Comment by somenameforme
5 days ago
Exceptions don't define the rule, the rule does. Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000 members before the war. They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.
In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.
> Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000
Where did you see that estimate? Some estimates were ~40k, with many more recruits added during the war. And not everyone attacking the IDF was Hamas-affiliated. PIJ alone had thousands of fighters, and as we saw on Oct 7, sometimes random Gazans join in on fighting too.
> They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.
Hamas themselves claim ~70k, which already includes fighters and non-combat deaths. There are a lot of questionable works trying to embellish the numbers. One of them used garbage data like WhatsApp chats. Another ended up with an estimate of 380k deaths for age 0-5, which is impossible since there were never that many in Gaza.
It's interesting to compare to Ukraine, because we don't see the same desperate attempts to embellish numbers there. Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" were killed in Mariupol, which is one significant digit; he didn't pretend to have more precision than that. He didn't send out a Google form so that they could claim a specific (but dubious) count. We didn't see a bunch of Western academics desperately trying to justify higher death counts.
The exact sources and numbers one wants to use don't really matter. You're right that there's a high uncertainty, but only in details. The overall picture is quite clear and consistent. In Gaza, Israel is primarily killing civilians under the pretext of seeking out a relatively small number of Hamas militants. And they have killed a significant percent of the entire population of Gaza, which only had a total population of ~2 million.
For instance the Lancet carried out a study using a variety of sources for cross-referencing, including things like obituaries, and found ~70k deaths in the first 8 months of the war, a war that's now been going on for years. And those deaths they measured were also only those caused directly and immediately by Israel due to traumatic injury. Famine, disease, despair, an other such deaths are not counted and bring it up substantially higher.
Politics in the US waxes and wanes, increasingly between extremes. Israel has already alienated itself from one 'side' in America, and is gradually doing the same with the other. Consequently, the fate of Israel in the future is more uncertain than ever - imagine an Israel not only lacking US support, but with an antagonistic US government in charge. And they also aren't exactly making friends with Russia or China. Making enemies of the world as a micronation is generally not a wise path to go down.
As for Ukraine, there's similarly a clear picture. There's no doubt that civilians are being killed but there's also no doubt that the vastly overwhelming majority of all deaths are military. So the situations simply aren't comparable.