Appreciate the response, going through it section by section
IDF casualties (1-4, 9)
"Clash Report" isn't the actual source, that's just the twitter aggregator. The numbers originally came from Ynet, an Israeli news outlet, but the original article was pulled by the military censors
Fortunately an article that
wasn't pulled by the censors came out at around the same time from
Haaretz, and their estimates fall within the same range. The whole article is informative but some key points:
An examination conducted by Haaretz with the hospitals where the wounded soldiers have been and are treated shows a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals. The hospitals' data shows that the number of wounded soldiers to be twice as high as the army's numbers.
For example, Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone reports treating 1,949 soldiers hurt in the war since October 7 (out of 3,117 injured people treated there during the war), whereas the army reports a total of 1,593 wounded soldiers.
The gaps between the army's data and the hospitals' data also comes into sharp relief in light of Health Ministry statistics maintained on its website. This website displays general casualty data – civilians and soldiers alike. According to the Health Ministry's data, 10,548 soldiers and civilians who were wounded in the war have been admitted between October 7 and December 10.
Another obscure figure, not reported to the public, has to do with wounded security establishment personnel who do not belong to the military, and were wounded in the course of wartime duty. These personnel includes special reconnaissance fighters and members of SWAT units, the police, Border Police, Shin Bet and emergency and rescue units like Magen David Adom.
It's undeniable that the IDF is hiding casualties, the only question is how many and whether they're also hiding deaths.
Palestinian civilian casualties & Israeli military doctrine (5-6) & General Brick
Initially I would have agreed with you that the priority was protecting soldiers at any cost but there's mounting evidence that there's more to it than that.
So the Yitzhak Brick quote came from
this article, specifically the summary at the very end. To be clear about the context, he was saying this over a year prior to the attacks and has since
gained notoriety and fame in Israel for the accuracy of his predictions.
Gen Brick's proposed strategy was basically the exact plan you'd follow if your top priority was the lives of your citizens and soldiers above all else:
1. Negotiate an immediate "everyone for everyone" exchange right from the start. You can kidnap or assassinate ex-detainees later but this removes a huge political issue from the Israeli perspective
2. Move in and establish fortifications surrounding cities and towns, evacuate the civilians out and put them under siege. No need to engage in urban combat and take casualties or to storm prepared positions, just wait for Hamas to run out of supplies.
Yet instead the IDF is pushing into urban combat and evidently taking some pretty severe losses, which doesn't exactly match with the "every soldier's life matters" justification even if they might occasionally use that rhetoric as a shield. So what's the real explanation?
Well, the first is that the doctrine being imposed here is the Dahiya Doctrine, which justifies intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and homes with the goal of provoking the civilians to rise up against the government. As
"Mass assassination factory" puts it:
Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).
The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.
Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
Of course anyone familiar with the history of strategic bombing would know that this "strategy" has literally never worked once in history. If anything blowing up civilian infrastructure pushes them to support their regime to get revenge on the attackers. But whether it works or not isn't the point; the IDF hasn't won a ground war in decades and the excuse they've come up with is that it's because they just cared too much about collateral damage. The alternative would be to admit that the IDF just isn't very good at fighting. But blowing up apartment buildings and sewage plants is easy and comprehensive military reform is hard.
The other goal here is to satisfy the bloodlust of the Israeli public through the constant production of atrocity footage regardless of military value. I know this sounds like some crazy idea but once again,
Haaretz has confirmed that the IDF is literally running a gore porn Telegram:
An October 11 post read: "Burning their mother ... You won't believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones. We'll upload it right away, get ready." Images of Palestinian captives and the bodies of terrorists were captioned "Exterminating the roaches ... exterminating the Hamas rats. ... Share this beauty." The following text accompanies a video of an Israeli soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat: "What a man!!!!! Lubricates bullets with lard. You won't get your virgins." And: "Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you'll die laughing."
The channel administrators didn't stop at images from Gaza. On October 11, hundreds of Israelis, including members of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team's violently racist fan club La Familia, rioted at the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, following a rumor that Hamas terrorists who had invaded Israel were being treated there. People roamed the hospital, cursing out and spitting on medical professionals. Within an hour, a video of the riot was uploaded to 72 Virgins with the title, "My brothers, the heroesssss, La Familia fans, love you!!!!!!! What heroes, came to screw the Arabs."
The IDF was utterly humiliated on October 7th and up to this point they haven't achieved any major objectives: they haven't rescued the hostages (except dead ones), they haven't stopped Hamas from firing rockets or ambushing their forces and the top leaders of Hamas in Gaza seem to be fine despite the intense bombing campaign and ground invasion. So instead they've had to resort to PR stunts to raise the public's confidence, ranging from blowing up the Gazan parliament building and surrounding Sinwar's house to faking "mass surrenders". The clear priority isn't to protect the lives of soldiers and hostages but to project an image of victory regardless of the reality on the ground. The IDF is willing to do basically anything to project that image, even if it requires extreme collateral damage or explicit war crimes.
7.) I am not convinced about your line of "covering up Putinesque losses", since I suspect that many Israeli's are likely aware of the significant uptick on casualties (mostly WIA thus far), and are willing to accept that as a price.
Maybe, but the IDF clearly doesn't agree if they're hiding casualties instead of announcing them openly as they come out. Also if they're hiding the number of wounded then it's hardly out of the question that they're also hiding the number of fatalities.
8.) What might be a bit more damning is how many of these IDF casualties which have occurred within Gaza are from "friendly fire" incidents.
Weirdly enough this is one area where I don't think IDF incompetence is the cause.
On the one hand, Hamas used IDF uniforms on Oct 7 to launch surprise attacks and it stands to reason that they'll do the same thing on the defensive. Add in a few Hebrew speaking commandos and you have a recipe for some serious
Operation Greif-style chaos in an already confusing urban combat environment. Additionally, Hamas seems to be replicating the tactics pioneered by Hezbollah in 2006: sudden, extremely close range urban ambushes where the IDF has to choose between hitting their own troops with their fire support or abandoning it entirely. As one Israeli commander put it,
“They emerged from tunnels, surrounding us, launching rocket-propelled grenades at us, and attempting to approach our armoured personnel carriers to set explosives,” said the battalion’s commander, Lt Col Tomer Greenberg, speaking to Israeli media after the engagement.
In that sort of situation it's very difficult to avoid friendly fire. There's also a less generous explanation:
the Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the IDF to use deadly force against their own captives to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips. While the directive has been
officially revoked there are growing indications that it has been applied more than once over the course of this war even if not by name. In the PR centric war being fought, it's hard to imagine an event more calamitous to the IDF's "image of victory" than a soldier sent to Gaza getting captured, and before any significant hostage rescue at that. In such a situation they'd rather obliterate the entire area with as much firepower as possible rather than allowing Hamas to drag fresh hostages into a tunnel to be put on camera.
