Israel and Zionism

[runrussellrun]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... eath-toll/

Biden’s dismissal of the reported Palestinian death toll

The Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,400 civilians and soldiers, according to a count by the Israeli prime minister’s office. Israel’s response — a bombing campaign and now a major ground assault — had killed 8,309 as of Sunday, according to a count by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, a militant group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

In any war, statistics on deaths are fuzzy and subject to change. Almost a month after the Hamas attack, the precise number of dead from it is unclear, as 200 bodies remain unidentified. As of Tuesday, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper had published the names of 1,009 verified dead (657 civilians and the rest soldiers, police and rescue services), with names being added daily.


The daily death count released by the Gaza Health Ministry has helped stir protests around the world, as the total has quickly exceeded the number of dead suffered by Israel. The Israel Defense Forces said it launched more than 7,000 airstrikes into the Gaza Strip, a seaside area that’s only twice the size of D.C. with more than 2 million people.



At an Oct. 25 White House news conference, a reporter began a question to Biden by noting that “the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children.”

Biden’s dismissal of the ministry’s statistics — that he had “no confidence” in them — was striking. The State Department has regularly cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights reports. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. “Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy,” an OCHA official told The Fact Checker.


Medhat Abbas, the Gaza Health Ministry’s director general, said in an interview that he was so disturbed by Biden’s comment that he ordered his staff to release a 212-page document with the name of every victim identified so far — including age, sex and identity number. The list included almost 7,000 names.

With any numbers, there are caveats. Questions have also been raised about the ministry’s statistics after a still-murky incident at the al-Ahli Hospital was said to have killed nearly 500 people. So let’s explore whether Biden’s opinion of the statistics has a factual basis.

How the Hamas health ministry collects data
Abbas said the ministry primarily relies on death certificates from hospitals and morgues in compiling its daily counts of the number of dead in the conflict, which is then collected in a computerized system. In the document released after Biden’s comment, which was through Oct. 25, the deadliest day was Oct. 24, when 756 people were reported killed, followed by Oct. 23, when 704 were reported killed, and Oct. 17, when 678 were reported killed. The hospital incident took place Oct. 17.


And for each day, more children than adults were listed as killed. On virtually all days — with the notable exception of Oct. 17, the day of the hospital incident — more males than females were reported as killed.

In its death counts, the ministry makes no distinction between the deaths of civilians and combatants. Neither does it list whether a person was killed because a Palestinian rocket aimed at Israel fell short of its target and crashed into a populated area of Gaza. The ministry only lists aggregate totals.

OCHA, when it does its own post-conflict reports, seeks to determine the percentage of combatants. After a 2012 clash, for instance, OCHA determined there were 2,133 deaths in Gaza, of which 644, or 30 percent, were combatants.

In 2014, the New York Times analyzed 1,431 names listed by the ministry as being killed in a war with Israel that year. The newspaper found that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, was the most overrepresented in the death toll. That population represented 9 percent of Gaza’s residents but 34 percent of those killed.

[jhu72]

Hamas has no clue how many hostages are alive and where they are.

Israel is 1000% not going to stop the war if Hamas released every single last hostage still unaccounted for.

+1000

[OCanada]

Why is it that none of the usual suspects on this forum are upset about Hamas using Palestinians as human shields? I'm only asking for a friend.

Probably because you're projecting your ignorance? Virtually everyone here has condemned the use of human shields and hospitals and kids for Hamas to hide behind.

As do most people around the world.

Does the use of human shields excuse murdering thousands of women and children in offensive strikes where no fighters were present?

murdering thousands?

Curious to know where you got your numbers from other than some opinion pieces

suck would suggest you back that claim up with some evidence


potusa agrees with suck. Hamas is not to be trusted in any way, shape or form.
Or did Joe Biden backtrack on that comment as well?

Hou are a fountain of misinformation. To date more than 30,000 confirmed dead most of which are women and children with estimated thousands more still not recovered.

Meanwhile famine is imminent. Everytime you post you reveal your disregard for accuracy and preference for fight wing rhetoric. In this instance Bengie the corrupt.,

This all just angry, spite filled trolling.
RRR's intentions are becoming clear, to clog the threads of a forum he was banned from for a very long time.
But he's back with a vengeance.

Another source to ignore

[Typical Lax Dad]

Why is it that none of the usual suspects on this forum are upset about Hamas using Palestinians as human shields? I'm only asking for a friend.

Probably because you're projecting your ignorance? Virtually everyone here has condemned the use of human shields and hospitals and kids for Hamas to hide behind.

As do most people around the world.

Does the use of human shields excuse murdering thousands of women and children in offensive strikes where no fighters were present?

murdering thousands?

Curious to know where you got your numbers from other than some opinion pieces

suck would suggest you back that claim up with some evidence


potusa agrees with suck. Hamas is not to be trusted in any way, shape or form.
Or did Joe Biden backtrack on that comment as well?

Hou are a fountain of misinformation. To date more than 30,000 confirmed dead most of which are women and children with estimated thousands more still not recovered.

Meanwhile famine is imminent. Everytime you post you reveal your disregard for accuracy and preference for fight wing rhetoric. In this instance Bengie the corrupt.,

This all just angry, spite filled trolling.
RRR's intentions are becoming clear, to clog the threads of a forum he was banned from for a very long time.
But he's back with a vengeance.

The personification…

[MDlaxfan76]

yup, we pretty much all didn't think Hamas was a reliable source of information that first month. Nor now.
It's not like we entirely trusted Israeli estimates either. Still don't.

But there's all sorts of international aid groups on the ground, so numbers are far more reliable than if they came from either combatant group.

total gaslighting trolling to suggest otherwise.

[PizzaSnake]

yup, we pretty much all didn't think Hamas was a reliable source of information that first month. Nor now.
It's not like we entirely trusted Israeli estimates either. Still don't.

But there's all sorts of international aid groups on the ground, so numbers are far more reliable than if they came from either combatant group.

total gaslighting trolling to suggest otherwise.

Fog of war?

“ Though it is unclear if the medic was referring to the same scene, residents said that in no other home in Be’eri were two teenage girls killed, and they concluded from the video that the girls had not been sexually assaulted.

Nili Bar Sinai, a member of a group from the kibbutz that looked into claims of sexual assault at the house, said, “This story is false.”

Reached by The Times, the medic declined to say whether he still stood by the account, saying he would like to put the attacks behind him.

Later, an Israeli military spokesman said that the medic stood by his testimony but might have misremembered the place where he saw the teenage girls. The spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the attacks on Oct. 7 are the subject of an active police investigation, said the medic operated in several villages that weekend and might have seen the teenagers in a different kibbutz. The spokesman did not specify which one. There is no complete public record of how every victim of the Oct. 7 attack was killed.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/worl ... hamas.html

[PizzaSnake]

This is interesting:

"Yitzhak Yosef’s weekly sermons rarely make waves outside the cloistered world of Israel’s fervently religious ultraorthodox community. But when the chief Sephardic rabbi addressed the faithful earlier this month, he touched off a political firestorm.

Yosef said ultraorthodox Jews, known as Haredim, would leave the country if the government began to conscript them for the army. The sermon added fuel to an escalating debate about a decades-old exemption from military service for religious students that has opened rifts in Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition.

“If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” said Yosef, who wields significant influence within the ultraorthodox Shas party, the second biggest party in the coalition. “All these secular people don’t understand that without [religious schools], the army would not be successful . . . The soldiers only succeed thanks to those learning Torah.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/c35044ef-8c4 ... fe25ed2d60

[jhu72]

This is interesting:

"Yitzhak Yosef’s weekly sermons rarely make waves outside the cloistered world of Israel’s fervently religious ultraorthodox community. But when the chief Sephardic rabbi addressed the faithful earlier this month, he touched off a political firestorm.

Yosef said ultraorthodox Jews, known as Haredim, would leave the country if the government began to conscript them for the army. The sermon added fuel to an escalating debate about a decades-old exemption from military service for religious students that has opened rifts in Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition.

“If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” said Yosef, who wields significant influence within the ultraorthodox Shas party, the second biggest party in the coalition. “All these secular people don’t understand that without [religious schools], the army would not be successful . . . The soldiers only succeed thanks to those learning Torah.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/c35044ef-8c4 ... fe25ed2d60

... I just love these folks. They are a real big part of the problem. They want the much more moderate majority of the citizenry to do their fighting and dying. These folks should be put in a cage with the radical Muslims and US Evangelicals. They can settle the who's dog is real question before involving the rest of us.

[jhu72]

This article is the "get even" for Canada not agreeing with the Israeli administration that genocide is ok. The US is next on the list after not using our veto to silence the rest of the world.

[PizzaSnake]

This article is the "get even" for Canada not agreeing with the Israeli administration that genocide is ok. The US is next on the list after not using our veto to silence the rest of the world.

That's right. All countries only succeed due to the students studying the Torah...

Now, they are free to believe whatever they wish, but "keep that crazy to yourself, please."

[Seacoaster(1)]

Very interesting article on the results of this conflict in an elite American academic setting. The author is the son of the NYTimes's reporter, Peter Baker, and the New Yorker columnist, Susan Glasser:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... as/677864/

Too long; let me know if you hit a paywall.

[PizzaSnake]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-histor ... for-draft/

"In a step that could have deep political and societal ramifications, the High Court of Justice issued an interim order Thursday evening barring the government from providing funds to ultra-Orthodox yeshivas for students eligible for IDF enlistment — as the legal framework for deferring their military service will no longer exist.

A government resolution from June 2023 instructing the IDF to temporarily not draft Haredi students despite the expiration of a law governing the matter will itself expire at midnight on March 31.

The court decision, which goes into effect April 1, comes after the government delayed for days the submission of a proposal to the court for plans to increase ultra-Orthodox military enlistment, and constitutes a sharp indication from the judges that their patience with repeated attempts to put off decisions on the matter is finally running out."

Maybe Bibi should consult the King of Delay on this matter?

[jhu72]

The possible outcomes of the court decision to require Orthodox conscription.

[youthathletics]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

[PizzaSnake]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

Oh, FFS! Really, a bovine intervention? Flipping morons, the lot of them.

“The cows he was talking about are red heifers, which now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Some Jews and Christians believe they're key to rebuilding the Jewish temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and to beckoning the Messiah.”

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

Oh, FFS! Really, a bovine intervention? Flipping morons, the lot of them.

“The cows he was talking about are red heifers, which now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Some Jews and Christians believe they're key to rebuilding the Jewish temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and to beckoning the Messiah.”

[Typical Lax Dad]

[jhu72]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

Oh, FFS! Really, a bovine intervention? Flipping morons, the lot of them.

“The cows he was talking about are red heifers, which now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Some Jews and Christians believe they're key to rebuilding the Jewish temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and to beckoning the Messiah.”

... These are crazy - stupid Jews! 2 billion Muslims in the world, 16-17 million Jews worldwide and they want to start a real war with all of Islam. This isn't the Palestinians.

I vote the US stay the f*ck out of it.

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

Oh, FFS! Really, a bovine intervention? Flipping morons, the lot of them.

“The cows he was talking about are red heifers, which now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Some Jews and Christians believe they're key to rebuilding the Jewish temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and to beckoning the Messiah.”

... These are crazy - stupid Jews! 2 billion Muslims in the world, 16-17 million Jews worldwide and they want to start a real war with all of Islam. This isn't the Palestinians.

I vote the US stay the f*ck out of it.

In the same manner that

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israel ... e-al-aqsa/

Oh, FFS! Really, a bovine intervention? Flipping morons, the lot of them.

“The cows he was talking about are red heifers, which now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Some Jews and Christians believe they're key to rebuilding the Jewish temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and to beckoning the Messiah.”

... These are crazy - stupid Jews! 2 billion Muslims in the world, 16-17 million Jews worldwide and they want to start a real war with all of Islam. This isn't the Palestinians.

I vote the US stay the f*ck out of it.

I wish the US would stay the f*ck out of the war in Ukraine. What about the chicken hawk who proudly flies his yellow and blue flag in support of the war he gets his rocks off on? Why don't you go to Ukraine Doc and become cannon fodder for the war you love. You could become a patriot and give your life for a worthy cause.

[youthathletics]

Interesting discussion on how Hamas has played the moral-card in war: https://x.com/HilzFuld/status/1777301113412239442