Why are Palestinians Killed by Israeli Defense Forces?

I watched 5 Broken Cameras and was surprised that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot live ammunition at Palestinians protesting the security wall. One Palestinian Protester in the documentary was shot dead. I wanted to know how often protestors throwing stones were killed by the IDF. 

B'tselem has statistics for each fatality caused by IDF in both West Bank and Gaza Strip since 9/2000, with a short description of the event that took place. Some examples of these descriptions are show below:

2                          Killed while on his way to buy candy at a store next to her school.

3                                   Killed when Border Police came to his house to arrest him.

4                                                                         Killed in his house.

5                Killed during the arrest of his brother, who Wanted by Israel. Was not armed.

6  Wanted by Israel. Killed during an exchange of gunfire with soldiers who came to arrest him.

I'd like to classify these descriptions to see reasons people are killed by IDF. Doing so can give a better picture of the current conflict and problems to overcome.

First some descriptive Statistics:

6711 Total Observations - All considered Palestinian Citizens

517 Female and 6194 Males

Mean age is 25.38 years, with 19-29 1st-3rd quartile. 

Above is an Age Pyramid of Palestinians killed. Men are predominately the victims and have a slightly right skewed distribution with age. Women have a much more uniform distribution. 

Overall the demographics most likely to be killed by IDF forces are male and in their mid twenties.

Below is a time series plot of all Palestinians Killed monthly by Gaza or West Bank Location. 

Palestinians Killed in IDF confrontations Map

However, 539 deaths had no description.Below are those without time series:

Missing data appears to occur with high number of deaths. 

To classify the data I used Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This method assumes each text description or post is an amalgamation of independent topics. Each topic has a probability distribution over the set of words in all posts. For each description the algorithm takes the words as given and produces a probability distribution over the set of topics. In effect, each post will result in a combination of "Topics" and will be a sum of different these Topics. The benefit of LDA is that multiple topics can be applied to each description. 

Topics are displayed below in decreasing Importance:

Topic 7	Topic 9	Topic 4	Topic 14	Topic 5	Topic 12	Topic 19	Topic 1	Topic 15	Topic 18
polic	famili	gunfir	idf	fire	arm	want	gaza	oper	car
station	hous	exchang	incurs	rocket	men	israel	near	defens	ride
build	bomb	soldier	camp	street	area	arrest	fenc	day	anoth
near	member	kissufim	refuge	next	move	person	citi	shield	also
next	armi	attempt	rafah	school	walk	undercov	perimet	repent	drive
injur	tunnel	guard	jenin	mortar	present	unit	cross	rain	travel
council	warn	apart	albureij	qassam	asabra	came	strip	summer	road
legisl	use	farmland	provis	earlier	demonstr	action	northern	idf	man
abu	nine	nablus	yavn	hit	east	hide	east	katif	taxi
offic	refus	organ	build	jabalya	observ	attempt	approach	aim	two
Topic 8	Topic 16	Topic 10	Topic 11	Topic 20	Topic 6	Topic 2	Topic 17	Topic 13	Topic 3
way	idf	home	soldier	hous	tri	friend	person	palestinian	wound
attack	neighborhood	neighborhood	shot	stand	near	work	armi	forc	two
settlement	incurs	isra	stone	roof	border	home	bomb	secur	brother
tri	azaytun	beit	demonstr	entranc	explos	meter	hama	three	die
checkpoint	yuni	struck	throw	neighbor	assassin "area"	militari	along	later
carri	khan	shell	open	found	plant	sit	wing	incid	father
post	azeitun	missil	head	bodi	group	yard	mosqu	headquart	hospit
infiltr	locat	civilian	jeep	went	tank	land	store	four	peopl
soldier	pass	kill	part	mother	charg	two	islam	villag	injur
follow	check	hanun	petrol	son	place	agricultur	jihad	five	sister

Two Topics I thought were worth mentioning were topics 11 and 19.

Topic 11 includes terms "Wanted", "Arrest" "Israel", "Person", "Undercover". This topic discusses Palestinians killed by IDF soldiers who were wanted by Israel. 

Above is the average proportion of each post attributed to this topic. One can see that it increased in 2006 in West Bank, while remaining relatively constant in Gaza. Because Israel has much more control of WB than Gaza Strip, it makes sense that Israel tries and arrest more people in WB and results in more deaths as a result.

Topic 11 discusses those who died during demonstrations; the very topic that brought my interset tot he topic. Its interesting that there has been a steady increase in West Bank while Gaza has seen a slight decrease in these. The Separation Barrier could be the reason for this divergence in protesting.


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