… while Blinken, playing both sides of the table, says no to a Gaza ceasefire but wants more aid sent to Gaza and France is sending armored vehicles to Lebanon.
Israel is starting to loose important political backing in its war on Palestinian people.
Every conflict since at least 2006, the Hamas health ministry releases casualty numbers.
Then after the conflict subsides, the UN sends in professionals to verify the numbers.
The UN has verified the Hamas health ministry’s numbers as accurate every time.
Yeah you just can’t ignore history leans toward these numbers being accurate to deny them is deliberately trying to cover for Israeli war crimes.
I think the worry is that because of the scale of war the UN likely won’t be able to check their work this time and that their claimed casualties in the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion are around 4 times higher than most other credible estimates. And those were revised down from an initial estimate that was about twice as high as that. It doesn’t take much to lose credibility.
On the other hand, it’s not like there’s anyone else reporting. If you’re basing the estimate on historical data, I guess the safest assumption for now is that those numbers are high but not that high. And that about a third of those reported deaths are Hamas fighters (the HM doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians). I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t hold though. It’s a way higher intensity attack from Israel and also a much more existential fight for Hamas.
I think it’s important to distinguish between good faith criticism, like you are doing, and the people screeching that “I dont believe the 10k number bc its Hamas”. The latter is genocide denial, it rhymes with “I dont believe 6m died in the Holocaust.”
And yes I agree the fog of war is thick, the initial reports of 500 dead at al-Ahli hospital were overblown and sensationalized.
But I think the safe assumption is that the 10k number is a significant undercount. The health ministry counts corpses in hospitals and morgues. It isn’t able to count people buried under rubble, bodies incinerated, corpses strewn across the road outside Gaza City, direct hits that leave nothing behind but pink mist, etc.
Look at it from the other side: Israel has said it launched over 9000 rockets, so if the 10k deathtoll is accurate, then each rocket killed only 1.1 persons on average. This death rate per rocket is very low, especially considering many are launched into heavily populated urban areas.