The Numbers Prove The Lies

David Rosenberg has a question or two about the casualties of Gaza last year. He has written:

I just noticed for the first time the number of women casualties in Cast Lead. They range from 49 (IDF estimate) to 116 (Pal Center for Human Rights), a figure that is well under 10% of the total.

Does Goldstone explain how, if the IDF was deliberately targeting civilians, it managed to kill so few females?

I'm sure fewer were out on the street during the fighting but if Israel was bombing homes etc., the ratio would come much closer to 50%. If Israel was trying to kill civilians, it seems unlikely that so few women would have been killed. On the other hand, there are few, if any, female fighters on the Hamas side. admittedly this is speculation, but it calls seriously into question [the claims that (1) Israel deliberately killed civilians [and] 2) the casualty levels for civilians is exaggerated because such a high percentage is male [spelling corrected]

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In a reaction Emet MiTziyon noted:

Looking at the totals of Jews and Arabs killed in the terrorism and counterterrorism of the "intifada" years, females are a much higher proportion of the Jewish dead than of the Arab dead.

And last March Elder of Ziyon noted

let's look at the numbers, according to PCHR.

PCHR says that 280 of the victims were children and 121 were women. If we assume that none of the 15-17-year old "children" were in fact "fighters," which is clearly not true, and if we assume that half of Gazans are under 18 (the median age is 17.2) and that half of Gazans are male and half female, and if we further assume that there were 20,000 fighters, then according to PCHR's own figures:

"Combatants" and Hamas police were 35 times more likely to be killed than civilians.
Adult males were 8.5 times more likely to be killed than adult women.
Adult males were 7 times more likely to be killed than children under 18.

When the PCHR lists the dead's names next week, we can look at how many of the "children" were in fact males between 15-17.

Given that the terrorists were completely integrated into the civilian population, without uniforms, this is hardly evidence of "indiscriminate" force. On the contrary, it proves great care on the part of the IDF to target terrorists...

...[It is also interesting that between the end of the war and now, the PCHR death figures went up from 1285 to 1434, but the number of women went up by only 10 and the number of children stayed exactly the same. It is an amazing statistical feat that 139 of the 149 newly-discovered dead were adult males.]

CAMERA also paid attention to this:

In a study in late March last year, CAMERA broke down PCHR's numbers according to gender and age, and found:

• Out of 1285 fatalities, at least 950 were males aged 15 or higher. While males over age 15 make up approximately 25 percent of the Gaza population, they made up over 74 percent of the fatalities.

• Where the data is broken down by age, it is clear most fatalities were males between ages 15 and 40. Is it a coincidence that this corresponds with the age range of most combatants?