I would bet the Israel number is closer to the true number, but I would bet the Gaza number is an underestimate.
The recently published list contained names, identity numbers, and ages. You don’t have to trust the Health Ministry, you trust the fact check in Israel. The information isn’t just a number, each of those identities can be checked against databases. Made up people can be found. People claimed to be dead but actually alive will turn up soon enough.
(I did a double take at the mention of the Harper’s Bazaar editor, given the famous Harper’s Open Letter On Cancel Culture But Only When Applied To Conservatives, but it turns out Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Magazine are in fact two different publications)
I’m not sure I get the “it’s not war takes”, historically speaking 100s of thousands or millions of civilians getting killed/starved/disease/etc is exactly what war is. Cellphones just let people see what that looks like now. I would have guessed this made the world less prone to war but last few years have proved me wrong
I don’t even know how that distinction even matters, It has routinely happened in every war since bombs existed, a kind of a “no true war” fallacy to say none of those were acts of war. War is pretty much inherently a crime against humanity but seems we can’t escape it. Like obviously we have all sorts of legal definitions of stuff but ultimately war is always going to kill massive amounts of folks who have nothing to do with it
On the dying in war topic, was googling if any graphs and this was one I could find. Seems like it’s just the fucking natural state of humans for as long as people counted this stuff. Makes real hard to understand how this ever going to get better except maybe nukes for everyone.
I feel like the logarithmic y-axis is doing a lot of work here to make the line look less pronounced. A different rendering of this same data could probably emphasize the terribly destructive nature of large conflicts (30 years’ war, WW1/2) compared to the normal state of things.
Yeah given how post-natal life expectancy is so high across the globe compared to 100 years ago, hard to imagine we haven’t improved (along with medicine obv)
I think a lot of this is just we count things better now.
we have technology and intel that makes it extremely easy to hit exactly what you’re supposed aiming at. IDF is supposed to be one of the most advanced military forces in the world. is your assertion they hit civilian targets on accident?
15,000 - 40,000 per Wikipedia, but sure, no argument, they are vastly outmatched. The goal isn’t to beat Israel though, it’s to start a wider conflagration orchestrated by Iran. It is not a coincidence this all started while Israel and the Saudis were negotiating a mutual defense treaty also involving the US.
This article has more, and offers a slightly different perspective on the document (Wikipedia tells me that this outlet is “a left-wing news and opinion webzine, established in August 2010 by a group of four Israeli writers in Tel Aviv”):
They translated the document into English which is worth reading. It does explicitly recommend the expulsion of Gazans to the Sinai over other options, and does a tremendous amount of telling on themselves:
it thinks handing control of Gaza to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is the worst option, because they really do not want to allow the two halves of Palestine to be united
it is pessimistic about the ability of the Israeli military to indefinitely occupy Gaza specifically because there are no Israeli settlements in Gaza to give them a reason to be there
the saudi timing is a bit too conspiratorial, and it may take years to confirm. i tend to agree that iran is probably in contact with hamas basically 24/7, although you’d have to be an IT tech on a military base to see actual intel on this. still, it’s weird to claim that hamas isn’t fighting back.
it’s also a rushed claim the numbers aren’t orders of magnitude off, not clear in which direction. it took days for israel to arrive at 1400 dead and 200 hostages, which were almost unimaginable on the first day. of course IDF numbers on killed fighters come with a huge asterisk, with all sorts of caveats on who is actually in hamas ranks and who is a protester, or simply not willing to leave their home.
i can only go by what others say, and what i’m biased toward at this time is that the ground war isn’t winnable in the sense that usa invasion of afghanistan and iraq weren’t winnable (hindsight and all). the regimes didn’t even go down without a huge cost, and occupation was worse. yet it is difficult to see how netanyahu’s cabinet could do anything else to save themselves. it’s always politics with netanyahu, but also militarily. iron dome is 99% effective for defense, but offensively could 6000 rockets even diminish hamas’ claimed 500km of tunnels? maybe, probably not. but they wouldn’t bring even a majority of hostages back, much less most. easier to see how it would embolden hamas or iran. there are no good decisions made here. we realize now that usa wasn’t good enough to not go to war, and usa was in much less danger than israel.
