Yesterday the BBC’s Christian Fraser interviewed Natasha Hausdorff (Legal Director of UK Lawyers for Israel) about the ICJ decision of 26 January 2024. Natasha’s responses to Fraser’s predictably biased questions were a masterclass. She has the facts at her fingertips and delivers them magnificently, leaving Fraser looking more and more incompetent, more and more biased.
As Fraser becomes more and more flummoxed he thinks nothing of repeatedly interrupting his guest. He interrupts her 8 times in all. And despite Natasha’s statement that she is ‘independent’ and ‘does not represent the Israeli government’, Fraser (2:52) rudely refers to ‘your partner the United States‘.
While he qualifies Hamas’ casualty numbers with ‘according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry‘ his qualification proves a figleaf because he proceeds to regard that number as the truth. Natasha has to point out that the number (as well as probably exaggerated) includes Hamas terrorists and sympathisers as well as those killed by Hamas rockets that fall short.
At 6:03 Fraser makes a glaring error. He tries to argue that Israel’s estimate that ‘70% of Hamas’ fighting force remains intact‘ means that ‘a lot of the casualties are civilians‘ (Shortly before, he says ‘women and children‘). Utter rubbish. Assume 10,000 casualties. The ratio of civilian to combatant casualties depends on the size of Hamas ‘fighting force’, see the graph below. The proportion of non-combatants in the total varies from nearly 90% down to virtually zero, depending on the number of Hamas. The fact that 70% of Hamas terrorists remain at large implies NOTHING about the civilian:combatant casualty ratio. And anyway in asymmetric warfare it is common for the civilian:combatant ratio to be above 1. Israel achieves 2:1, thanks to the precautions that the IDF takes before any operation. 2:1 is unprecedentedly low in asymmetric warfare. (In my example below a 0.66 proportion (that is 2:1) implies a Hamas total of about 13,000).
Not only is Christian Fraser malicious and biased – he’s also thick.
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