Comment by richardfeynman
1 year ago
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.
From my understanding their numbers have been fairly accurate throughout the years, do you have any specific examples of prior extreme discrepancies? (Because from what I followed, even the US believes those numbers to be accurate, but I would be happy to be corrected)
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-officials-have-gro...
I'll answer your question, but first I'll ask you a question: Do you know how the Gaza Health Ministry generates their death toll? What do you think of their methods? My guess is you don't know but you trust it because you see these numbers repeated in the media (just like China's COVID death toll).
If you ask me how Israel calculates its death toll the answer is pretty simple: they use archaeologists, forensic medical teams, and more
One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy was the Health Ministry claiming that ~500 innocent civilians died when Israel bombed al Ahli hospital. Of course, we later discovered the hospital wasn't bombed, the parking lot was, the bomb wasn't dropped by Israel but was rather an errant rocket from Hamas, and that far fewer people died. In other words, a series of lies. The Health Ministry never corrected the death toll and kept adding from that.
Beyond this, here's one of many analyses casting shade on the Health Ministry's statistics: https://twitter.com/Aizenberg55/status/1744381711993946209
You can google around for dozens more. As I said to the prior commenter, I'd rather not have a debate here about whether the numbers are accurate (not because I'm not confident but rather because of the famous XKCD) and I simply mean to point out that Paul Graham has one standard for China's COVID death toll and a completely different standard for Hamas's Health ministry figures.
I still this still ignores important points, and ill make some comments and questions, some of which might be pedantic so feel free to ignore them
1. Regardless of the method, it was fairly accurate for years, and matched closely to Israeli estimates of casualties in prior conflicts.
2. The US, Israeli's largest ally, is not doubting those numbers. This alone says alot given that the US from a strategic perspective would want to present Israel in the best possible light they can given the majority of the globe is heading towards leaving Israel in isolation.
3. The Israeli claim against Almamadani hospital incident is placing the blame on Islamic Jihad (not Hamas) (pedantic point)
4. The issue of Almamadani hospital incident is still not settled, especially as the Israeli claimes have been debunked by multiple entities most notably the New York times. [1]
5. Ignoring the questionable numbers of this specific incident, because you might be right, but its interesting that the US's admission that the death toll coming from Gaza is accurate came at a date way after the Al mamadani hospital incident (my claim would be that this incident has been taken into consideration by the US officials when they admitted the accuracy of the death toll coming from Gaza). This paired with the US's strategic support of Israel makes their admission that the death toll is accurate is way more trust worthy than possibly exaggerated COVID death tolls, as in one case its an admission playing against the admitter, whereas the other case the admission is in favor of the admitter.
But thank you for sharing the Twitter thread, I'll investigate it and look into other sources as well
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/world/middleeast/gaza-hos...
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First, Israel has been carpet bombing Gaza for weeks on end. They have destroyed everything & bombed housing, schools, mosques, churches, universities, kids schools, restaurants, bakeries & every aspect of civilization there.
How many Palestinian journalists have been murdered or had their families targeted and extended family bombed by the IOF?
The IDF have targeted & murdered more journalists in 2 months than in any other conflict.
The IDF is the only military on the planet that has a military court for juveniles and imprisons them by the thousands. You can search this all out on YouTube & see footage of it. They were holding boys in open air cages in the winter. Their parents not even knowing which military prison their kids were in.
We see the US bombs falling 24/7 on all of Gaza. We see what is going on every single day.
We know the Israeli policy of “mowing the lawn” every few months.
We SEE it. You should own it and be revulsed by it, just as you should by the Israeli Apache gunships emptying their machine guns at Israelis at the concert or the tank rounds. Or shooting unarmed Israeli civilians hostages waving a white flag.
What policy is that called by the IDF again? Oh yeah, The Hannibal Directive. Only now they target their own.
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Aizenberg55 seems like a disinfo propagandist shill. No different than any other shill, Gazan or Russian or German.
For instance, Aizenberg55 discounts the fact that over 10,000 bombs were dropped in the first 10 days, which resulted in higher casualties than in the later stages of the war, with fragile lives that of infants and young kids dying of shock and fear. It is also easier to count the fatalities when an entire building is reduced to rubble and everyone in it is either buried or dead. You don't need archaeologists and nuclear scientists to count.
> What do you think of their methods?
Their methods have been known to be robust. IDF, in the past wars, have arrived at similar numbers to those presented by the Gazans.
> One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy.
Just like the discrepancy of 40 beheaded babies? Or the murder of a fictional Holocaust survivor? https://twitter.com/yairbrill/status/1748836323908346359 Applying your own logic, why do you even trust IDF or Zaka, then?
> Paul Graham has one standard...
- First, people are allowed to be wrong and change their minds when presented with facts. There is no need to hold them to prior beliefs and beat them for it forever.
- Second, if you don't personally know Paul Graham, I doubt you're in a position to judge whether he's willfully accepting ordinary claims just because he's a closet anti-semite, when the fact is, a wide number of independent institutions also accept those claims.
...is there any reason to doubt these figures? Is there any reason to suspect that Hamas is any less trustworthy than the Israeli government is?
For example, Hamas claimed that an Israeli bomb struck a Gazan hospital and killed 500. Later the consensus viewpoint is that (1) it was a failed Gazan rocket launched at Israel that malfunctioned, and (2) it struck in a parking lot and the death toll is likely much, much lower. Hamas, a terrorist organization that repeatedly launches rockets at Israeli civilians, does not have a ton of credibility.
Yes, of course there is reason to suspect Hamas is untrustworthy. I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press. This doesn't mean they always tell the truth, but there is no equivalence between them and Hamas.
In terms of specific reasons to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry numbers specifically, I could go on forever about that, but I don't see the point of doing so on HN. It's not a tech-related question.
> Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press
Israeli law allows news censorship by the IDF. Currently, if you are a news outlet working in Israel, you have to pass your war coverage by them [1,2] even the CNN is forced to do this [3]. I don't know, but you seem to have a strange definition of free press. Should I list some of the series of scandals of IDF caught laying in the past to complete the picture? Just remember that they tried to convince people that the words [Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday] in Arabic are Hamas members names [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor
[2] https://theintercept.com/2023/12/23/israel-military-idf-medi...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2024/01/04/cnn-israel-gaza-idf-repo...
[4] https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-...
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I believe there is very little reason to assume the numbers are not accurate. Not only have their numbers been fairly accurate in previous conflicts, but also many US officials believe them to be accurate if not underreported.
It feels more like an Israeli attempt at using fog of war and the masses ignorance on the matter to soften the reaction and spread doubt about the real numbers. As this talking point was continously used by Israeli spokespersons even after US officials believed these numbers to be fairly accurate. I would be happy to be corrected, I wish the numbers are actually less, and would want this to be the reality.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-officials-have-gro...
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>Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley
With Netanyahu and other far right parties in power I'm not sure this is argument you think it is.
Also not great numbers with the free press either:
https://rsf.org/en/index
Better than some in the region, but not great.
And the refrain gets old when used as a cover for Israels terrible actions, but it actively makes me ill nowadays, maybe not as ill as "IDF is the most moral army in the world" when I think about the tens of thousands of kids they have blown up (killed and injured) I suppose.
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A liberal democratic state? You consider likkud a liberal party? I suppose Irgun was liberal too.
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> I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press.
None of this has any bearing on whether or not Israel's word is actually worth anything (...or Hamas's word, for that matter).
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