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Notes -
This article asserts that the figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry on civilian deaths since Israel's invasion cannot be trusted. It links to this article, which argues that the figures provided are obviously fabricated given how they violate statistical expectations.
I am not very good at stats, so can someone tell me if these arguments are credible?
is what you would expect if the total number of daily deaths exceed what can be confirmed by a finite number of personnel in a given day. If a week-long heavy wind wipes out 3000 poles a day, and I only have the personnel to confirm 2000 a day, then we should expect almost metronomical linearity in the reporting of fixed poles. The article states that “the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%”, and that’s enough variability to align with the above.
This only make sense if boys those under 18 are not sent by their mother to obtain goods. In fact, these boys are much more likely to be targeted by Israel when they are gathered in a group without women present. Additionally, per the above, there may be separate areas for corpses based on age — usually they try to keep the children alive as much as possible, or rescue them first, etc
There has never been any evidence that Israel is targeting Hamas fighters. They may very well be targeting the extended families of those who they believe could possibly be Hamas fighters. Israel has dropped 30,000 bombs just by December, whereas there are only 20,000 Hamas fighters. They could literally be targeting whoever they think are the smartest Gazan residents and we would have no idea because there is no evidence or verification of their attacks’ successes.
What incentive does Hamas have to undercount the civilian death toll of the Israeli invasion? The only times governments do this is when the preservation of domestic civilian morale outweighs the need for international support / condemnation of the enemy. This is clearly not the case for Hamas, whose only hope of maintaining control of Gaza is that third parties pressure Israel into withdrawal, and which is strongly incentivized to hugely overcount civilian casualties as a result. We saw this early in the invasion with the Shifa bombing hoax where Hamas claimed a death toll of 500+ in an Israeli strike that never actually materialized and that appeared to actually be a comparatively small explosion in a parking lot. We see it regularly with the repurposing of historic footage of previous bombing casualties as current. This does not suggest any reason why they’d undercount instead of just ‘estimating’ strike casualties even if they couldn’t verify corpses on the ground.
Prewar estimates of the number of Hamas fighters was 30-40,000, not 20,000. Given the scale of some of the destroyed tunnels so far (many detonations on /r/combatfootage) it’s widely believed that many thousands of fighters remain in the tunnels. The military strategy is to secure the surface so that these tunnels can be detonated with minimal IDF casualties.
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.
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 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.
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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