Trying my best to assume this comment in good faith... Low compared to what? For reference, in the recent war in Ukraine (post 2022), there have been approximately 11,000 Ukrainian civilians killed and approximately 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed [1].
Not to get into the debate about that other war, but there have almost certainly been many more Ukrainian civilians killed than the 11 000 formally confirmed deaths. That's just the number that can be properly verified, mostly in Ukrainian-held territory, and nobody is entirely certain how many have died in the Russian-occupied regions. Ukraine claims a much larger number have died, including more than 25 000 in Mariupol alone, for instance, but that can't be independently verified because it's still Russian-held.
This is at least as true in Gaza too is it not? And over a much shorter time frame, with a significantly smaller population.
The expectation is that there are at a minimum 15/20% dead under the bombed and decimated buildings. It could well be much, much higher, even double, or triple is not infeasible, given the large scale untargeted bombing, population dispersement and recognised IDF tactics that don't allow for groups to even consider searching and rescue operations in most cases but leave possible survivors buried under the rubble to die slowly and horribly.
The current numbers are just not even close to verifiable given the circumstances, but are statistically clearly far worse in terms of civilians on all measures.
One significant difference is that Ukrainian authorities goes really far to evacuate civilians while Hamas goes really far to prevent civilians from evacuating.
Earlier it has been said that based on previous reporting from previous incidents we can roughly trust the total numbers Hamas release evem if they are obviously wrong in that they claim every death to be an innocent civilian.
And if they could, why would they help Israel displace the palestinian population from palestinian territory?
The only resistance groups in the Gaza strip that might have militia units for women that I know about are PFLP and DFLP, and I forgot which one I've seen a video of militia women from. They are probably very small and not deployed at the moment. This means that kids and women aren't in the 'brigades', and that a majority of killed palestinians are "civilian" for sure.
Israel claims that every male they kill is a combatant, and israeli pundits and politicians routinely equate terrorist and palestinian and say things like 'there are no innocent civilians in the Gaza strip'. Neither is true, many they kill are elderly or obviously unaffiliated with the 'brigades'.
Of course, this is irrelevant, since Israel is starving the entire population of the Gaza strip and kills or maims pretty much anyone they see in the areas where they operate, sometimes even other IDF soldiers or hostages.
All reporting I've seen has made it clear that any movement of population in Gaza has been subject to IDF and more broadly Israeli control.
Every reported case I have seen appears to have been demanded by Israel, and the Palestinians have had no choice in it.
I'm not sure we're you think Hamas are involved in this at all?
It's all been forced displacements by Israel. And none of it has been willing. Where people have stayed and not moved often they have died, even with not the slightest involvement with Hamas.
Addressing your second paragraph:
Not quite sure if your point, but the numbers of deaths/casualties are broadly (my interpretation) seen as being as accurate as are available, and likely to be a significant undercount of the real number.
I have to say the continual questioning of, what by a number of significant indicators, looks to be an undercount of the total number of people deliberately killed by Israel, in such a short period is appalling.
It's highly likely that when we say 30,000 it's a wrong figure because it's 40,000 Israel deliberately killed.
If it's wrong and it's only 20,000 Israel killed it doesn't matter. They should still stop the killing.
Not saying it isn't, and I wasn't trying to make a comparison between the two conflicts. Only pointing out the inaccuracy of the quoted Ukrainian numbers.
Also Ukraine is a large country, civilians who were not drafted have mostly evacuated westward, and Poland and other countries have taken in other countless Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, Egypt has built barbed wire fences to prevent Palestinians from crossing the border and taking refuge there. And no other countries are presently accepting large numbers of Palestinian refugees at all.
The barbed wire fences were equally built by Israel, are they not? Israel definitely controls that border.
The current geopolitical outcome of Egypt accepting large numbers of Palestinian is that Israel does what it is doing now to Palestine, to Egypt at some point in the future.
Sadly, whoever takes the fleeing will likely have tremendous headaches in the future -to their own government- because of the people.
Jordan took a large number in the past and they were terrible guests -attempting to overthrow the sovereign government- and got expelled. Black September left a very bad taste in nearly everyone’s mouth. Governments friendly towards Palestine are very much against physically taking them after those events
I think the Egyptian fence has been built by Egyptians.
That border is even more tightly controlled than the Israeli one AFAIK.
Also, some useful conext:
The Israeli border wasn't always like today. It has been progressively tightened step by step as nutjobs on the Arab side used whatever leeway they had to stage suicide attacks and smuggle in rocket parts.
That response is just random propaganda. Can you provide some actual verifiable facts please, or at the very least, something based on your experience and insight?
Egypt currently definitely is, other than in very individual cases.
From Google:
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Egypt, however, has warned against an influx of refugees. It facilitates humanitarian aid into Gaza, but has said a mass exodus of Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt is a red line, saying it fears Israel might never let the Palestinians go back.
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And Egypts real fear is that the Palestinians in Egypt will try to take back Palestine. Which wouldn't be very good for Egypt and engage them in a war with Israel.
Usually you would compare it to other instances of urban combat.
E.g. you might compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in cities, but you wouldn't compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in the middle of nowhere where no civilians were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio has some things to compare against. Part of the problem is it is often hard to identify who is a civilian, and often different battles will categorize them differently. For example, in the iraq war us was accused of significantly undercounting civilian casualties. All this makes it hard to do direct comparisons.
A similar anti-terrorist war featuring large amounts of urban conflict, eg Iraq (3:1) or Afghanistan (4:1.1) — since much of Ukraine is designated armies across open fields.
That article appears to state that the use of human shields by Hamas is not true and fabricated by Israel.
It's not a term I've seen any real evidence for. If anything the opposite is true according to the linked and Guardian article. Israel is pursuing a policy of killing suspected members of Hamas in their family home/building when they are not engaged in warfare, using dumb bombs that guarantee there will be significant civilian casualties, likely in the low to high 10's and possibly higher.
How would that work? Is the IDF somehow forced to kill civilians? If so, how come the palestinian resistance groups aren't and considered accountable for it?
Since we're quoting might as well: "Under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, they killed indiscriminately in streets, houses, kibbutz communities and at a rave music festival.
It took more than three days of heavy fighting for the Israeli army to regain control, and left the country deeply traumatised by violence unseen since the country's formation in 1948.
Police are still working to assess the scale of the sexual violence that was reported alongside the killings."
So even if the ratio is slightly lower (also debatable whether every death they count as “combatant” is accurate), this makes a fundamental difference in terms of IDF’s behavior compared to that of who they designate as “terrorists”?
When the US fights a war we get drones bombing weddings, private mercenaries gunning down civilians in the streets of Baghdad etc. Armies engage in a very brutal practice called war which is different than the more brutal practice we tend to call terrorism. During most wars any western army fights (or really any army) there are usually many incidents one might call war crimes. Now in a post-truth world where words have no meaning you can call anyone anything you want.
When the US went to war after 9/11 what do you think its casualty rate was overall (even ignoring the fact that it didn't fight under similar conditions)? How many children did the US kill (by the way the US considered every male >14yo to be a combatant AFAIK)?
46,319 civilian casualties. I think a guess of 50% under 18yo is probably not off the mark. Some claims this number is under-reported.
52,893 "taliban insurgents killed". I'll bet a fair amount of those also under 18yo.
2,400 ISIL-K.
There are a lot of differences between these wars. Gaza is much denser. The US was under no time pressure and wasn't getting e.g. continuous rocket barrages falling on it.
The IDF in general does not intentionally target civilians. It targets military targets. It might be very loose or too loose in this targeting and in this conflict but it still does as a rule. The Hamas on the other hand does intentionally target civilians and engages in other activities like mutilation and rape. It also uses civilians as shields and intentionally embeds in civilian environments for cover. There's also the little matter of who started the war.
So if you want to designate all military as terrorists then we'll have to find a different word for terrorists.
> Armies engage in a very brutal practice called war which is different than the more brutal practice we tend to call terrorism.
35000 dead, almost 2 million homeless and starving, ~10000 more buried under rubble and ~10000 taken prisoner is somehow less brutal in your eyes than
~1500 dead and several villages deserted, 10000s of thousands homeless, and 200 taken prisoner?
You and I have different definitions of brutality, so afraid I’m this discussion is at its end.
The “biased” video I posted is simply a recording of an interview of a survivor of the kibbutz on an Israeli talk show. Do you have any substantive critique of the video, besides just lazily dismissing it as biased?
You can find interviews with commanders and soldiers about it on israeli television as well.
If you watch footage from Nova you'll see large patches of obvious damage from Hellfire missiles, and footage from kibbutzes commonly show damage way beyond what you'd expect from handgrenades or RPG:s.
I don't know about the "Israeli Zionist European settler Jews", but a plurality of all Israeli Jewish people are indigenous to MENA, so summing the population up that way is a little bit racist. I may be misreading you, though.
I believe the poster above was referring to the biggest representatives of the extremist minority of Israel who are cheering this conflict on in those terms. Not all of Israel is pro-genocide, but those that are are more likely than not to be in that group.
Ironically: the extremist minority in Israel is probably more likely to be of MENA origin, not less. Ben Gvir is from Iraq, for instance. The Mizrahim are generally more conservative, and the Ashkenazim are generally more liberal.
You keep referring to "indigenous" Palestinians and implying that Israelis are themselves interlopers. That simply isn't true. The fact that Netanyahu is Ashkenazi doesn't erase the ethnic identity of the plurality of Israeli Jewish people who are from the region, and for whom Israel is --- like the Palestinians --- their only real home.
A lot of ugly stuff is certainly said by right-wing Israelis (who are, generally speaking, more likely to be indigenous than the left-leaning Ashkenazim). But there's also a great deal of erasure of hostile Palestinian advocacy in your summary as well.
These discussions would be simpler if we could keep focus on the actual misdeeds of the Netanyahu administration, and stop trying to generalize problems out to Israel as a whole. It's not that it's impossible to make such an argument, but as you can see from your comment, those arguments are treacherously difficult to construct reliably without leaving gross, obvious, and sometimes even overtly racist generalizations in them. If you want to condemn the entirety of Israeli society, you aren't putting enough effort into your comments to do so here.
At the end of the day, I don't think it's worth it to try to litigate that kind of question. We're not going to resolve Israel vs. Palestine in an HN thread. But if you must try, the guidelines ask you to try harder than that.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> the plurality of Israeli Jewish people who are from the region, and for whom Israel is --- like the Palestinians --- their only real home.
All but a tiny population of pre-existing Jews in historic Palestine are settler colonialists living in territory violently ethnically cleansed of the indigenous Palestinian population to make way for Jewish settlers.
If Israel is ever forced to abide by international humanitarian law, or through boycott divestment and sanctions, Israel is forced to become an actual democracy where Palestinians are treated as human, first class citizens-- either will lead to Palestinians being able to exercise their UN mandated right of return. With the changing demographics many Ashkenazi will likely leave voluntarily back to Europe/US-- many not only have another place they call home, they retain dual citizenship.
There will likely be a turbulent period with terrorist attacks by Jewish extremists. Palestinians who lost their families to Jewish violence may also engage in revenge attacks. There may also be terrorist attacks by (American/European) Christian Zionists in a last ditch attempt to start the war in the region, that they dream of. But, under Muslim Ottoman rule, people of all religions in Palestine, including Jews, lived mostly peacefully together, so it is possible that they can again. We also have the S. African example-- many of the white European settler colonialist Afrikaners remained citizens of a free S. Africa, but they no longer rule / oppress the indigenous population.
> stop trying to generalize problems out to Israel as a whole.
95% of Israeli Jews support the current genocidal massacre of Gaza. This _is_ Israeli Jews as. a. whole. Another poll showed 80% of Israeli Jews didn't think the genocidal bombing was enough, they wanted greater destruction i.e., greater death-toll.
You seem to think history of the atrocities by the settler colonialist Jews of Israel began with Netanyahu. The Jewish Zionist atrocities began prior to the founding of Israel. There has never been a period in Israel's history when they did not engage in atrocities against the indigenous population.
Netanyahu is a monstrous man, but if he were to be replaced today, his replacement would likely be just as bad, or worse. Israel is a sick society overtaken by blood lust (similar [but worse] to the US after 9/11 blow-back for US atrocities in the middle east [including support for Israel and their atrocities]).
I was unable to locate the study, but a professor of Middle East Studies (in an interview) mentioned a study conducted in Israel which found that those (Ashkenazi Jews) who experienced the Nazi concentration/death camps were more likely to be more aggressive and ruthless toward Palestinians than other Israelis.
Interestingly, Israeli society was also crueler to Jews who experienced Nazi concentration camps. These people were looked down upon as weak. No idea if this dynamic factored into the cruelty these concentration camp survivors exhibited toward the Palestinians.
We disagree, but Israeli polls, Israeli social media posts, Israeli leadership's public statements, and most importantly, Israeli actions, support my statements. Israeli Jewish society, as a whole (including Kibbutzniks living in a kibbutz on stolen land), is responsible for ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide, with extra responsibility to Ahskenazi without whom there would be no Zionist settler colonial project of Israel on Palestinian land.
> erasure of hostile Palestinian advocacy
An occupied, oppressed people, even if they were not experiencing a genocide at the hands of their oppressors have a right to defend themselves both morally, and under international law.
> overtly racist generalizations
I'm sorry that you perceive things that way. It is not my intent. I've been bending over backward to attempt to separate the genocidal monsters in Israel and their supporters, from Jews in general-- non-Jewish supremacist non-Zionist Jews are some of the strongest voices against Israeli atrocities and least likely to be forcibly silenced (but, I recall, in the US, every Muslim [I am not one] being forced to declare how evil the 9/11 attackers were, and I want to see the same with American Jews calling out the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel [or, at least, admit that they too are genocidal racist monsters]). I am also not willing to pretend that Zionism isn't a European creation. Nor that the genocidal monsters in Israel are not Zionist Jews-- recent settlers on stolen Palestinian land. The latter is important, as it is, in one sentence, what the entire "middle east conflict" is about.
I would speak just as vehemently about the German Christian Nazis committing genocide against Romani and Jews of Europe. I just don't think Israeli Jews should get a pass on genocide and other crimes against humanity, just because someone else committed similar atrocities against the ancestors of some of them. And, it infuriates me that within discourse in the US and W. Europe, it is considered "antisemitic" or "racist" to criticize a murderous, racist, apartheid, genocidal, settler colonialist regime just because the oppressors and perpetrators of violence are Jewish. Imagine if criticism of Nazi Germany was instantly shut down by people claiming racism against Christians.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You mainly have simply repeated yourself in your comment. (I am guilty of this to some extent too [necessarily so, otherwise is to concede that Israel has a right to ethnically cleanse, engage in genocide, etc., which I vehemently do not believe], but I hope you will see some of my comment as substantive content as well)
All but a tiny population of pre-existing Jews in historic Palestine are settler colonialists living in territory violently ethnically cleansed of the indigenous Palestinian population to make way for Jewish settlers.
This isn't just false, it's luridly, categorically false. A plurality of Jewish Israeli citizens are of MENA origin --- from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region. They're the "Mizrahim", they're a huge chunk of the population, Israel is literally their only homeland, and they tend to be more right-wing than the "settler-colonialist" Ashkenazim, who tend towards the left.
> from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region.
So, you agree with me. These are Jewish settlers from OUTSIDE Palestine. These followed after the initial European Jews had already engaged in violent ethnic cleansing.
When the English directed their colonialism against Ireland, the settlers were "from the region", but still settler colonialists.
This is what happened to the Palestinian _survivors_ of the original Nakba (violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make way for Jewish settlers):
Zionist Jews poisoned wells, planted bombs/threw grenades into bus stops and shopping centers, mortared Palestinian villages, etc. to mass kill Palestinian civilians and "encourage" them to flee.
What Israel is doing is putting Jews, Zionist or not, in danger everywhere, as many see the people of "The Jewish State" as committing genocide, and the Zionists are doing their best to conflate Zionism and Israel with all Jews (criticism of Israel is "antisemitic").
Outside the US and parts of the EU (especially Germany) news outlets are actually reporting on the genocide-- In the US, CNN even sends all their Israel stories, to Israel to be censored to ensure the "proper" narrative on the Israeli genocide and other atrocities i.e., Americans never hear about them.
E.g., did you see images of the row of Palestinians lined up, face down, on the ground, hands zip-tied behind their backs, then run over by a truck, crushing them-- on your US news broadcasts (or German)? Someone, anywhere in the rest of the world might have. The Israelis are committing monstrous acts for most of the world to see, while claiming that they represent all Jews.
I'm curious, why do you defend them? "Never again" should mean Never again for anyone.
Your apparent claim that poor rural Moroccan and Yemeni Jewish people forced from their communities by mobs enacting pogroms throughout the Middle East and North Africa are "settler colonialists" unworthy of "defense" is racist, and not in a "the real racism is against white people way"; it's Racism Classic(tm).
This is a long-dead thread and we need not keep it alive.
> This is a long-dead thread and we need not keep it alive.
Agreed.
You haven't outright admitted it, but your technique of repeatedly accusing those criticizing Israeli policies/atrocities as being racist while never addressing any of the Israeli atrocities is SOP for Zionists.
Good luck. Hopefully some day, you will consider the lives of the indigenous Palestinians of equal value to those of the brutal genocidal Israeli Jewish Zionist settler colonialists who stole the Palestinians homes, land, and the lives of their children, parents, brothers and sisters-- people who never had a quarrel with Jews before the Zionist Jews, of Europe, attacked them, and stole-- everything.
At 2:1 civilians to combatants, this is an unusually low civilian death count.