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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2966 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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In no previous conflict has the Gazan Ministry of Health overcounted mortality figures — they have proven reliable in their counting based on history. You need to prove that Hamas has taken control of the ministry of health when we know that the leadership of the ministry is more affiliated with other groups like Fatah and Palestinian Authority. If the ministry has a finite number of trained officials to verify deaths, which is probable, then the number of verifications has a ceiling. They would not be pulling random Hamas fighters in tunnels and putting a white coat on them and telling them to verify deaths.

the Shifa bombing hoax

Run a google search of my comments on that if you want. Did you forget that a month after this hospital bombing, the NYT put reporters in another hospital and were able to verify Israel bombed that one? Or did you forget that the hospital administrators — a hodgepodge of anglosphere Christians — confirmed that Shifa was attacked by Israel days before and warned of an impending attack? Israel and US claim it is a hoax, there has been no evidence that it was a hoax.

appeared to actually be a comparatively small explosion in a parking lot

The parking lot which we know, from tweets made before the event, hosted sleeping refugees. I made an archive of that tweet and you can find it in my original comments on the event.

30k

DNI disagrees with you

Run a google search of my comments on that if you want. Did you forget that a month after this hospital bombing, the NYT put reporters in another hospital and were able to verify Israel bombed that one? Or did you forget that the hospital administrators — a hodgepodge of anglosphere Christians — confirmed that Shifa was attacked by Israel days before and warned of an impending attack? Israel and US claim it is a hoax, there has been no evidence that it was a hoax.

The hoax wasn’t that there was never a strike (although the jury seems to be out as to whether it was Israel or a failed Hamas rocket launch), but that 550+ died in it.

They would not be pulling random Hamas fighters in tunnels and putting a white coat on them and telling them to verify deaths.

Perhaps not, but again, they have every incentive to overcount deaths and absolutely zero incentive to undercount them, which is highly meaningful in this kind of invasion scenario. Again, I’m not arguing that total deaths are vastly lower than recorded, just that they’re unlikely to be much higher.

DNI disagrees

That data is old. Reuters’ sources inside Hamas reported their strength was 40,000 fighters pre-war, and they tend to be pretty reputable. Israel thought it was 30,000, but they were caught off guard. And of course many young men will have been drafted in or volunteered as fighters since the invasion began.

DNI disagrees with you

Is it possible this website is out of date? I note that its list of "Notable Attacks" committed by Hamas stops at April 2022 and doesn't mention October 7th.

2022 is recent enough, though. It’s unlikely they can recruit 10,000 fighters in just one year, one third of their entire force. But they could still just be wrong about the numbers.

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