the IDF.

Balance and perspective
As a reader, I couldn't help but notice an odd division of coverage. World War II, whose civilian and combatant casualties included at least 60 million dead, is summarized in seven lines of text. The Israel/Palestinian conflict, which is a much, much smaller conflict by every measure, is given a bit more than ten times the coverage. Recentism? Undue weight? Both? Unician &nabla; 09:10, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

The article quotes many military sources, trusts them, and is working very hard to justify modern forms of warfare as precise and not as lethal for human beings as have been reported. It cites much evidence to argue that drones are getting more accurate. Again, all sources heavily biased toward military and security sources that have a vested, including financial interest, in seeing the weapons of contemporary war vindicated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.135.65.128 (talk) 20:15, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Wrong Subjects
The article focuses on the first conflicts listed as enemy civilian vs enemy combatants killed, while the sections on Israel focus on enemy civilians killed versus israeli civilians. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.89.247.214 (talk) 14:51, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

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Balanced focus
This article contains a great deal of reasonably well referenced material. However, in terms on contemporary armed conflicts, the focus of the article is overwhelmingly on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in terms that appear to be partisan, placing more focus on Israel as a belligerent than on Palestine.

The article badly requires balancing editing in the very long section dealing with Israel-Palestine, and also badly requires information drawn from the multitude of other recent and contemporary conflicts, such as Russia-Ukraine, Russia and other breakaway Former Soviet Republics and would-be independent states, Yemen, Myanmar, China, etc. (https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts). Yitz (talk) 21:00, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

External links modified
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Inaccurate calculations.
Many of the conflicts cited have inaccurate calculations attached.

Or, at least, calculations I can't replicate without making errors.

EG, quoting from the article: '' According to military historian and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, for every Serbian soldier killed by NATO in 1999 (the period in which Operation Allied Force took place), four civilians died, a civilian to combatant casualty ratio of 4:1. Oren cites this figure as evidence that "even the most moral army can make mistakes, especially in dense urban warfare".''

This implies that NATO is responsible - NATO were responsible for, according to HRW in the sidebar at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia, 528 civilian deaths. The Serbian MOD assessed 1008 deaths, in the same sidebar.

The only way I can reach anything like a 4:1 ratio is by including all Yugoslavian military deaths in the Kosovo war ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War ), which total 2092, and dividing that against all Kosovar Albanian civilians killed (including acts of ethnic cleansing) 8 676, giving a ratio of 4.15 civilians killed to 1 combatant killed.

This mistake is replicated in this quote:

''According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count, a United Kingdom-based organization, American and Coalition forces had killed at least 28,736 combatants as well as 13,807 civilians in the Iraq War, indicating a civilian to combatant casualty ratio inflicted by coalition forces of 1:2. However, overall, figures by the Iraq Body Count from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013 indicate that of 174,000 casualties only 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of 77%.''

According to this page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Civilian_deaths_by_perpetrator ) The Iraq Body Count attributed 12% of civilian casualties to the American and Coalition forces - meaning that out of 174 000 total casualties, removing 39 900 combatants, civilian casualties are 134 100, of which 12% - 16 092 - would be attributable to coalition forces.

These statistics in specific have recently been quoted on the news, so as to imply that a 2:1 civilian-combatant ratio is in some way 'low'. In actual fact both of these conflicts, by my calculations on the available data, show a 1:2 civilian-combatant ratio in the Kosovo war in the deaths caused by NATO, and assuming all combatants were killed by coalition forces, a 1:2.5 civilian-combatant ratio in the Iraq war in the deaths caused by the coalition.

I am not sure how to best approach rewriting this article to more properly reflect the data, or whether or not the rest of the article has similar mistakes - those are the only ones I was able to spot due to knowing what to look for. 78.150.150.155 (talk) 00:58, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Conflict and not war?
Why is it labeled "Israel-Palestine conflict" and not war? Literally, every news news organization refers to it as a war. Also proclaimed by their president. It's not a conflict it's a war. 47.132.127.113 (talk) 04:21, 25 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi,
 * when you say "their president" do you mean the Israeli president or the Palestinian president?
 * regardless, the Conflict refers to the many years of conflict that include several wars, operations and ongoing tensions between the populations. 212.117.136.137 (talk) 13:45, 12 February 2024 (UTC)