Comment by tety
1 year ago
it is accepted by the UN because there is no other figure. they have no other way of estimating, also the UN is far from a neutral element in this conflict
The UN is a political body composed of the political interests of its members, which are mostly authoritarian states, and it hasn’t shown much support for Israel due to the vast membership of Islamic countries. Parody case in point, Iran being Human Rights commission seat
UNRWA, the UN agency on the ground was shown again and again to be in the very least in the mercy of Hamas therefore cooperative, at most its infrastructure and staff was used by the organizations for attacks against Israel and to hold hostages.
The ICJ in this case heavily quoted UNRWA as a source while it is an extremely problematic one.
The hospital bombing I quoted above is an example case where many experts tried to estimate casualties based on evidence, they arrived to figures that range from tenth to fifth of what Hamas published.
This together with the fact they control the casualty figure and have a clear interest at inflating it in order to stop Israel from attacking, is pretty obvious to me what’s going on.
Leaving the fact that this figure also includes Hamas members, and therefore is useless at estimating if there is excessive collateral damage
That's just motivated reasoning. The UN is multidisciplinary. If you have a better source, present it.
Even if the true numbers are a quarter of the given figure that's still way too high.
the fact there isn’t a better source does not make the only source reliable.
This is going to be a major issue when the actual court case will have to rely upon it.
the numbers will always be ‘too high’ as they are the number of civilian deaths in a war.
However, if they are much lower relative to similar conflicts than that changes a lot. Currently we have no way of knowing that, yet still people attribute these numbers some magical properties
The precise number doesn't matter if it would be unacceptable at an order of magnitude lower.