Numbers provided during war are never accurate, but let us work with the numbers we have. On February 29, the Gaza authorities reported a total of 30,035 Gazans dead. On the very same day, the Israel Defense Forces tallied the number of killed Hamas militants in Gaza at “over 13,000.” (Multiple analyses – e.g. here, here, and here – make the numbers released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry extremely hard to believe, but we’ll treat them as accurate anyway; and if, for argument’s sake, we believe Hamas, it behooves us to believe Israel too.)
Now thirteen thousand militants out of 30,000 total dead spells a combatant-to-civilian ratio of 13:17. During war people do not stop dying of non-war-related reasons, however. The CIA World Factbook assesses 3/1000 deaths yearly in the Gaza Strip. This translates to about 2,500 non-war-related deaths between October 7 and February 29 (given a population of 2.1 million). Since Hamas militants make up about 1.5% of the Gazan population, virtually all these 2,500 deaths are civilians. Hence the war-related combatant-to-civilian ratio drops to 13:14.5. Of course, not all civilians who died of war-related reasons died because of Israel: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 12,000 rockets during this war, roughly 12% of which fell within the Gaza Strip. That’s 1,440 rockets falling indiscriminately on civilians. Hamas also opened fire on civilians who tried to follow IDF instructions and evacuate the fighting zones so as to stop serving as Hamas’ human shields. And so on. We do not know how many civilians died in these ways, but it is reasonable to conclude that the combatant-civilian death ratio stands at about 13:14, which is less than 1:1.1.
And now the crucial question: What should we make of this figure? It can only be evaluated meaningfully by comparison to historical references. The combatant-to-civilian ratio of wartime casualties varies widely according to the character of the war theater. A wide comparative historical analysis suggests a (conservative) ratio of 1:1 on average. Crucially, however, in urban warfare the ratios climb very sharply. The Washington DC-based Center for Civilians in Conflict reports that “In cities […] civilians account for 90 percent of the casualties during war.” Similarly, in its global survey of armed conflicts from 2011 to 2020, the NGO Action on Armed Violence found that “91% of those reported killed or injured by explosive weapons in populated areas were civilians.” Even when attacks were “explicitly coded as targeting armed actors” specifically, civilian casualties in populated areas still accounted for 69%. The (less than) 1:1.1 ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties of war in the inordinately densely populated Gaza Strip is astonishingly low in historical comparison. Not only is this conceptually incompatible with genocide – it is its very polar opposite.
Notice also that since the 1:1.1 ratio is inordinately low compared to the norm in urban warfare, then even if, hypothetically, the final true numbers turn out to be doubly worse, they would still be low in historical comparison and therefore incompatible even with a prima facie suspicion of genocide.