Israel’s air war in Gaza has now killed more than 100 people. Around the world, there’s concern and anger. These concerns are appropriate—war is horrible, and any number of deaths should trouble us. But given that this war is happening, let’s focus on the narrower question of how to minimize civilian deaths, now and in future conflicts. How bad is this war compared to others? Are Israel’s attacks indiscriminate?

First, it’s important not to get consumed by whether you love or hate Israel. There will be other wars in other places. We need to build rules that apply everywhere. Second, we don’t need to debate the conduct of Hamas. Hamas rejects the whole idea that it’s wrong to target civilians. So behaving better than Hamas isn’t a standard worth talking about. Let’s focus instead on what Israel is doing.

1. The casualty rate. Total deaths in Gaza now exceed 100. Every account except Israel’s says most are civilians. That’s a bad ratio, but it’s skewed by the low number of Hamas military deaths, which can be traced to two factors: Most Hamas officers are lying low (literally—many are underground), and Israel has mostly targeted assets such as rocket launchers, not people. The better measure of Israel’s moral performance, then, is the number of civilian deaths. The latest tallies range from 58to 75, though the numbers will be higher by the time you read this.

How does that compare to other conflicts? Wars differ in nature (ground vs. air, for example), pace, and duration. So let’s look at air wars and compare the civilian death rates per strike. So far in Gaza, Israel has hit approximately 1,100 sites. Using the high-end casualty count, that’s an average of one civilian death for every 14 to 15 sites struck. In the 1999 Kosovo air war, Human Rights Watch found that NATO had killed approximately 500 civilians in attacks on more than 900 targets. That’s more than one death for every two targets hit. In the invasion of Iraq, HRW cited a low-end estimate of about 3,500 civilian deaths but attributed most of these to ground combat. There seems to be no separate count for the bombing campaign. In Libya, according to the U.N. Human Rights Council, NATO killed only 72 civilians in 3,327 strike sorties. That’s three times better than Israel’s performance. Because of population density, you’re less likely to hit civilians in Libya than in Gaza. But in areview of the Libya campaign, HRW also credited “the care NATO took in minimizing civilian harm.”

2. Israel’s practices. On the whole, the worst incidents in Gaza have resulted from strikes on houses. In traditional rules of war, houses are off limits. Israel’sstated rationale for hitting houses in Gaza is that “Hamas was running the operations of their units out of these homes. Some had weapons storage caches in them.” But residents have already asserted that in some cases there was no such basis. Israel hasn’t clarified whether it thinks these houses were valid targets or whether it hit them by accident.