This is one of the key charts of the war. It shows that adult male deaths in Gaza are 3.3x higher than adult female deaths, with older teenage males similarly disproportionate at 2.8x higher. Women and children were killed at rates far below their share of the population, which definitively contradicts claims of indiscriminate bombing or deliberate targeting of women and children. If such targeting were occurring, civilian deaths would at minimum resemble the population’s age and gender structure. Instead, the chart shows a large excess of adult male deaths, roughly 23,000 excess adult men, and when excess male teens, many of whom are documented combatants, are included, the total closely corroborates the IDF’s claim that about 25,000 combatants were killed, a figure publicly affirmed by the United States. Rather than contend with this evidence, critics have come up with a new talking point: men always die more than women in wars, so the pattern proves nothing. Meaning that they claim these excess male deaths are civilians not combatants, all said without evidence. With that logic in place it makes it impossible to ever identify large-scale combatant deaths, because any excess male mortality is dismissed by definition as “what happens in war.” Comparisons to other conflicts are also misplaced. Gaza is structurally different on many levels from the wars commonly cited as evidence, such as Yemen, Syria, Congo, or Tigray. For example, Gaza had repeated mass evacuations and was the only war in history where one side facilitated massive quantities of food and humanitarian aid throughout active combat. In another post I will show statistics that contradict this claim as well. Crucially, no affirmative evidence is presented that adult male civilians in Gaza died at much higher rates than women; that claim is simply assumed by analogy to other, dissimilar wars. The effect of this reasoning is to ensure that excess male deaths can never be attributed to combatants, while simultaneously sidelining specific, evidence-backed claims about Hamas losses. The irony is also striking; many of the same voices accusing Israel of targeting women and children must also argue that Gaza followed the standard wartime pattern of excess male deaths. Both cannot be true. Chart credited to @GabrielEpsteinX