Two weeks into the latest conflict in the Middle East, the casualty figures make interesting reading. US-sponsored Israel has sent 422 Lebanese to an early grave while Hezbollah (brought to you by Iran and Syria) has killed 42 people.
In other words, the Jewish state, armed and backed by the world’s richest country, has maintained a ten-to-one kill ratio in the first fortnight of fighting. This disparity in human suffering is the single defining characteristic of this war and must be acknowledged in any honest commentary on the conflict.
But the bald figures tell only half the story. Of the 42 people killed by Hezbollah, 24 (57%) were soldiers and 18 (43%) civilians. This relatively low per centage of civilian casualties seems strange. The Shia militia makes no distinction between an Israeli soldier and an Israeli child - they are both Zionist occupiers of Muslim land. The Party of God has demonstrated no qualms about taking innocent life.
So, the fact that more than half the Israeli dead were soldiers is probably a result of military rather than moral considerations. Obviously, Hezbollah’s guerrilla war against the IDF in southern Lebanon has been more effective than the hundreds of Kaytushas it has fired on northern Israel.
What then of the IDF’s pattern of killing? Well, unlike Hezbollah, Israel’s military proudly boasts that it is the most moral army in the world, that no other fighting force on the planet goes to such lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Logically then, you would expect the Israeli army to have killed significantly fewer civilians proportionally than Hezbollah.
Not so. Of the 422 people killed by the most moral army in the world, 27 were Hezbollah, 20 were Lebanese soldiers and 375 - a whopping 88% - were civilians. All these numbers can get a bit confusing so let me distil them all into one sentence: Israel has killed more than twice as many civilians as a per centagethan Hezbollah.
Remind me again who the good guys are.