Everyone cares about collateral damage. The thorny part is how much to care... what is the calculus for how much is acceptable? Israel, rightly or wrongly, seems to be comfortable with around a 100:1 ratio.

100*x=40972-x

x≈406

Sure...

If that were the case, Israel wouldn't be intricately planting bombs in Hezbollah pagers.

Gaza seems like a pretty effin strong data point to consider here?

Not really? Part of what happened with Gaza and Hamas was that Netanyahu (and governments before his) spent a decade taking Hezbollah more seriously than Hamas (for good reason!). They are geared up for a precise and carefully-executed conflict with Hezbollah in ways they were not with Hamas.

At the same time: 100% reasonable to look at today and say "if you can pull off an attack like this, why the fuck are you still leveling apartment buildings in Gaza, after having permanently crippled Hamas months ago". Like, there's a moral dimension to this! But I don't think that dimension is "feel real bad for Hassan Nasrallah". Play stupid games, &c &c.

Gaza has fairly low civilian:combatant death ratios, lower than in most comparable urban wars. It's not hard to calculate them, the information is partly public (published by Hamas and IDF). However, many people chose to believe whatever they want to believe instead of going for the facts, I've seen some people come up with numbers ad hoc that are ten times than what Hamas reports, or they claim IDF has basically not killed any Hamas combatants at all.

This might be true but would be an easier argument to make persuasively if Israel had backed off after it more or less roflstomped the Al Qassam order of battle and virtually the entire Hamas command staff.

To clarify, I'm not trying to make any persuasive arguments about this. This is based on my own calculations, and there is generally not enough publicly available information to come to a fully informed verdict. For example, if you take all figures by Hamas, including some of the low number of deaths of their own fighters they reported, the ratio climbs up to 4:1 or more. I doubt anyone can say with certainty what the right figures are (well, perhaps some can provide good estimates, but not publicly).

I'd be interested in knowing how the IDF mandate to destroy Hamas is defined concretely in terms of KIA of enemy combatants but perhaps that hasn't even been decided yet.

I see no reason for Israel to "back off" before the hostages are returned and Hamas surrenders. Like all wars, it will probably end when one of the combatants surrenders. Hopefully this will happen soon.

But if you look at it in terms of civilian casualties, they've gone down massively since the start of the war. Israel "has" backed off in many senses of the word.

The problem is that Israel hasn't left Gaza, because despite your statement that the entire Hamas command staff is dead, it seems very likely that the minute Israel leaves, Hamas regains control of Gaza and starts building up strike capability again. So we're in a semi-holding pattern.

Now, there are good questions about why we're in this holding pattern. Many people (including me) think that it's because Netanyahu isn't trying to actually "win" the war, but prolong it, so this situation is good for him. Hence no steps to leave and set up a Hamas alternative, but also no move to more decisively finish the war either. A holding pattern suits Netanyahu just fine, at the expense first and foremost of the Gazan population, but also of the Israeli population (and also the Israeli economy, reputation, etc).

You could listen to testimony from those within the IDF:

"the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials" ... "We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits" ... "they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age" ... "It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...

When looking at this we have assess both the theoretical rules of combat and the actual implementation of those and compare them to an ally nation in other active combat zones like the US, UK, NATO forces in various places. No army is good at being ethical, foir want of a better word, but the Israelli government and the IDF seem to fail much more at holding to what most people would consider acceptable standards of behaviour.

I always try to base my judgments on the actual numbers rather than qualitative anecdotal evidence since the latter is relatively worthless (for statistical reasons alone). The problem is also that you can always find some people who support some narrative. Often these people don't know the numbers themselves.

A problem with numbers is that they are very prone to manipulation. Who gets to decide who is a combatant and who is a civilian? The IDF's computer algorithms like Lavender system categorise large numbers of people as enemy combatants without any evidence or visible reasoning. Who's numbers do you use? Do you include indirect deaths as a result of of IDF action? And on and on. Lies damn lies and statistics.

Regardless of number I think people can be judged on their intent, actions & policies they put in place and enforce. That's what we judge people on in courts of law.

I don't see any contradication here.

The pagers do give Israel a certain veneer of plausible deniability that they wouldn’t otherwise have if they had used more traditional bombing methods.

Literally everybody in the entire world believes Israel is responsible for this. An Mk-82 bomb dropped from a bomber would have more deniability. This was a joke about Israel's tactical signature back when James Mickens included it in a Usenix Security throwaway paragraph back in 2014. There is absolutely no deniability here, unless someone very powerful is deliberately trying to frame Israel (which is not what is happening).

And yet they set thousands of them off no matter who was nearby.

bombs that injured thousands of innocent bystanders, including women and children