The amount “civilians” in your calculations is tricky. The first time it appears it refers to dead civilians, the second time it appears to the overall civilian population (hence the 1/2 using the rule of thumb that half of Gazans are under 18).
I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.
I thought originally that you were suggesting a simple syntactic manipulation of the fraction but you’re not. I don’t understand why the equation you propose is reasonable.
We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.
If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.
That fails to take into account any effort by the idf to minimize child casualties, which is absolutely happening. It assumes an equal amount of adult and children civilian deaths when there is no marker whatsoever that shows that to be the case, other than the overall ratio of children to adults in Gaza. You have made a huge leap in your logic.
That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.
Like @[email protected] said above, it’s 2:1 adults to children, not combatants to non-combattants.
If we assume that (1) the civilian population is 50% children and (2) none of the combatants are children then:
This is where my 2:1 civilians to combatants number comes from.
The fact that among the dead, the ratio of civilians to combatants equals the ratio of adults to children is a coincidence.
The amount “civilians” in your calculations is tricky. The first time it appears it refers to dead civilians, the second time it appears to the overall civilian population (hence the 1/2 using the rule of thumb that half of Gazans are under 18).
I.e you can’t say
#deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #deadKids/#allCivilians
Because #deadCivilians << #allCivilians
That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.
If I were to use your notation, I would write:
I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.
I thought originally that you were suggesting a simple syntactic manipulation of the fraction but you’re not. I don’t understand why the equation you propose is reasonable.
Let me try to explain it another way.
We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.
If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.
That fails to take into account any effort by the idf to minimize child casualties, which is absolutely happening. It assumes an equal amount of adult and children civilian deaths when there is no marker whatsoever that shows that to be the case, other than the overall ratio of children to adults in Gaza. You have made a huge leap in your logic.
That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.