quote:

He said: “We have told Israel time and again to stop killing our civilians with their military might – to withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967 – in return, we are willing to end the armed resistance.”

“One Palestinian state would be ideal, shared by all Palestinians – Jews, Muslims and Christians. But as a truce, until that happens, we recognize the reality of Israel, but we reserve our right and cannot and will not recognize Israel’s moral legitimacy.”

TLM3101 posted:

It's this. The floating pier is now another reason for Israel to cut Gaza in two and impose a new security-regimen on Palestinians in the name of fighting Hamas. Also, please note that Israel is once again in charge of the aid. You know, that whole thing the pier was ostensibly about circumventing? The ships are going to unload right into a seven-acre area Israel has specifically set aside to hold the aid.

Presumably until it clears 'inspection'. Estimated time of completion? Never.

Nameless_Steve posted:

If Israel were on the warpath to spill as much blood as possible, the way the Syrian army was in 1982, we would expect numbers with 100:1 casualty ratios, at least.

Nameless_Steve posted:

If the numbers don't matter, then why did Hamas exaggerate them? Why did people and news organizations repeat them?

https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/gaza-death-toll-united-nations-35000-rcna152150 posted:

The death toll in Gaza has not been revised down by the United Nations, the organization confirmed, clearing up a report from one of its agencies that has been used to fuel misinformation about the veracity of figures issued by authorities in Gaza.

The 35,000 number provided by the Health Ministry “remains unchanged,” said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the U.N. secretary general, at a news briefing on Monday. A lower figure that appeared last week in a report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs represented the number of dead who have been identified.

On May 8, the OCHA published a report listing the death toll in Gaza at 24,000, with 7,700 children and 4,900 women killed — approximately half of the latest number of dead women and children provided by the government’s media office. Pro-Israel media ran with the seeming difference, and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.

According to the Health Ministry’s latest official count, 35,000 people in Gaza have been killed, 15,000 of whom are children and nearly 10,000 women. Those numbers are not in dispute, Haq said, and the 24,000 figure from the OCHA report represents the people "for whom full details have been documented — in other words, people who have been fully identified.”

His remarks square with the Health Ministry's recent statement that about 10,000 people in its official count have not yet been identified. Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization, backed the 35,000 figure as well. “The fact we now have 25,000 identified people is a step forward,” he said.

Nameless_Steve posted:

Remember when I got probated for doubting Hamas' numbers and claims about most victims being women and children?

quote:

"Denial of self-determination" is not genocide, nor are the various security measures taken against a hostile, nazified populace like the Palestinian Nationalists. October 7 was an instance of the dangers of lax security, and showed us exactly who Israel was keeping out and why.

Nail Rat posted:

Also the 34,000 deaths are not just a made up number, they're the people who have actually been named as dead. Hamas as a government entity gives out traffic tickets and does collect taxes so they have to keep track of who is alive and dead.

There are a lot of dead people under rubble, not much to move that rubble with (not to mention the bombs keep falling and everyone is starving), and a lot of unexploded bombs in that rubble.

You just need to look at pictures of Gaza city to know the number has to be far higher in reality.

Nameless_Steve posted:

Interview by the National Review (informative just on its own that he'd be interviewed by a far-right magazine) posted:

Not many Jews wander around the Palestinian territories in their spare time asking people on the streets of Ramallah, Jenin, and Bethlehem what they think of Hamas — Corey Gil-Shuster has been doing it since 2012.

Shuster, an academic at Tel Aviv University, has traveled across Israel and the territories for over a decade, asking regular people questions “that nobody really wants to talk about but we need to talk about,” he tells National Review. Accompanied by a simple camcorder — and by a translator, when speaking with Arabs — Shuster documents his conversations on his YouTube channel, known as the “Ask Project,” which features quick, punchy clips shot in a low-budget, gritty manner.
So far, Shuster has released over a thousand videos, each of which features a simple question submitted by a viewer, and his channel has garnered more than 117 million views. Nearly 400 of those videos include interviews with Palestinians.

A liberal by temperament, Shuster’s extensive experience interviewing Palestinians about the decades-long conflict left him with an open mind toward the diversity of viewpoints that exist in the Palestinian world. But the October 7 Hamas massacres — and the adulation and celebration it inspired across Palestinian society — have narrowed his perspective considerably.
“I have a hard time now looking at Palestinians in the same way,” Shuster said in an interview with National Review. “Before, it was theoretical; that they could try to butcher us. And then it happened. I know it happened in terrorist attacks [before], but [never] to this level of animalistic pride. The videos of them butchering people and taking pride in it” left him deeply disturbed.

“I think I’m more on the left in a lot of ways. I have left-wing liberal values, more or less, although I agree with the right-wing assessment of the Arab world,” he said. “The right-wing is much more correct than the left-wing, but that’s a different thing.”
In the wake of the attack, Shuster decided to repost earlier clips in which he asked Palestinians and Arab Israelis their thoughts about Hamas. He also shared earlier interviews with Israelis gauging their willingness to make peace with Gazans.

Looking back on those videos in light of the October 7 atrocities drove home for Shuster just how intractable the problem really is.
“Palestinians don’t want peace with Israelis. They don’t even see Jews as being native to this land. So, they think we have to go back to Poland.” Shuster said.
When Shuster points out to Palestinians that many Israelis trace their heritage to the Middle East, they typically respond, “it doesn’t matter, they have to go back.”
When Arab contacts began sharing social-media videos of the unfolding atrocities on October 7, Shuster initially couldn’t tell if they were authentic or ripped from old footage of the Syrian Civil War. The recordings showed Palestinians on social media reacting to the clips with hearts, happy faces, and laughing emojis.
“It’s too soon to say how it’s changed my view,” he said. “I do know that I was thinking about having to go back to the West Bank and I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can look at Palestinians anymore. I’m having a really hard time.”

“I would have to hear from them: ‘This was really barbaric, and it went too far,’ but I’m not because they’re seeing in their social media feed Hamas is wonderful, Hamas did this to liberate Palestine,” he said.
Shuster, a keen observer of the Israeli national mood, said that Westerners haven’t fully grasped the degree to which the devastation of October 7 has altered the Israeli psyche.
It’s been difficult for Shuster to grasp the disconnect between the scale of the horror — when you adjust for the size of Israel’s population, the Hamas attack claimed thirteen times as many lives as 9/11 — and the rush on American college campuses and in Western media to rationalize terrorism.

Western leftists who celebrate Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters fundamentally don’t understand who they’re aligning themselves with, Shuster said.
Speaking with NR earlier this year, prior to the attack, Shuster highlighted the story of Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay Palestinian who had sought asylum in Israel but was kidnapped and beheaded in Hebron.
“I tell queers for Palestine people, they’re incredibly misinformed,” he said. “Like, you should support gay people. That’s great. And you support Palestinian rights. That’s terrific. However, understand it’s a shockingly homophobic society.”
Shuster’s perspective cuts both ways. He also feels that Israeli society has become desensitized to prolonged conflict with Palestinians and their unwillingness to acknowledge a Jewish state’s right to exist. “But does that mean that a child — a 12-year-old or 15-year-old — who throws rocks deserves to be shot? Or lose an eye?”
“I also blame Palestinians for [this], and they do send their children. They encourage it. They see them as heroes,” Shuster said.

“I think Israelis have a kind of sociopathic tendency to them that they have dehumanized Palestinians to a huge degree,” Shuster said, citing “the constant terrorism from Palestinians.”
“So, if you say to somebody, a Palestinian was beaten or killed, they would say, ‘Well, they probably deserved it.’ That’s the mainstream. That’s not right-wing. You’d have to prove to them that it was somebody who really was just a bystander,” he said.
Even before the Hamas attack, Shuster believed the prospects for a long-term peace deal were shrinking, due both to the rightward shift in Israeli politics and the level of anti-Israel indoctrination that younger Palestinians have grown up with.
“There’s been no change,” he said. “There’s been no direction or improvement. Neither government is giving any vision of what is going to happen.”
Shuster’s encounters in the territories have given him a unique perspective on the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians define themselves in hostile relation to each other. “I tie their sense, for Palestinians, to this idea of hating Jews in Israel. That’s a formative part of their identity,” he said. “On this [Israeli] side, you have had people, at least for the last hundred years, who created infrastructure and institutions and a culture around this new idea of what Israel is. On the Palestinian side, you definitely have a culture, but you have no infrastructure, really bad institutions.”

The divergent sentiment is particularly pronounced on the Palestinian street. Palestinian “politicians say we believe in a two-state solution, but the people do not,” Shuster said. “Nobody wants [that], other than people maybe my age and older, like 50-year-olds and up. Young people — when I do meet someone who actually believes in some form of coexistence with Israelis — I wanna hug them. It’s so rare that when it happens, I have to stop myself from actually hugging them.”
If Shuster’s hopes for the future were bleak before, they’ve only gotten more so since October 7.
“Everybody — mainstream and right-wing — want revenge,” he said. “They want blood … People are really, really, traumatized, and they are angry.”

Nameless_Steve posted:

In 1982, Muslim Brotherhood rebels in Syria attempted to assassinate Hafez Assad. In vengeance, he sent the military (30k soldiers) to put down the rebels (2k volunteers) making a last stand in the sympathetic city of Hama. By the end of February, 40,000 civilians had been killed, and only 400 militants.

So that's a 1:100 casualty ratio.

The Gaza War? The ratio is 15:16. As urban warfare goes, that's significantly better than average even among advanced militaries.

The UN says that, globally, 90% of war casualties are civilians

Nail Rat posted:

Also the 34,000 deaths are not just a made up number, they're the people who have actually been named as dead. Hamas as a government entity gives out traffic tickets and does collect taxes so they have to keep track of who is alive and dead.

There are a lot of dead people under rubble, not much to move that rubble with (not to mention the bombs keep falling and everyone is starving), and a lot of unexploded bombs in that rubble.

You just need to look at pictures of Gaza city to know the number has to be far higher in reality.

quote:

Israel and Egypt are locked in a row over the Rafah border crossing, blaming each other for its continued closure as Gaza's humanitarian crisis worsens.

Israeli forces have taken control of the Gaza side of the crossing.

On Tuesday Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz said he had told the UK and Germany about "the need to persuade Egypt to reopen" the crossing.

...

Mr Katz said the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which attacked southern Israel on 7 October last year, sparking the current war, could no longer "control the Rafah crossing", citing security concerns over which Israel "will not compromise".

"The world places the responsibility for the humanitarian situation on Israel, but the key to preventing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now in the hands of our Egyptian friends," Mr Katz wrote on X.
In its most recent update, Cogat - the Israeli military agency tasked with coordinating aid access in Gaza - said 64 aid trucks entered Gaza on Sunday, significantly down on the daily number of trucks that entered in April.

Nail Rat posted:

You can also plainly see that only Israelis have been killing Christian Gazans and bombing their churches. Hamas has not bothered them (other than making it illegal to drink alcohol I guess)

Esran posted:

Maybe examine why you felt the need to rush in with "Hamas are no angels".

Goatse James Bond posted:

Stuff along the lines of "we have seen video of this dead body from a reasonably reliable source and we're pretty sure we're not double-counting it".

DeadlyMuffin posted:

Israel is 100% in the wrong, you don't need to try and make Hamas into angels, and you'll just start a lovely derail if you depict them that way.

I could go pull up articles about Hamas doing horrible things to LGBT people. There are greater sins than making it illegal to drink alcohol.

DeadlyMuffin posted:

Because someone suggested that their prohibition of alcohol was the only way Hamas was negatively affecting residents of Gaza and that's a hilariously wrong statement on its face.

Groovelord Neato posted:

This is incredible even Israel tried to play it off like it's 1:2 I've never seen someone try to act like it's nearly 1:1. Civilian casualties were "best case" 75 percent of the dead early in the war (and that's if every man was a Hamas member) and likely over 90 percent at this point with famine taking hold. Israel's "AI" they're supposedly using for targeting has parameters allowing 1:20 for even low level members of Hamas.

Esran posted:

Considering what we heard from doctors about "wounded child, no surviving family" becoming a common phrase back in December, I think it is equally likely we're talking about actual verified corpses that no one can identify because the relatives are dead.

quote:

The first shipment of humanitarian aid has arrived in Gaza via a temporary floating pier, the US military has confirmed.

US Central Command said that aid trucks began moving ashore at about 09:00 local time (07:00 BST) on Friday.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the delivery of 8,400 plastic shelters was "the culmination of a herculean joint international effort".

quote:

Aid offloaded at the pier will come via a maritime corridor from Cyprus, where it is first inspected by Israel. Britain said on Friday it had delivered its first aid shipment via the pier.
The U.N. World Food Programme will have a handful of staff stationed near the pier to coordinate distribution of the aid - using contractors - throughout Gaza, said a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

...

U.S. officials have said the pier would initially handle 90 trucks a day, but that number could go to 150 trucks. To maintain U.N. neutrality at the pier, U.N. staff will not have any contact with the Israeli military, which is providing security and logistics support for the operation.
Haq said on Friday that the U.N. will coordinate "the arrival of empty trucks, their registration, overseeing the loading and transfer of commodities coming through the floating dock to the trucks and the dispatch to warehouses across Gaza and, finally, hand over the supplies to humanitarian partners".

quote:

Israel has said it is stepping up aid efforts, and the military said 365 trucks entered through the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings on Thursday, carrying flour and fuel. Hundreds of tents were also delivered for people evacuated from Rafah to the Al-Mawasi area, which Israel has declared a humanitarian zone.
Israel also recently started moving supplies through a new point close to the existing Erez crossing in northern Gaza. However, the southern crossings of Erez and Kerem Shalom have been disrupted by military operations.
Israel's military said in a statement it "will continue its efforts to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip by land, air, and sea, in accordance with international law."
The United Nations said on Thursday that "for days now, crossings into southern Gaza have been closed, unsafe to access, or not logistically viable".

DeadlyMuffin posted:

Israel is 100% in the wrong, you don't need to try and make Hamas into angels, and you'll just start a lovely derail if you depict them that way.

I could go pull up articles about Hamas doing horrible things to LGBT people. There are greater sins than making it illegal to drink alcohol.

Because someone suggested that their prohibition of alcohol was the only way Hamas was negatively affecting residents of Gaza and that's a hilariously wrong statement on its face.

Esran posted:

They didn't.

Or in other words, the lower number is the number of victims who have been fully identified. The previous number included corpses they don't know the names of.

TLM3101 posted:

So, about the pier...

Turns out, Israel has found a way to use it to sever the Gaza strip in two:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/17/gaza-israel-netzarim-corridor-war-hamas/

(my bolding)

Israel have also been building forward military outposts, check-points, holding-areas and bases across the only two major north-south roads of the Strip. They're there to stay forever. Well done, Biden.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

The issue is that these numbers cannot be reconciled. The Health Ministry is saying that 10000 + 15000 = 25000 women and children have died. OCHA's confirmed figures put it at 4900 + 7700 = 12600. Even if you assume all 11,000 unidentified victims (IE, the difference in total between the confirmed count and the total count) are women and children (which is basically impossible) you cannot get to the Health Ministry's figure.

Esran posted:

That is not what they said, you should read it again. The point being made was about religious/ethnic tolerance.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

The issue is that these numbers cannot be reconciled. The Health Ministry is saying that 10000 + 15000 = 25000 women and children have died. OCHA's confirmed figures put it at 4900 + 7700 = 12600. Even if you assume all 11,000 unidentified victims (IE, the difference in total between the confirmed count and the total count) are women and children (which is basically impossible) you cannot get to the Health Ministry's figure.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-death-toll-ocha-un-confusion-anger-rcna151934 posted:

Previously, OCHA had reported the total number of people killed in Gaza (which reached 35,000 this month), along with a breakdown of the number of women and children among the dead, citing the government media office in Gaza. As of May 6, Day 213 of the war, OCHA reported that at least 14,500 children had been killed in Gaza, along with 9,500 women.

But starting two days later, May 8, OCHA appeared to change the source of its data, citing information from the ministry of health in Gaza, rather than the government media office, on how many women, children and men were among 24,686 people killed who had been fully identified as of April 30. It is not clear why the presentation of the data was changed.

(...)

“The numbers have not dramatically shifted. The overall tally remains unchanged — 35,000,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said in emailed comments to NBC News on Monday. “What is new is the level of verification ('full details have been documented') for a subset of 24,686 of those fatalities."

(...)

When he first saw the new data published by OCHA, World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier told NBC News that he too found the information “striking.” But upon a closer look, he said it was clear that the way the data was being represented had changed.

(...)

“This is absolutely normal and to be expected that figures shift in one way or another,” Lindmeier said.

https://time.com/6979208/israel-gaza-death-toll/ posted:

For months, the agency had been regularly updating an estimated total death toll in Gaza and breaking that total down by gender and age. Those figures were based on information provided to the U.N. by three Hamas-controlled entities: the Gaza Ministry of Health, Hamas’s government media office, and the Gaza chapter of the Palestinian Civil Defense, which provides emergency response in Gaza.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-69014893 posted:

Why did the UN change approach?

The GMO has consistently given a higher figure for the proportion of women and children in all fatalities than has the health ministry.

On 6 May, the UN reported 34,735 deaths - of which there were 9,500 women and 14,500 children, citing the GMO as its source.

The two days later, the UN released a further report, switching its sourcing to the health ministry.

The result of this was that although the overall recorded death toll was almost unchanged (34,844), the number of registered deaths of women (4.959) and children (7,797) had both fallen significantly.

This difference was because those individuals with incomplete information were not included in the demographic breakdown.

(...)

Asked by BBC Verify why it made the change, the UN said it used the GMO data for women and children killed because the health ministry had not been publishing these figures.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

The issue is that these numbers cannot be reconciled. The Health Ministry is saying that 10000 + 15000 = 25000 women and children have died. OCHA's confirmed figures put it at 4900 + 7700 = 12600. Even if you assume all 11,000 unidentified victims (IE, the difference in total between the confirmed count and the total count) are women and children (which is basically impossible) you cannot get to the Health Ministry's figure.

Mechafunkzilla posted:

What loving difference does it make if it's 35,000 vs. 24,000 dead? The whole discussion is so grotesque.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

This is an argument that is no different, in any appreciable way, from the nazis who cast the exact same sorts of doubt about about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

I know we are doing Calm Hitlers in this thread, but posts like this (from an IK, no less) and allowing Nameless_Steve to vomit up his outrageously racist, intensely Islamophobic hasbara drivel should not be acceptable even under the Koos regime for the exact same reasons nazis posting the same sorts of things about doubting the numbers of Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust and Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy poo poo would be immediately -- and correctly -- perma'd. Something Awful should not be a safe place for a fascist ideology, whose ideologues are actively engaged in a genocide.

Koos Group posted:

If it had occurred in UKMT, I don't know, but in D&D proper, yes. Seeing Nazi or antisemitic arguments and their refutations could be quite informative, particularly with the outbreak of this ideology in the past decade, as it would help people not only recognize them but argue against them elsewhere.

Koos Group posted:

It's the same as the benefit of having any position argued by its actual adherents rather than only summarized or analyzed by others. Getting it straight from the horse's mouth means it is more likely to be similar to what you'll encounter in the real world, and you can see what sort of things they might say in response to criticisms.

Mechafunkzilla posted:

What loving difference does it make if it's 35,000 vs. 24,000 dead? The whole discussion is so grotesque.

Nucleic Acids posted:

Eventually a rocket is going to hit one of the bases near the pier and it'll be used as proof that Hamas will genocide their own people via denying them aid befure surrendering.

YF-23 posted:

Gaza is experiencing a complete institutional breakdown on account of being invaded and occupied by a hostile power which harbours no intent on governing the existing population, and which does not shy away from targeting humanitarian workers and international organisations in the area. The 30K+ figure is almost certainly an underestimate, given it hasn't risen much in months in spite of continued bombing, fighting, and induced famine, and my gut says we've crossed the 6 figure mark months ago (I fully admit to this being purely conjecture on my part and not based on any reliable data).

Mechafunkzilla posted:

What loving difference does it make if it's 35,000 vs. 24,000 dead? The whole discussion is so grotesque.

Esran posted:

I think it is valuable to understand that what some media outlets were pushing this last week was fake news, and in what way it was fake. There's no reason to hand a victory lap to people like Nameless_Steve.

VitalSigns posted:

Casualty numbers in the middle of a war are always going to be inaccurate for obvious reasons accusing journalists of lying when estimates are revised later is at best childish if not outright dishonest.

It's an especially laughable accusation in this context when even the low end of plausible civilian death counts is still outrageous.

Darth Walrus posted:

https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1791155389620269252?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q

extremely bleak lol

Paladinus posted:

I guess, technically, if they made sure there were no more patients or doctors in the building, it's no longer a hospital? War crime lawyers, please correct me if I'm wrong.