Gaza war's staggering toll reaches a grim milestone: 20,000 dead
Gaza war's staggering toll reaches a grim milestone: 20,000 dead
More than 20,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas, health officials said Friday.
This is devastating. And amidst so much debate over Israel's right to defend itself, I feel it's getting lost that this military campaign is only a success if measured by a set of goals even most Zionists would not recognize as productive.
Will it make Israel safer? No, undoubtedly the war has cost international standing, strained the US-Israel relationship, and will inevitably radicalize far more extremists than are killed.
Will it continue the right-ward shift of Israeli policy? Does it cut off avenues for peace and reconciliation and foster militant Israeli nationalism? Yes.
This campaign is only a success if the primary objective is the eventual capture of the entire region at the cost of Israel's safety (and the safety of Jews around the world) and Israel's international standing. By any more conventional aims, it is an unmitigated disaster.
The US's twenty years in Afghanistan should have taught the rest of the world the "forever wars" don't work.
But I suppose not.
Honest question, what is Israel supposed to do? Give Hamas concessions? I think history shows that appeasement only emboldens terrorism. Back out now and let Hamas come back with even more local support?
It's a lose/lose. There is no winning for Israel. It seems that either Israel makes itself a pariah in the international community by killing countless innocent Palestinians or it lets terrorists win.
I would love for you or someone to help me see a different way Israel can get back out of this.
I'm going to answer in two parts.
Part 1: I grew up a Zionist. In most versions, Zionism envisioned a peaceful, multi-ethnic state. In that sense, the zionist project is half-complete.
The first half was accomplished by people who aspired to something that everyone said was madness, totally impossible, completely unfeasible, hopelessly unworkable. And they fucking did that thing.
Now, anyone who considers themselves a Zionist needs to take on the responsibility for continuing that project with the sense of courage and insane vision that brought Israel into existence. 'It's too hard!' 'There are no good solutions!' BULLSHIT. The whole country is founded on the idea that nothing is impossible, so let's stop making excuses.
Part 2: The biggest problem is Jewish radicals. Itmar Ben Givir of the Jewish Power Party, Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, and Netanyahu of Likud. These are the primary leaders of a genocide, and Netanyahu's special move for decades has been foreclosing peace. Step one is wanting peace, and step two is holding accountable the people who've never wanted it and always tried to keep it out of reach.
Step three, I think, is to help every Palestinian climb what I think of as "the ladder". Israel is an apartheid state. You've got Ashkenazi Jews at the top, and Mizrahi/Sphardeic Jews close but just below. Then you've got Palestinian Israelis, then a whole bunch of tiers of West Bank / East Jeruselum Palestinians, then Gazans / foreign refugees. Each group needs a path to the rights of the group above, and there has to be a roadmap to a roadmap to peace. And that is going to require international brokers. Israeli needs a government that isn't hostile to the UN, and the US needs to reduce its involvement and stay the fuck out of the peace process.
Too many posts are removed if they’re critical of Israel. I hope this post survives for discussion.
Yes, I've had several posts that humanize Palestinians removed near the start of the conflict on Lemmy.World, though things have improved there. I've never seen censorship of Gaza reporting here at BeeHaw; I have a lot of admiration for @alyaza@beehaw.org who has beaten me to the post several times.
Lemmy.world hasn’t improved as far as I can tell. Or maybe their bias was even worse before I noticed.
In any event, their entire instance is now blocked from my feeds, so I won’t have to deal with them.
That’s nearly 1% of the total population.
health officials said Friday.
Hamas health officials. How I hate the lazy reporting on this conflict.
How I hate the lazy deflection and caping for Israel in your comments.
The Gaza Health Ministry is considered to be reliable for casualty reporting due to independent verification by groups that monitor the conflict like Human Rights Watch and the UN. They release specific casualty data including names, ages, and ID numbers.
The only argument that Israel or their allies have used against their released casualty numbers is that they're run by Hamas (the Gaza government), but oddly those people, yourself included, never seem to dispute Israeli numbers for the same reason.
But keep up your propaganda, bro.
In October the Gaza Health Ministry claimed 471 people were killed by an Israeli missile strike on a hospital. Widespread credible (independent) evidence proves a small Hamas rocket missfired and hit a carpark near the hospital, causing relatively minor damage (there was a large fireball, but it was mostly rocket fuel - which is far less damaging than an explosive payload intended to kill).
None of the credible evidence was able to put a number to the deaths in that accident but it’s highly improbable that 471 people were in the carpark. And it definitely wasn’t an Israeli rocket.
In other words - Gaza’s health ministry is not a reliable source. Some of the things they report are probably accurate but they have been proven to be unreliable. Don’t trust anything they say unless it’s been backed by someone more reliable (in which case, you might as well refer to the other source instead).
At best, the ministry failed verify facts (e.g. was a large missile even fired at all?) before reporting what happened. But I think that’s being too charitable. For example where did they get the 471 number from? I think they made it up. I don’t have proof but it’s the only believable explanation.
Worse though - they haven’t retracted the claim. Mistakes are understandable… but failing to admit someone in your organisation made a mistake is unacceptable.
Israel has not released any official numbers on dead Palestinians, which is why there hasn't been anything disputed. The most we got was a number of dead Hamas commanders - which some people seriously tried to twist into "Israel only killed a few dozen Hamas members" - and a leaked, but unconfirmed estimate from an unnamed Israeli government official.
They release specific casualty data including names, ages, and ID numbers
The list included at least one person who died in 2014:
https://nitter.net/Aizenberg55/status/1718622126624645352
The numbers published show ridiculous patterns, like days in which almost no man dies or when the number of dead women and children increase more than the total number of dead:
https://nitter.net/Aizenberg55/status/1731753062622982386
Then there was the whole hospital parking lot incident, when Hamas made a claim that 500 people died in an air strike on a hospital with 85 beds and that the hospital had been flattened, only to then increase the number of dead to more than 700. Even during that night, it became apparent through footage published by Palestinians themselves that in reality, a rocket fired from Gaza at a city in Israel had malfunctioned and dropped on the area. After sunrise, it turned out that the hospital was still standing. Hamas officials later claimed, when asked about the projectile, that "the missile has dissolved like salt in the water. It's vaporized. Nothing is left."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hospital-evidence.html
Those 500, later reduced to 470, from this blast are still part of the official death toll. One has to assume that, given the pattern we have seen so far and the frequent tendency of Hamas officials to blame Israel for their own rockets and that of affiliated groups falling onto the strip (the failure rate is between 15 and 25%), that this kind of false reporting is common and routine, making the numbers released anything but reliable.
But keep up your propaganda, bro.
Welcome to the post-information age, where obvious and transparent lies are being eaten up by well-meaning, but naive people and using the most basic critical thinking skills gets someone labeled as a propagandist. Seriously, you and so many others are eating up whatever Hamas says and it's embarrassing. They are no different than ISIS, yet you didn't do the same with any press releases made by that terror group. Why is that?
Hamas is the government in Gaza. Who else would run their health ministry? Israel obviously doesn’t give a damn about them.
How I hate the lazy trolling on this conflict.
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Click here to see the summary
Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in modern history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave.
“That such a brutal conflict has been allowed to continue and for this long — despite the widespread condemnation, the physical and mental toll and the massive destruction — is an indelible stain on our collective conscience,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
The military has said that months of fighting lie ahead in southern Gaza, an area packed with the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, many of whom were ordered to flee combat in the north earlier in the war.
On Friday, it ordered tens of thousands of residents to leave their homes in Burej, an urban refugee camp, and surrounding communities in central Gaza, suggesting a ground assault there could be next.
Mustafa Abu Taha, a Palestinian farm worker, said many areas of his hard-hit Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah have become inaccessible because of massive destruction from airstrikes.
Because of insufficient aid entering Gaza, the extent of starvation has eclipsed the near-famines of recent years in Afghanistan and Yemen, and the risk of famine is “increasing each day,” Thursday’s report said.
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