4 ms·

I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim. Even if w

I suppose if we are to digress to the land of "shoulds", Israel should not have decided to delete tens of thousands of Gazan children in the interim. Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
[flagged]
- hmcq6 2y ago
  > Conservative figures show that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-children-killed-gaza-israeli-military-any-other-recent-conflict https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-child... Edit: also that's not war, thats war crimes
  - tptacek 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > these are always the dumbest disputes They’re a test on the source. (And I’d argue that yes, there is a meaningful difference between ten thousand and tens of thousands of deaths.)
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I just mean the dynamics of how they unfold on HN. I'm pretty cynical about these threads. Yeah, it's not great that I participate anyways.
        hmcq6 2y ago
        The dynamics of how they unfold is that I am dropping links from well respected (and frequently Jewish Israeli) institutions and getting bombarded by whataboutisim, misinformation and semantic arguments that interest no one but the commenter. The dynamics is that one side cares about history and the truth and the other side is a whitewashing campaign for genocide. "Hamas surely deserves some credit for the deaths" This is literally equivalent to saying the Jews deserved [some credit for causing] the holocaust. There are people in this thread breaking down the history from literally 139 BC to the current day (although hardly anything before 1920 is actually relevant to the current conflict). To handwave all the complexity away when it's presented to you in a form that would take only a few hours to fully digest and say "both sides"... it's definitely a choice. Is Hamas technically at fault for giving Israel an excuse for committing genocide? I guess, if you think such a thing is even possible.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I'm sure these are beliefs you hold in good faith that you've worked hard to inform yourself about but this comment is a case in point for why I think these threads are cursed. You're convinced there's no discussion to have at all. That's a reasonable perspective to have! But then: what are we doing here?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        Ohhh, I see your point from earlier now.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      > They should have taken the deal in May. It wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then, as Netanyahu was fighting the ceasefire anyway.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then Very difficult to predict. Israel unilaterally rejecting a ceasefire plays very differently in the Congress and Tehran than both sides telling the other to fuck off.
        littlestymaar 2y ago
        The US administration under Bidden has not shown a single sign they were willing to put pressure on Netanyahu, and regarding Iran Israel has full escalation dominance over them and it's not like they care what the Iranian think of them.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. > that's not war, thats war crimes It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.) The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons. I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
    - hmcq6 2y ago
      > 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. 1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children. 2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied. 3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then. The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... So again, you're splitting semantic hairs to try and imply that the damage is being overstated when it is in fact as accurate as one can be.
    - mysecretaccount 2y ago
      > 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht... Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
  - Auracle 2y ago
    [flagged]
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths. Unfortunately we have. > Don’t start stupid wars This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas. > Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation. > appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers Correct. Israel isn't a superpower. (Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      > Israel isn't a superpower. On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't) > Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion. There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
- volleyball 2y ago
  >We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18. : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes-identities-of-34344-palestinians-killed-in-war-with-israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes... Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza. Indeed, Studies like the recent one published in Lacet suggest that the actual “traumatic injury deaths” might be closer to double the official ministry figures : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-underreported-study-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-tol... I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza). I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.
tptacek 2y ago
I'm not making a moral argument.
- mysecretaccount 2y ago
  "[Hamas] should have taken the deal when it was first offered [because this list of people died afterward]" sure sounds like a moral argument to me.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I couldn't possibly have given less of a fuck whether Hassan Nasrallah drew another breath; the point is that Hamas and all the regional forces backing it were drastically compromised and/or reduced to their combustion products in the months that followed their May 27 rejection, and they are in much worse shape today. They should have taken the deal in May.
    - mysecretaccount 2y ago
      The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

[flagged]

hmcq6 2y ago
> Conservative figures show that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-children-killed-gaza-israeli-military-any-other-recent-conflict https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-child... Edit: also that's not war, thats war crimes
- tptacek 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > these are always the dumbest disputes They’re a test on the source. (And I’d argue that yes, there is a meaningful difference between ten thousand and tens of thousands of deaths.)
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I just mean the dynamics of how they unfold on HN. I'm pretty cynical about these threads. Yeah, it's not great that I participate anyways.
      - hmcq6 2y ago
        The dynamics of how they unfold is that I am dropping links from well respected (and frequently Jewish Israeli) institutions and getting bombarded by whataboutisim, misinformation and semantic arguments that interest no one but the commenter. The dynamics is that one side cares about history and the truth and the other side is a whitewashing campaign for genocide. "Hamas surely deserves some credit for the deaths" This is literally equivalent to saying the Jews deserved [some credit for causing] the holocaust. There are people in this thread breaking down the history from literally 139 BC to the current day (although hardly anything before 1920 is actually relevant to the current conflict). To handwave all the complexity away when it's presented to you in a form that would take only a few hours to fully digest and say "both sides"... it's definitely a choice. Is Hamas technically at fault for giving Israel an excuse for committing genocide? I guess, if you think such a thing is even possible.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I'm sure these are beliefs you hold in good faith that you've worked hard to inform yourself about but this comment is a case in point for why I think these threads are cursed. You're convinced there's no discussion to have at all. That's a reasonable perspective to have! But then: what are we doing here?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        Ohhh, I see your point from earlier now.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > They should have taken the deal in May. It wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then, as Netanyahu was fighting the ceasefire anyway.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then Very difficult to predict. Israel unilaterally rejecting a ceasefire plays very differently in the Congress and Tehran than both sides telling the other to fuck off.
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        The US administration under Bidden has not shown a single sign they were willing to put pressure on Netanyahu, and regarding Iran Israel has full escalation dominance over them and it's not like they care what the Iranian think of them.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. > that's not war, thats war crimes It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.) The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons. I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
  - hmcq6 2y ago
    > 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. 1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children. 2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied. 3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then. The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... So again, you're splitting semantic hairs to try and imply that the damage is being overstated when it is in fact as accurate as one can be.
  - mysecretaccount 2y ago
    > 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless. The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht... Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
- Auracle 2y ago
  [flagged]
littlestymaar 2y ago
> We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths. Unfortunately we have. > Don’t start stupid wars This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas. > Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation. > appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers Correct. Israel isn't a superpower. (Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > Israel isn't a superpower. On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't) > Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion. There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
volleyball 2y ago
>We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18. : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes-identities-of-34344-palestinians-killed-in-war-with-israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes... Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza. Indeed, Studies like the recent one published in Lacet suggest that the actual “traumatic injury deaths” might be closer to double the official ministry figures : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-underreported-study-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-tol... I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza). I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.

tptacek 2y ago

I'm not making a moral argument.

mysecretaccount 2y ago
"[Hamas] should have taken the deal when it was first offered [because this list of people died afterward]" sure sounds like a moral argument to me.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I couldn't possibly have given less of a fuck whether Hassan Nasrallah drew another breath; the point is that Hamas and all the regional forces backing it were drastically compromised and/or reduced to their combustion products in the months that followed their May 27 rejection, and they are in much worse shape today. They should have taken the deal in May.
  - mysecretaccount 2y ago
    The timing of their acceptance of a 42-day ceasefire - whether now or eight months prior - bears little significance for the long-term outlook of Hamas or the civilian death toll in Gaza. Strange analysis to hang your hat on, Thomas.