Quote from a post on Facebook by a person I know:
My education on the history of Israel comes from many sources... but I also recognize that many of those sources carry subtle biases.
I will try to seek more information.
That said, my base argument underlying the original post is that the Israeli army is inflicting unnecessary destruction on a vulnerable population.
Yes, Hamas must be destroyed... but must it come at the cost of many thousands of innocent lives? And for those who survive, mist they come back to neighborhoods that have been totally destroyed?
Many people agree that Hamas must be destroyed but complain about what Israel does. None of these people seem to be military experts. As I understand almost every house our soldiers enter has a weapon cache and many have opening to the tunnels. The tunnels that are longer than the London underground.
But I'd like to remind you what the US had to do in Germany and Japan in WWII to get them surrender. What did the US have to do in Mosul, in Iraq?
As for the innocent lives: Basically the only source you have for the number of dead in Gaza is Hamas. That's what is being reported by the UN and every media outlet including the BBC and NYT.
No one knows the real numbers, but it is clear that they over-report.
We don't know how many of the dead were killed by their own fire.
For example, do they still include the "500 dead kill by Israeli bombing on the Al Ahil hospital" - where it turned out the actual death count was less than 30 and the rocket was fired by the Palestinians, so they killed their own people.
We know that they include the combatants in the number of "innocent people" in order to further inflate the numbers.
Which brings me to the civilian/combatant death ratio: The UN reports that in general in the conflicts around the world this ratio is 9:1. It is horrible that so many innocent lives are lost.
In Kosovo in 1999 the NATO had a 4:1 civilian to combatant ration.
In the war in Iraq the US had 2:1.
If we take the total death-toll reported by Hamas and death toll of Palestinian combatants reported by Israel then this ration in the current conflict is 1.5:1.
The lowest in all the conflicts, especially if we take in account that this is basically just urban warfare where Hamas and the other Palestinian combatants are hiding behind the civil population.
Every innocent live matters, but it seem the media (both the traditional and the social media) present this as if Israel was doing something especially evil while the numbers on the ground show the opposite.