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Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds
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- Title
- Civilian toll from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza is 'unprecedented killing', study says
- Authors
- Julian Borger
- Published
- Dec 9 2023
- Word count
- 902 words
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Even this is a significant underestimate, operating on the assumption that all non-elderly adult males are Hamas. From the Haaretz article:
Wars are so stupid. Humans will never get along all the time we have imaginary rules created by invisible Gods that didn't write a darn thing. Then some crazy nut turns those lies in to a cult level and pushes people in to doing stupid stunts like murdering people who don't look to fit in to their cultish behaviour.
The ideology of Tildes is great - don't be an asshole. If that could be generally applied to all humans there would not be casualties of wars. Most wars end up being a dick measuring contest as it is: "We killed more of your people than you killed of ours!" It's so depressing.
Marked this as noise because while the sentiment is nice this is quite misguided. These issues are not primarily about conflict between two religious groups, nor is there dispute about religious issues.
I beg to differ: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67039975
What is Hamas and what does it want?
Hamas is a Palestinian group which has run Gaza since 2007.
The name is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which means Islamic Resistance Movement.
The group wants to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state.
Its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, is thought to have about 30,000 members.
Hamas has fought several wars with Israel since it took power, firing thousands of rockets into Israel and carrying out other deadly attacks.
In response, Israel has repeatedly attacked Hamas with air strikes, sending in troops in 2008 and 2014.
Hamas - or in some cases the al-Qassam Brigades - has been designated a terrorist group by Israel, the US, the EU and the UK, as well as other powers.
I seem to remember immediate and universal outrage about the Israeli civilian deaths. why do you think that's not happening with Palestinian civilian deaths?
Probably because Hamas explicitly targeted civilians, unlike Israel which is generally going after military targets. Not to mention the fact that Hamas made a conscious choice to endanger civilians by hiding among them.
Hamas kills Israeli civilians = Hamas's fault
Israeli military kills Palestinian civilians = Hamas's fault
there is a magic force field around the Israeli military that prevents them from ever being responsible for any collateral damage they cause.
if the Israeli military kills civilians, they weren't trying to, so you should be thankful they didn't kill more.
and shouldn't the civilians themselves share some of the blame? if they didn't want to die, they simply should have been more than one explosion radius away from anything the Israeli military might think is a Hamas target.
To a significant degree, I don’t disagree with this. This article makes many good points. Certainly Israel is killing a lot of civilians, but they clearly aren’t the only group to blame for this. Hamas actively causes civilian deaths on both sides to achieve their goals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/opinion/columnists/hamas-war-israel-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.gp68.2GTg-zILO9Hr&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share
…
here's an archive link for anyone blocked by the paywall.
oh boy.
from his wikipedia:
if you're looking for opinions about foreign policy, someone who supported the Iraq War and continued supporting it even 10 years later is maybe not the best person to rely on.
doubly so when you're not looking for just any foreign policy opinions, but specifically opinions about the morality of killing civilians in the Middle East.
Stephens also has a history of promoting race science:
there's been allegations that the Israeli government's actions towards Palestinians constitute genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
an opinion piece from someone who has previously argued that Jewish people are inherently genetically superior to non-Jewish people is maaaaaybe not the best way to argue against those allegations?
Are there any non-ad hominem criticisms of the specific excerpts that I selected?
what you're calling an "ad hominem" I would simply call "evaluating the source of a piece of writing". it's one of the foundational techniques of media literacy.
from the nonprofit Poynter Institute, for example, this is a page aimed at teaching media literacy to teenagers: Lateral reading: The best media literacy tip to vet credible sources
for an opinion piece, it seems like the simplest possible application of this would be to look up the columnist's Wikipedia page or previous writings and see what their track record has been.
but anyway, sure, let's avoid the "ad hominem fallacies" or the "basic principles of media literacy that get taught to schoolchildren" or whatever you want to call it, and look at what Stephens wrote:
he links to a Reuters YouTube video as his source for this. which is a somewhat odd choice, because Reuters published an article the same day about the same story.
from that article, which has a couple of key details the video leaves out:
so in the first paragraph, it's made clear that it's not just Hamas, it's also mosques.
the article also gives some of the reasons why Palestinians might have chosen to stay, regardless of any messages broadcast by Hamas or by religious leaders:
and points out that if they did try to flee, there's very few places where they can go:
and lists additional groups, besides Hamas, that rejected the Israeli demand of forced relocation:
so Stephens claims that Hamas wants Palestinians to stay, rather than comply with the Israeli military evacuation order. the source he cites lists many other reasons why Palestinians might choose to stay in their homes.
meanwhile, it sure seems like history has proven the Palestinians correct in their skepticism about Israel's "evacuation" orders?
Dec 9th: Israel orders more evacuations in Khan Younis after US blocks Gaza ceasefire call
people who listened to the Israeli military and fled northern Gaza into southern Gaza are now being told to flee southern Gaza.
moving on to the next thing you quoted from Stephens:
the source he links here is a 2014 Washington Post article.
ahh, the good ol' days, when 1,300 Palestinian casualties was considered a lot.
we get another example of the Israeli military's Magical Anti-Responsibility Force Field:
"forced to respond" is an interesting choice of words. "Hamas chooses" but "the IDF is forced to".
there's a school, Hamas hides weapons at the school. and the Israeli military is forced to respond. they have no choice in the matter. someone in the Israeli military gives the order to fire, and possibly someone else actually pulls the trigger or pushes the button. but somehow, they have no agency or control over their own actions. they were forced to respond.
for some reason, within the bounds of the force-field, "we're not going to bomb that school, even though Hamas is using it to store weapons, because the strike would kill innocent children" is not an option. they are forced to bomb the school.
another comparison I've made before is to the Mariupol hospital airstrike in Ukraine in 2022.
the Russian military alleged that the Ukrainian military had occupied the hospital and was using it as base of operations. then they bombed the hospital.
that airstrike was widely condemned as a war crime. and people correctly noted that there is no "two wrongs make a right" exception for war crimes. if it were true that the Ukrainian military were using the hospital as a base of operations, that would be a war crime, but under no circumstances does it justify the Russian military committing a war crime of its own by bombing the hospital.
somehow, the Israeli military MARFF means that two wrongs do make a right. Hamas commits war crimes by storing weapons in schools and hospitals and mosques, and when the Israeli military is "forced" to bomb those schools and hospitals and mosques, it's totally fine and not a war crime and actually justified and also a terrible tragedy that is entirely Hamas' fault.
getting back to Stephens' op-ed:
from the WSJ article he cites as a source:
this "source laundering" is a cute little propaganda technique. Stephens says the WSJ reported it, but the WSJ made clear they were just repeating what the Israeli military said.
Stephens could have attributed that statement directly to the Israeli military, but that would have made the bias and the incentive to exaggerate the estimate a little more obvious. when you read "The Wall Street Journal reported" it's easy to assume that was an independent calculation done by a WSJ reporter.
it's also kind of laughable to hear criticism of Hamas in the form of "look how much they're spending on their military while neglecting the needs of their citizens" coming from conservatives who supported the Iraq War (oops, there I go again with "ad hominems")
a single Israeli Merkava tank costs $6 million USD. Israel has 360 of them and another 300 more on-order. and that's just of the latest version, the Mark IV.
the Israeli Air Force has 39 F-35 fighters at a cost of $110 million per aircraft as of 2015
but gosh, Hamas spent $90 million (according to estimates from the Israeli military) building tunnels and that shows how bloodthirsty they are, at the expense of the civilian needs of their population.
back again to his op-ed, here Stephens seems to basically admit to the criticism that Israel has made Gaza an open-air prison - but claims as usual that it's the Palestinians' fault:
do you agree with Stephens on this point?
I will address one point you made regarding a misunderstanding about what the international law says about war in and around hospitals. You state the following:
Hospitals are protected, but not under all circumstances. Hamas’ use of hospitals to stage acts of war means that hospitals can be valid locations of military operations under certain circumstances. See the head ICC prosecutor’s comments:
From: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-be-military-targets-international-law-israel-gaza-al-shifa
I'm curious why you didn't quote the part immediately after that. and why you cut off the first part of his sentence ("One:") which made it clear he was making a multi-pronged point.
here's the full paragraph, with the part you selectively quoted in bold:
that second and third point seem to be important.
I did not quote those portions because they do not support your incorrect argument that, under international law, staging war from hospitals does not cause the hospital to lose its protected status. Under the circumstances in Gaza, the burden to prove that acts of war are staged from a given hospital is on the IDF, of course. That doesn’t mean that the IDF cannot engage in military operations after a hospital is used by Hamas troops. The burden as to who must prove what is not relevant to either of our points, because your longer original comment still misapprehends international law (and my cited quotation points that out more succinctly and in a more targeted way).
I would argue that evaluating a piece of writing should extend to more than just the byline. The more important part is the actual content.
This is whataboutism -- is this relevant to the argument that Hamas is intentionally putting civilians in harm's way? Any other reasons that Palestinians have are irrelevant, since the only point I am concerned with is Hamas' motivations -- which is gaining human shields, to make the invasion more difficult and to gain sympathetic press coverage due to civilian deaths.
Of course, since Israel intends to sweep the entire territory of Gaza. There should have been no expectation that they would be asked to move only once, so I'm unclear on what the point being made here is.
Yes, Israel is forced to respond since not responding will inevitably and immediately lead to more Israeli deaths. There's no meaningful choice here.
On the other hand, Hamas does not have to murder festival goers. There's no universe where their choice to commit this terrorist attack results preventing Palestinian deaths. Hamas was not forced to do this in any sense.
This is apples to oranges. This figure of $90m covers a mere 32 tunnels -- At its peak, almost 2,500 tunnels running underneath the Egyptian border were used to smuggle in commercial goods, fuel and weapons by Hamas and other militant groups., and doesn't even get into the amount of money being spent on weapons. It's worth noting that the amount being spent on attacking Israel is even more significant when we consider the relative low economic output of Gaza. The diversion of the economy into pointless attacks on Israel is an even greater disservice to the Palestinians when placed in the context of their available cashflows.
Is my personal opinion relevant to the argument?
I would like to point out that the article you’re quoting is an opinion piece. These are somebody’s personal viewpoint and not objective reporting or actually any other type of reporting
The excerpts I selected, and especially the parts that I boldfaced, were specifically not opinion based, and are as far as I know factual statements of Hamas intentionally doing things to put civilians in harm's way.
It's easy to say you're going after military targets when you consider every adult male under 60 a military target.
The fact that someone thinks using Israel's own numbers for how many civilians they're killing is "stirring the pot" is extremely indicative of what a warped perspective these people have of the conflict. Even if you take all of Israel's assumptions as fact and use the numbers from their own studies, it makes them look bad, so let's pretend 1400 dead in a terrorist attack is remotely similar to performing an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
From my perspective as an outsider, this feeling is mutual, and arguing over whether either side is justified in that feeling is moral grandstanding. Regardless of whether an opinion is correct, no one actually involved will care.
The big difference is that Israel has the military power to create their ethnostate if they decide to go on an ethnic cleansing crusade while Hamas does not. A dead civilian is a dead civilian, regardless of whether the UN classifies it as the result of genocide, terrorism, or ethnic cleansing. So much online discussion eventually slips into the tone of “those dead civilians don't count because their nation did much worse things.”
How does killing more civilians make that situation better?
I don't know what point you're trying to make, but according to Wikipedia:
I thought there were soldiers killed at the border...