>We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths
We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18.
:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes...
Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza.
I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza).
I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.
> We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths.
Unfortunately we have.
> Don’t start stupid wars
This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas.
> Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational
Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
> they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it
Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation.
> appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers
Correct. Israel isn't a superpower.
(Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.)
On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't)
> Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win
Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance
even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion.
There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
> that's not war, thats war crimes
It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.)
The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons.
I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...
Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children.
2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied.
3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then.
The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds.
>We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tens of thousands of child deaths
We have absolutely tons of credible evidence in fact. In September, The Gaza health ministry published names and details of 34,344 identified dead ( the remaining 7,613 that made the official death toll were unidentified). Of these 11,355 are children below the age of 18. : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes...
Gaza Health Ministry figures have been generally found to be reliable by international agencies, western governments and journalists from years of experience in previous conflicts and corroborate their own independent investigations and reports. Israel will also have full records of most of these people given that they issue ID cards to Gaza.
Indeed, Studies like the recent one published in Lacet suggest that the actual “traumatic injury deaths” might be closer to double the official ministry figures : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-tol...
I haven't mentioned the thousands of missing buried under rubble or dismembered into multiple pieces or eaten by stray dogs. Or deaths due to starvation and disease (due to Israeli blockade of water and food) and excesss deaths due to denial of access to medical care (again due to the blockade of medicines and due to Israel's deliberate targeting of every hospital in Gaza).
I have yet to read a credible report that doesn't also mention the very high proportion of children (and women and elderly) in the casualty figures.
> We have absolutely zero credible evidence of tends of thousands of child deaths.
Unfortunately we have.
> Don’t start stupid wars
This was indeed an insanely stupid move from Hamas.
> Hezbollah (and Iran) has been rational
Idk if I'd call that rational: they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it. Only do discover that appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers.
> they were afraid of going war against Israel and they mostly tried to appease it
Fear can be rational. Rational fear measures costs and benefits. It's balanced by grimmer trigger strategies [1], e.g. disproportionate retaliation.
> appeasement doesn't really works well against expansionist superpowers
Correct. Israel isn't a superpower.
(Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win. If there is no possible world in which you win, the correct move is to drop the organised response to preserve resources and go guerilla. Part of the reason for maintaining peacetime readiness is so that you have the option of grim triggering.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy
> Israel isn't a superpower.
On the middle east scene, the balance of power is so lopsided in favor of Israel that I stand with this qualifier even though I use it in a way that isn't the most common way (as a “global superpower”, which Israel isn't)
> Even so, you only don't appease an adversary if you know you can win
Winning can take many shape, you don't have to be able to eradicate an opponent to be better off than if you tried to appease him and lost everything. For instance even if Ukraine were forced to accept a peace deal that involve losing all of the occupied territories, they would be far better off than if Zelensky caved before the invasion.
There's no doubt that the outcome for Nasrallah wouldn't have been worse had he declare open war on Israel directly after Oct 7th. The problem is that he though he had a lot to lose, when instead given Israel's long term plan he could only have improved his position.
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> Conservative figures show that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-child...
Edit: also that's not war, thats war crimes
11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
> that's not war, thats war crimes
It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.)
The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons.
I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...
Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.
> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.
1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children.
2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied.
3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then.
The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
So again, you're splitting semantic hairs to try and imply that the damage is being overstated when it is in fact as accurate as one can be.
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> these are always the dumbest disputes
They’re a test on the source. (And I’d argue that yes, there is a meaningful difference between ten thousand and tens of thousands of deaths.)
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> They should have taken the deal in May.
It wouldn't have happened no matter what Hamas wanted back then, as Netanyahu was fighting the ceasefire anyway.
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