Most Palestinians killed in the second intifada were not combatants

Evidence

Targeted assassinations, effectively extrajudicial executions, while aimed rhetorically at all Palestinians, seek in their immediate destructiveness officially and officiously to kill the individual targeted. They do not look to obliterate the ethnoracially identified group, no matter whether or not many Israelis desire Palestinians to disappear completely. And yet, in seven years of the Al Aqsa or second intifada, more than four times as many Palestinians as Israeli Jews have been killed, 60 to 80 percent of whom were not involved in armed actions against Israel or Israelis and almost 25 percent of whom are children (nearly ten times as many Palestinian as Israeli children have been killed since September 2000). The cycle of violent death, the performative aspects of mourning, resentment, bitterness, and the resolution of revenge, serve only to reinforce already hardened responses, on all sides. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 642

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘60 to 80 percent civilians’ figure is a wide range — worth tracing its source and how ‘involved in armed actions’ was defined.