• jet@hackertalks.com
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • المنطقة عكف عفريت@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 months ago

      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@jet@hackertalks.com said:

      I think the implication of your comment is these are fictitious deaths, but clearly people are dying there

      • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.

          • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            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.

              • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                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.

                  • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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                    8 months ago

                    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.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.