They’re not in the war zone taking an unbiased sample.

They’re in a hospital receiving critical but patients after triage

Inherently, their statistical sample of war injuries is biased. It’s a textbook example of the survivorship statical bias!

This is all I’m trying to say: not that their observations are false or that children aren’t being shot, but that they’re not in a position to draw accurate conclusions about what goes on outside the walls of their hospitals based on information they receive inside its walls. They certainly can’t draw conclusions about the motivations of IDF soldiers from the information available to them.

This logic applies to both sides, of course, and to all similar scenarios.

A random example are the Russian claims of having destroyed ‘X’ instances of ‘Y’ weapons system when Ukraine got less than ‘X’ delivered. The reason is simple — they’re not lying — they just counted the decoys they also blew up!

It’s war. It’s messy. Information is hard to interpret.