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Transparency in the face of accusations that the death toll is inflated. I'm interested to hear what comes of this
The list has people's full names of four sections (for those who don't know how it works in Arab naming systems): your first name, your father's name, his fathers name, and the family name (read more here). Married women keep their own full name and don't inherent their husband's, so people's wife's would have a different last name.
Arabic goes from right to left, so the names furthest to the left are the family name. The first two pages of the spreadsheet all have people from the same family.
And their ID card numbers, which can be indexed to the existing systems that The Israeli government controls.. and I imagine also that the US has access to.
So now to prove that Hamas is lying about the death toll, they just have to find one person on this list who is still alive and put them on television. Seems easy enough, considering that all the cell phones in Gaza strip are easily monitored.
Sorry I don't mean to imply they have to prove the Hamas is lying, it's just a great PR opportunity, so they won't pass it up if they have that capability
I was wondering what it is that the health ministry would have to do to be seen as credible. What would be good enough?
Nothing would be seen as good enough. We are in a war, and that includes information war, that means constantly attacking the credibility of your enemy, even if what they're saying is true.
Releasing IDs, and photos of each body, to create a somewhat morbid wiki death would probably go a long way to establishing credibility.
But again they would be attacked, because we are in the information war phase.
Getting third parties in there to certify the deaths would help, but the UNRWA is deliberately not doing that, because they don't want to be political.
So whatever the ultimate death toll will be, it'll be contested hotly for decades to come. All will be able to agree on is a lot of people died, but not exactly how many...
We are in a war
As much as I agree, I don't think the main factor now is the fog of war. Seems like it's the White House deliberately removing credibility from a governing entity, which didn't echo well at all, and diplomatically could be seen as giving the middle finger to Gazan civilians are already invisible in their suffering. Biden made them even more invisible. He didn't say that the numbers were inflated (as far as I recall), but that they cannot be trusted at all. This is very different from saying, "take these numbers with a grain of salt".
War is war. Even if the information is 100% accurate and true and undeniable, the war playbook says you deny it, say the enemy is lying, and undermine their credibility at every turn.
War is not about accuracy, it's not about fairness, it's not about law, it's about winning.
Deny, deny, deny, until you believe.
I agree with your overall point but take issue with referring to the hostilities in Palestine as a "war". We do not say that Nazi Germany was at war with Jewish People. We call it genocide. This is extermination of a civilian population.
Palestine does not have a standing army. Calling it a war normalizes the actions of Israel.
Nothing. Biden will do anything to aid and abet the bloodbath because it's in the US military and economic interests to do so. Palestine is approaching final solution levels of genocide but this time there won't be anyone coming to stop it.
It's accused of being inflated by two sources that have decisively proven to be definitively untrustworthy, the US and Israel
Edit: and obviously their allies and supports
Just a reminder, that every Gaza official represents Hamas.
Literally the first word in the article.
Hamas on Thursday released a list of almost 7,000 names of Gazans it said had been killed in Israeli strikes after the US president cast doubt on its toll figures
I think the implication of your comment is these are fictitious deaths, but clearly people are dying there
Because people won't trust them, they releasing the names and the ID card numbers, which the Israelis control (The ID card system) so that the names of the dead can be verified as actual real human beings.
Yes and who gives a fuck? Israel is turning every man, woman, and child in the strip into dust over a single attack they not only instigated but also ALLOWED to happen. I'm no longer playing this "but hamas" bullshit - you all never cared and just want to see innocents suffer.
Just a reminder, Hamas is the name of the government in Gaza. What you are (maybe) trying to say is, "The government of Gaza is one part of Hamas and the Qassam brigades are the other militant part, altogether they are called Hamas after the winning party".
Journalists have confirmed and shown a large number of these deaths. People are being buried in mass graves whether these numbers are from "Gaza officials that represent Hamas" or not.
When Israel says it wants to "eradicate Hamas", that would include the civil bodies that run the government and serve people, anything from the ministers to the government clerks. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel just thinks of doctors as Hamas actors too.
Yes, we should not blanket-trust numbers from an organization that has committed atrocities, but like @jet@[email protected] said:
I think the implication of your comment is these are fictitious deaths, but clearly people are dying there
When Israel says it wants to “eradicate Hamas”, that would include the civil bodies that run the government and serve people, anything from the ministers to the government clerks.
If Hamas wanted to distance themselves from the intentional targeting civilians, they have had every chance to do so. But their stated goal is not to "eradicate the government of Israel", it's to "eradicate all Jews living in Palestine". The goals of the Qassam Brigades explicitly call out using violence to do achieve that goal.
I don't think anyone is debating that Hamas' Qassam brigades suck. Rather it's whether or not Palestinian lives have value.
I don't think that was ever in question - Hamas have made it abundantly clear that they have no regard for human life, Israeli or Palestinian. That's why they're holding hostages and using innocent Gazans as human shields.
I mean whether or not they have value to Israel, which is the one now causing all their misery and collectively punishing them.
I think Israel does value Palestinian lives. Less than their own citizens, but not so much as to intentionally target them. They aren't indiscriminately bombing civilians - they're bombing building that have Hamas infrastructure inside, or that Hamas dug tunnels under. It's the same reason they won't allow fuel in as aid - Hamas' tunnel network need ventilation and there is a deliberate attempt to "starve" them out. This is not collective punishment. It's a siege. War is hell, and this is a war.
Israel announced they believe that Hamas has their headquarters underneath Shifa Hospital in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Correct or not, this is signalling that they intend to target that hospital. If they believe the hostages are being held there, I doubt they'll just drop bombs on it. They're more likely to throw bodies at it in an attempt to rescue the hostages. If they manage to do that while only killing a few hundred civilians out of the 40,000 taking shelter there, that would be an amazing achievement.
So many reports have shown that Israel is intentionally targeting civilians, medical staff, and journalists.
Are you referring to recent events? Or are you referring to the historical incidents where civilians have been killed?
Historically, Israel has court martialed soldiers who killed civilians. They are typically acquitted, or given a rather light punishment for murder. Which is horrible, but it's not an official policy to target them. The simplest proof of that is how rare the incidents are. If it were official policy, you'd hear about Palestinian civilians being killed almost every day. Paging through some historical news (Google news is actually decent for this if you use the "tools" to limit the date range), I see a lot of "X Palestinians killed today", along with a note that "they were killed exchanging fire with Israeli forces, and were confirmed members of Hamas/PIJ".
In terms of recent events, there have clearly been civilians killed in bombings - if Israel is intentionally targeting medical staff or journalists, you'd expect them to be over-represented by a large margin in the mortality statistics. It's really difficult to find any recent statistics, but the PCBS reported in 2014 that 0.22% of the population are doctors, and 0.34% are nurses. I can't find any reports on the number of medics, so we'll just infer that from the ratio in the US - 0.08% according to this. That means that we should expect 0.64% of civilian casualties to be medical personnel. I'm basing this on old data and might be missing some medical role (e.g. ambulance drivers) so let's put an order of magnitude error bars on what I'm writing: 0.3%-1.2%. That means given 7000 dead, assuming uniform distribution of civilian casualties we should expect to see between 21 and 84 medical personnel killed. The latest report I can find says the current total is 73. That's on the upper end of what we should expect to see, but the hospital blast probably contributed a lot to it.
Bottom line, there's for sure some problems and it's a tragedy, but there's no attempt to target medical staff more than anyone else. The fact that fewer people have died than bombs have been dropped already speaks volumes to the effort Israel has taken to minimize civilian casualties. Hopefully, once this war is over, Gaza will get the aid it needs to build an actual economy whose basis isn't building weapons to kill Israelis.
Let's take one example where Israel told Gazans to move south then bombed several areas in the south of Gaza. That's one of thousands of examples of Israel using proximity shielding or some other pathetic excuse to butcher civilians.
Civilians and journalists and medical staff are over represented. Especially the ones Israel shot point blank in the head.
Thanks for the details but they are diverging from the core issue. Maybe someone with more time could tackle them but I won't. I think your math isn't based on much, just numbers slammed together. Let's focus instead on every single time Israel lied to civilians and then neutralized them.
It sounds like you won't be convinced by anything I write, so do it yourself. Pull the numbers yourself. Do the math yourself.
A good place to start would be comparing the number of bombs dropped on northern Gaza vs. the south.
Yeah, I guess I find it hard to use math to justify murder. The number of expected dead civilians should be very close to zero if Israel wasn't committing war crimes like having military operations that directly harm civilians.
So is asking people to go south then bombing the south, is that Israel trying to avoid human casualties? Yes/no would be good.
I understand the hesitation. It's treating humans as numbers. But civilian casualties will always be nonzero in war. Especially when one side is using human shields.
Asking people to move south is actually proof they want to avoid human casualties. There never was a chance 100% will leave, and sure as shit not in 24 hours. But if 50% leave after 3 days and 80% after a week, then when the eventual ground invasion comes there will be far fewer civilians left who can be killed in the crossfire.
But Israel deliberately bombed the South of Gaza knowing too well how many people are there. I find it hard to justify this or wiggle out of it to be honest.
What about withholding water? Humans could die of dehydration. How were they avoiding human casualties then??
If you want to take an absolutist position like declaring the south of Gaza a completely safe zone, then you're going to be disappointed by reality. Military campaigns never say "this is an absolute safe zone". It's always shades of gray.
Withholding water is absolutely contemptible, which is probably why they walked that back after a day. The bigger issue is the existing infrastructure wasn't designed for the current population, much less the population doubling overnight, which is why the water distribution is failing. That is 100% on Hamas as they have had full control of the Gaza Strip since 2007. Perhaps if they used pipes to build water and sewage infrastructure instead of building rockets but the past can't be changed.
It's a dangerous situation, and more aid needs to go in than has until now. Thankfully, it seems that will happen soon.
You can make up all sorts of excuses but at the end of the day it's Israeli missiles that directly killed civilians. Excuses made to excuse war crimes.
I try to take people at what they say. Israel says they are shooting at Hamas members. Hamas are pretty up front that they target Israeli civilians. Always have been.
For what it's worth, I hope you're wrong about Israel. The alternative would mean there is no hope for any mutual lasting peace. Certainly not so long as you believe it.
Israel is upfront about targeting Palestinian civilians. 8k dead so far.
Try to take them by their actions not their words. Don't be naive.
Do you have more nazi comments to share, or is this your personal best?
Lol. Lmao, even. That, in itself, is not a nazi comment.
I think in a few hours it will be available on more websites in English, and that's also why I posted the link from Aljazeera Arabic.
Here are the stats as an info graph on the Gaza Health ministry website: https://www.moh.gov.ps/portal/%d8%a7%d8%ad%d8%b5%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%af%d9%88%d8%a7%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%8a%d9%84%d9%8a-%d8%b9%d9%84%d9%89-%d9%82%d8%b7%d8%a7%d8%b9/
Best wait till some other credible source pick up the news, someone got banned for posting multiple news from such source, even when other news site is reporting the same news.