The death rates in Iran are vastly higher than those in Gaza — and the obvious reason why
Per capita per unit time, suppose around 30,000 Iranians were massacred in just a couple of days. Let’s contrast that with Gazan civilian deaths, which may be of the same order of magnitude, but spread over two years. Let’s put Gazan deaths at 50,000 (a likely overestimate).
Iran: 167 deaths per million per day
(30,000 of 90 million killed in 2 days)
Gaza: 34 deaths per million per day
(50,000 of 2 million killed in 2 years)
Even this is not a fair comparison. Per-capita rates implicitly treat all 90 million Iranians as equally at risk as all 2 million Gazans. But that plainly isn’t so. In Gaza, a very large fraction of the population was genuinely at risk even while staying at home, precisely because Hamas embedded its military activity within civilian areas. In Iran, by contrast, the killings would be a straightforward massacre concentrated on demonstrators and their immediate surroundings; so long as one avoided the protests, one was almost certainly safe.
So using total population as the denominator already dilutes the intensity of what a 30,000-dead-in-two-days Iran scenario would represent. Adjusting for who was actually exposed would only widen the gap further — astronomically so.
It also isn’t a fair comparison for another reason: the notion of a “civilian” in Gaza is inherently fuzzy. There are large numbers of Hamas supporters among the civilian population — many aiding, abetting, or directly participating in Hamas’ war effort — and their deaths would nevertheless be labeled “civilian.” In Iran, by contrast, every last person killed was a civilian.
And even this understates Iran’s dead. Authoritarian regimes systematically suppress reporting, intimidate families, and conceal bodies. The true toll in Iran would almost certainly be higher than what could ever be reliably counted, whereas Gaza’s deaths are tracked by Hamas itself, who wants to exaggerate, not underreport, the number.
The main moral is this:
If Israel had truly been “genociding” Gazans for two years, as has been claimed since 10/7 itself, the number of deaths per million per day would be orders of magnitude higher. And Israel is more — not less — technologically and militarily capable than the IRGC at doing so.
The numbers are vastly different because the situations are not comparable in the first place. In Iran it was a straight-out massacre, whereas in Gaza the deaths were inadvertent casualties resulting from Hamas fighting from civilian centers.