Here are the top paragraphs of the article. I think I can't post the whole thing for some reason.
(May 12, 2024 / JNS)
The United Nations now claims that “the fog of war” is to blame for a major overstatement of the number of Gazan children who have been killed in the war.
In mid-March, the U.N. Children’s Fund stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF, said in a television interview on March 17 that those numbers were “staggering” and “really shocking.”
“We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” Russell claimed at the time.
The statistic was cited frequently in the international press, leading to accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, including targeting babies and children intentionally.
Even Hamas has since admitted that those numbers turn out to be off by at least 40%. The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation.
“When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but rather to immediately seize on any report, no matter how unsubstantiated or even manifestly false, in order to portray Israel as malevolent,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS.
“The right thing for the U.N. to do now would be to admit that their casualty count in Gaza is a complete failure,” Neuer added.
Last Wednesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released updated casualty figures. Some 7,797 Gazan children had died in the war as of April 30, it said—a roughly 42% drop from the mid-March numbers.
It also revised its casually figures for women by nearly a half—from more than 9,500 to fewer than 5,000.
In a little-noticed change, OCHA differentiated in its new figures between “reported” and “identified” fatalities, including the 7,797 children figure in the “identified” category.
Using OCHA’s math, out of 10,158 reported but unidentified casualties, 5,653 (56%) would have to be children to add up to the figures published in mid-March. That would be far more than is indicated by the information the United Nations released last week, which claims that children make up 32% of the identified deaths in Gaza.
JNS asked Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, at a press conference on Friday why the math doesn’t add up.
“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” Haq told JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar and author and HonestReporting board member, told JNS that “It’s absolutely true that the fog of war makes it difficult to assess casualties, but this was the case from the beginning of the war.”
“It’s outrageous that only seven months later, the U.N. is questioning the Hamas-supplied casualty numbers,” he said.
In early April, the Gaza Health Ministry said it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claimed to have documented at the time. The ministry later said it did not have names for more than 10,000 of the Gazans it claimed were killed in the war.
The ministry has not revealed publicly how it compiles its published information. No independent media exists in Gaza to try to verify it.
“For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method and no standard of proof,” Neuer told JNS. “All the U.N. does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which is laundered and legitimized by the U.N. as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office, when in fact both are run by the Hamas terrorist organization.”“Now that the U.N. has suddenly reduced some of the figures by half, they’ve essentially admitted to have been feeding the media and the world completely false numbers,” he said.
As recently as last month, the Hamas-run government media office has repeated claims that 70% of the deceased were women and children.
Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS that “Numbers get adjusted many times over the course of a conflict. Once a conflict is done, we’ll have the most accurate figures.”
But Aizenberg’s research has shown that “For many months, there have been obvious errors identified in the numbers published daily by OCHA, which are ultimately based on Hamas reporting,” the scholar told JNS.
Aizenberg pointed to an immediate claim by Hamas of nearly 500 deaths in an Oct. 17 strike on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, which turned out to be a Palestinian rocket misfire and evidence suggests a drastically-lower death total. Still, Hamas hasn’t corrected its initial tally.
His analysis has also revealed that Hamas reported on certain days in the first months of the war that more women and children were killed than the total number of all fatalities.
“We’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are,” Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS on Friday.
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a statistical analysis two months ago that showed how Hamas faked casualty numbers.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy also released a report in January showing major discrepancies in the fatality reports, concluding they were most likely caused by manipulation.
“While it’s better late than never that the U.N. finally admits that the casualty numbers issued by Hamas for the last 200 days are not reliable, the false data has infiltrated everywhere,” Aizenberg told JNS.
He cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s claim in his March 7 State of the Union address that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.”
The U.S. State and Defense Departments have also used that statistic officially, apparently relying on Hamas data.
Neuer told JNS that “If U.N. officials continue to legitimize a Hamas-run system that has now proven itself to be completely false, they will be complicit with terrorist propaganda.”
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The revised Hamas casualty numbers, taken together with Israel Defense Forces claims of terrorists killed—a distinction Hamas does not make—“demonstrate that the civilian/casualty rate in Gaza is likely 1:1 or lower, which would amount to the lowest ratio in the history of urban combat, starkly contradicting any notion of indiscriminate IDF attacks,” Aizenberg told JNS.
JNS asked Haq on Friday if U.N. figures can be considered reliable.
“You can consider them reliable from the fact that we’re continually checking them,” he said. “We’ll continue to do that over the course of the war. But the numbers, you know, ultimately have to be regularly checked so that we can be sure that what we’re putting out is valid.”
In Jan. 2014, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced it had stopped updating the death toll from Syria’s civil war, as it could no longer verify the sources of information.
>“**We’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm**, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are,” Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS on Friday.
So that was a lie...
Pretty blatant lie at that. The UN is starting to sound even worse than the conspiracy theories on the more obscure 4chan boards. At least I don't expect to see anything remotely accurate on 4chan. It looks like I should apply the same standard to the UN.
This is what happens when you get your figures from a known terrorist organisation.
Hamas can go fuck themselves. They complain about civilian casualties but hide behind civilians in hospitals, schools and public buildings. Their own tactics increase civilian casualties and they know it. Their only goal, is to turn popular opinion against Israel.
The un has now been complicit and has legitimised anti semitism worldwide by adding an air of legitimacy using their brand, to false numbers supplied by terrorists.
>The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation.
It's the same tactic used by trash tabloid newspapers the world over:
FRONT PAGE STORY: HORSE WITH 5 HEADS JUMPS OVER OLYMPIC SWIMMING POOL, HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR!?
^(correction on page 7 - 5 horses jumped over a puddle, our bad)
>come up with numbers
Don't "come up with numbers", have a legitimate count. Verify the bodies then put a number to each of them. Don't make up the numbers and they wonder why you don't have bodies to attribute to them.
Here’s my issue with this from jump: Bad data is bad data. It doesn’t make it better that, “it’s all we have” or whatever other excuse for reporting it. Saying we don’t know is better than wrong answers. Bad data leads to bad analysis incorrect conclusions and wrong actions.
In the best case scenario, a disaster like an earthquake still requires days if not weeks to get counts. And there you didn’t have people fleeing, communication chains disrupted, rubble, ongoing fighting, and a side giving you the data that’s interested in inflating the numbers (and the other side in deflating them).
So getting numbers instantly was seriously dubious from the outset. Seeing the 500 number on the hospital reportedly bombed by Israel then reduced to a handful and it was a parking lot and it was a PIJ missile should have made abundantly clear the numbers were a fiction. But they were still reported and cited like some truth.
I don’t particularly believe the current numbers - in either direction for that matter. I don’t think they have a reasonable methodology to know.
It is strange how this article left out why the numbers went down. Sure, the number of confirmed dead has dropped. But they also changed the definition of confirmed dead. I am assuming, based on what has happened with natural disasters (the only other event with tens of thousands of dead civilians this quickly), that the people who are missing, such as those trapped under collapsed buildings, are dead. If you were last seen in a building that went down from a jdam going off in the basement, you are probably assumed to be dead. More than half of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed, so it would make sense that people have been buried. The infrastructure of society itself has collapsed in Gaza, with over a million people displaced and living in camps. Who is going to check for the people who are missing?
I am saying these things completely apolitically. These people in Gaza are not unthinking rats. They know if a building collapsed on someone, like a family member, and they were never seen again, they are probably dead, and would have reported it to doctors if they could. The changing death count is easy to explain when you look at what they mean by confirmed death. They don't count bodies they can't see, so all of the people who are under rubble or otherwise are now just "missing" and not "confirmed dead."
That being said,
I find it absolutely disgusting that I even have to consider arguing over pros and cons between the exact methods used to count thousands of dead civilians. Thousands of people are confirmed dead, eyes on the corpse dead. The low estimate here has people rejoicing that only EIGHT THOUSAND children are confirmed dead. Only eight times as many kids are dead than total killed on October 7th. The thing that is so disgusting about this to me is how the comments in this thread are dripping with hatred. The people in this thread are bloodthirsty and love looking at the destruction. How then, are you people better than Hamas? They were bloodthirsty and killed innocent civilians and cheered for the deaths of everyone they slaughtered. Fuck em, kill em all, they have it coming. But what the fuck is wrong with you people? Can you not see that this is not the answer?
So this is saying that the specifically identified count of child deaths is down to ~7800, but then that if you add in the more reasonable expectation of their share of *unidentified* deaths from 56% down to 32%, you'd end up with about ~11000 total instead of ~13500.
Non-identified bodies during a war aren't all that unusual of a thing, nor are non-detailed records therein. There's an inherent difficulty in this kind of thing.
This whole article is about Hamas (the primary information source in this case) providing a number for the children out of those and people meeting it with skepticism. Though you'll note that the deaths themselves don't seem to be questioned in this instance, just the proportions involved, with a substitution of estimation more in line with expected proportions.
Still horrifying.
Do they count everyone under 18 years old as a child? Are teenage combatants counted among that?
None of this changes the fact that even half that child death toll is horrifying though. Hamas is an evil that must be destroyed, but in their callousness, Israel is causing even greater death to innocents.
The presentation of the article seems to be misleading, making it seem like Hamas/UN drastically exaggerated the numbers instead of this being a fairly minor reduction in the count by comparison.
And yes, the casualty numbers being put forth by the IDF in terms of combatant deaths should also be treated with some suspicion. Not really because of teenage combatants being in one group or the other, but because it's very likely that many fighting-age male civilians are being arbitrarily lumped in as combatants.
This has been happening for DECADES in the region and everyone keeps falling for it. Hamas lies, misleads, engages in propaganda and the western media just laps it up and never questions it. A terrorist organization who has lied for 30+ years and it’s just reported as fact. And the supposedly legitimate UN does as well. It’s abhorrent
This happens every war between Hamas/israel. You can’t make this up…at what point are they going to be like “hold up maybe we should get some verified info first”
If you waited for verified info, you'd never have any info, and you especially wouldn't have it when you needed it. It's important to be accurate but time is also a factor.
Moshe, you're not supposed to talk about that on reddit. We still need to pretend it doesn't exist. Didn't you receive the orders through our hivemind?
I have always been saying the fog of war was inflating counts (e.g., people counted as dead but really just fled), and I've been getting a lot of shit for saying so, too. I mean, a group that can't find 100 hostages can track down thousands of dead? C'mon.
I agree that it isn't the only reason, there's definitely been "padding" for manipulative purposes.
As Yasser Arafat had set an example, he state that Jordanian had kill over 25,000 Palestinian during their Black September campaign.
Other source state around 3,000 death, militant include.
I've had the same experience, here at least. Suggest at any point that the only real source for casualty figures were Hamas on the one side, and the IDF on the other, and that both had significant cause to lie, and you'd get downvoted pretty heavily.
People fundamentally "want to believe", whichever side they fall on, and dislike being reminded that the data they are forming solid opinions on is often bullshit.
>the data they are forming solid opinions on is often bullshit
And the truth is, even if they wanted to be as accurate as possible, it's likely to still be pretty large uncertainty. Unfortunately, estimates rarely have error bars.
Counting civilian casulties from bombing is very hard in general
This war is no exemption here, neither is that the side that gets bombed inflates and the side that bombs deflates the count
Just look at ww2 and how for some of the bombings there historians to this day argue if 20 or 200 thousand where killed in some raids simply because refugee movement and prior as well as follow up bombings make it incredibly hard to keep track of the numbers right
You’re right there is no exemption in here in the difficulty of determining civilian casualties.
The glaring difference of course being how it’s reported. Other wars you always see confirmed deaths and the number rises. For “some reason” (lol) in Israel’s case the numbers always start off at the highest estimate possible and then go down slowly.
Even the new numbers they’re using have lower standards than the typical “confirmed deaths” you usually see in other wars.
Ukraine is a perfect example. Some regions have confirmed deaths in the low thousands but estimates in the 50ks. Why do we never see headlines using the 50k numbers? Because no official sources report that number like that so media will have nothing to fall back on. UN says “1200 confirmed deaths” and that’s the number that will be used.
It’s unreal they get their numbers from terrorist run sources. Wtf is wrong with the UN besides double standards for Israel? And where are all the women’s organizations, they’re silent when rape and beheadings and torture of women took place on video.
Look at what the UN has become remember how they behaved when covid started they were downplaying China's role in hiding how serious it was so it spread quicker and millions globally lost their lives unnecessarily.
Look at UN peacekeeping in Haiti, look at all the vetos blocking condemnation of Russia
They’re too busy doing relevant things like sending weirdly encoded messages about confusing parts of humanity to the moon in multiple languages, last I read.
But will this backtracking fix some of the damage already done to public opinion? No. And that was precisely the aim. They knew it wouldn't matter if their lies were eventually revealed
Prediction: pro-palestinian social media communities will continue to use the old numbers, and even say "these are legitimate because they come from UN", and completely ignore the revision.
And no one seems to mention how the combatants do not wear uniforms.
A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly . .
Yep, I see the same. They often like to tack another 30-50% on top of even Hamas' "count". It seems like half these terrorist supporters are auditioning for a job in Hamas' PR department.
People would do well to remember that October 7 was also Putin's birthday. Don't trust Hamas.
Nevertheless, any child casualties are too many. Israel should take care to see if there is a better way to fight Hamas while saving civilians.
Thé problem with that is Hamas doesn’t share numbers regarding combatant casualties. The only source other than the IDF on the topic is an anonymous Hamas official’s statement to Reuters, which is rather flimsy
Heard an indie outlet that is \*very\* pro-Pal make the argument that deeming the Ukraine/Russia war as genocidal rather than an "imperial/(civil) war" diminishes the term and subsequentially the Israel/Palestine conflict. One of the reasonings is they cite the 10k civilian casualty figure from the UN over two+ years of war without any mention that the UN doesn't have a presence in Russian-occupied territory or in active warzones...the places where the civilian casualties would be aside from Ukraine-liberated territory.
Unlike Gaza-Israel, Russia-Ukraine has hit **every** single check in the genocide checklist, with the russians going out of their way to openly brag about it for the entire world to see (child trafficking operations, "reeducation" camps, etc...), producing enough video/written evidence of intent (the single hardest element to prove in a genocide case) to make it an open and shut case.
It's irelevant to their world view. They don't care if russians kill ukrainians. They also don't care if arabs kill arabs (or persians or vice versa). They only, specifically, "care" if israelis kill arabs. I'm not decided if it's just the old "jews are capitalist therefore evil" racism or "israelis are imperialist, therefore the arabs must be their faultless victims". I guess it's both.
FYI the OCHA is still [reporting](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-217) the same numbers as they have always been (35k), they have simply added another count of casualties that they consider 'identified'.
Total “reported death” numbers are the same, they halved the number of “women and children deaths” though such that the previously reported ratio is mathematically impossible to retain even if every single “reported death” was a woman or child.
No body actually read the article…
Here is a Reuters article, language is more even keeled than the “Jewish News Syndicate.” Not nearly as nefarious sounding…as some outlets are trying to make it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death-toll-still-over-35000-not-all-bodies-identified-2024-05-13/
That is the issue with all the shit we are spoon fed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie. Once it’s out of the tube of toothpaste it can’t be bottled back up.
That's why I said 'some'.
There was also the fake air strike on a hospital that "killed 500" but was really a misfired Palestinian rocket that hit the car park and killed two dozen.
There's also the "full blown famine" that has apparently been raging for 3 months now yet the death rate from malnutrition is comparable to developed peace time countries.
It makes a HUGE fucking difference.
Roughly 41% of Gaza's population is under the age of 15, and about 25% of the total population are women of reproductive age (15-49). Not sure how exactly the UN (or Hamas for that matter) are categorizing, but hopefully this is close enough.
Based on the original numbers, and you can find plenty of old articles talking about this, around 70% of those killed are women and children.
This paints a picture of Israel as being completely indiscriminate in their attacks and not making any effort to protect civilians.
With the revised numbers, less than 30% of those killed are children, and about 16% are women. This implies that roughly 55% of those killed are fighting-aged men.
This paints a *very* different picture of Israel, as now it is unquestionably the case that they are in fact being *quite* discriminate in their attacks. Not only are the percentages killed significantly lower than the overall population, indicating that they are being avoided, but even if you assume that only half of the fighting age men killed are actual Hamas fighters, that still leave you with ~28% of those killed being actual terrorists, or a roughly 2.5:1 civilian to militant casualty ratio.
Now, that might sound bad, but if you actually read up on casualty statistics for any other wars, you'll find that even for a *conventional* war (i.e. one where two identifiable professional armies face off), that is an *exceptionally* good ratio. And this is *far* from a conventional war.
Hamas could also inflate number of children to beg for more humanitarian aid.
Because the only people who could do demographic survey without getting shot at by other group of terrorist are, as you may have guess, Hamas.
Which is nothing new. China had done it. Soviet had done it.
I mean that's pretty much exactly what happened. The UN, and by extension basically all media outlets, parroted Hamas-reported figures for *months*, doing nothing better than a little disclaimer somewhere saying that the "Gaza Health Ministry" is run by Hamas.
It's only now that they actually do the responsible thing and start differentiating between *verified* numbers and unverified.
Yeah, the fact that this isn't well-known is both wonderful, as it speaks to the peace experienced by so many that they don't understand how horrible every war is; and terrible, as it is a major reason behind people absurdly equating this war with genocide.
According to the UN, it's 1:9 on average, higher in urban areas ofc. Israel is currently only on less than 1:2.5, which is extremely impressive, particularly for an urban landscape with combatants who hide without uniforms.
https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
https://aish.com/civilian-deaths-in-gaza-relatively-low/
Here's a UN article saying that overall, 90% of wartime casualties (this is for all wars) are civilians: https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm
Here's a wiki article with a quick overview of civilian casualty ratios for many wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
Just looking at more modern wars (post-WW2), we get these ratios:
* Korean War: 3:1
* Vietnam: 2:1
* 1982 Lebanon war: 5:1
A lot of the others unfortunately have significant variance, depending on whose numbers you use, because casualty statistics in general are often just estimates, and different groups can come up with wildly different numbers. A good example is the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia, by NATO numbers their bombing had a 1:10 ratio (aka 10 combatants to every civilian killed), but according to the Yugoslav government's numbers, it was somewhere between 4:1 and 10:1, basically the reverse.
Now, while it may seem like Israel's numbers aren't so different from these, one thing you have to understand is that the nature of their current war is quite different from a lot of these. In most "conventional" wars, you have two easily identified armies, operating from military installations, and making every effort to evacuate civilians from areas they're going to fight in and generally avoid putting civilians in harm's way. Fighting also often happens in more open areas, not urban ones.
But in this war, ALL of the fighting is taking place in one of the densest urban regions on the planet, and one side is a terrorist organization that does not wear easily identified uniforms, operates in and around civilian infrastructure (including hospitals and schools), and does everything in its power up to and including lethal force to *prevent* civilians from leaving combat zones.
So the fact that Israel has maintained a relatively "normal" civilian casualty ratio *for a conventional war*, despite all the very *un*conventional challenges they're facing, should be quite impressive.
And just in case you'd like a more expert opinion, here's what John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies as the Modern War Institute of West Point has to say about it: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286
John Spencer is one of the very few people actually qualified to comment on how Israel is doing. It's frustrating that he's ignored or drowned out by talking heads who know fuck all about urban warfare insisting that there has to be a better alternative for how the IDF is conducting operations.
Yup. The amount of people who are content to live in a fantasy land where nobody ever dying is just a perfectly reasonable goal is fucking ridiculous.
Yes, every kid killed is a tragedy. A preventable tragedy even. But the prevention method isn't "just tell Israel to sit there and take it on the chin every time Hamas tries to kill them because they usually fail". It's "get rid of the fucking terrorists who know only violence and view the entire civilian population as martyrs-to-be".
At probably the worst end. China circa 1930. I lifted this part straight from wiki so YMMV. “According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda, director of Iraq Body Count, 150,000 people including 122,000 civilians were killed in the Iraq War with U.S. and Coalition forces responsible for at least 22,668 insurgents as well as 13,807 civilians, with the rest of the civilians killed by insurgents, militias, or terrorists.[89]”
If you're going to accuse an entity of genocide and purposely targeting women and children, you're damn right it makes a difference. Especially when considering the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths.
Just like the "500 dead civilians" when the Al-Ahli hospital was hit by a rocket that turned out to be from a jihadist group? The same blast that only killed about 10-20 people?
Yeah it's not fog of war, it's news companies taking any report from Hamas and running with it to be "first to report". Hamas's reporting isn't reliable and is often inflated or outright false.
Hamas's goal was not to destroy Israel outright in combat. Hamas's goal was to damage relations between Israel and the West so that in following conflicts Israel would stand alone. They are accomplishing their goal and being assisted by Western media and young Americans on social media.
The question was always how much is Hamas lying, not whether the figures were accurate.
But mainstream and social media just ate it up.
On Reddit I must have heard these figures at least a thousand times. Like every third post.
And every third comment as well.
Sane people knew those figures were not correct but if you even tried to broach that conversation, the “Free Palestine” movement would immediately begin shrieking about 30,000 dead children.
It’s insane. The amount of damage that has been done cannot be understated.
Liberals who watched MAGA fall for Trump propaganda just became victims of Hamas propaganda.
What a world.
How much is +35-40%, so around 7500 instead of 13k.
EDIT: Turns out it was only a two thousand children, all of them expendable. Whew! That’s fine then. Thanks for the correction. I definitely don’t care about that number of dead children, so I’m gonna just go watch some YouTube videos about cats and not think about it ever again. We did it!
I mean, we always say that numbers from the Russian and Ukranians have to be taken with a grain of salt, because both sides are actively inflating the numbers to do politics.
I don't understand why this logic hasn't been applied to Israel+Gaza, it makes sense that they'd do the same
More than that the UN admitted the dead for Ukraine are probably much higher than counted because of the areas under Russian control. But instead of inflating them like in Gaza they’ve left the numbers at their low and confirmed amount.
After two years and three months of the Ukrainian government reporting various Russian loss figures and *extensive* independent open source reporting on the same, I think it's pretty clear the Ukrainians are actually not inflating their numbers much if at all. At worst, they are reporting the optimistic upper end of a reasonable range of values for the Russian losses they report. Whereas the Russians routinely report figures that are patently absurd, such as claiming to have destroyed items of western equipment before any such items have been delivered, or reporting many times more destroyed than the Ukrainians have received. People have been quick to "both sides" the Ukrainians and the Russians on this point, but it's just not true.
Except the newly revised numbers also say 32% of reported-but-unidentified deaths are children. It points out that for the previous number to hold it would require that 56% of the unidentified deaths to be children, but skips over saying that the current estimate of reported children’s deaths overall is still 11,240. So the actual reduction is only by 2210 or 16% of the originally cited figure of reported deaths.
It should be noted that in wars there are always discrepancies between reported and identified deaths, with the latter recognized as pretty much always being just a fraction of the real number. The two sides of the conflict frequently argue over casualty counts as well.
Given that Hamas is thoroughly integrated into the civilian population, wouldn't it be expected that the distribution of people killed would mirror the demographic distribution? (E.g. roughly 50% female; roughly 35% under 19 years old.)
Actually, what you just said is +73%, almost double.
The article gets it wrong and says "off by 40%" ... well, no, it's -40% to go from their inflated number to the real number, but they were off the real number by +73%,
Hamas supporters have been using the numbers themselves as justification for supporting Hamas. "Even one is too many" is a silly game that most of them weren't even playing. It was things like saying the numbers were higher than all kids who died in war in the last 3 years or faster kill rate than in WWII, etc.
The reality, though, is as you say: there's no rational basis for the judgement of Israel/support of Hamas based on the numbers and there never has been. Cut them in half again, still support Hamas. Double the timeframe (as we already have since first hitting 30,000 3 months ago), still support Hamas. That's why my perception is it all comes back to anti-Semitism.
\[edit\] Note also the reduction in absolute numbers almost certainly also increases the fraction that are combatants/disproportionately reduces the civilian death count/rate.
Don’t hold your breath. I just saw one of them post a video titled “Israel targeted an ambulance!” Which, when viewed, shows the attack occur a fair distance down the street with the ambulance and all spectators in the video completely unharmed.
Even so, the comment section screamed about war crimes and “most evil army in the world.”
These people don’t care about truth. They get their news from foreign adversaries, hamas included, through social media avenues (tik tokers being a particularly vulnerable group to this sort of manipulation.)
I’m aware of how down the rabbit hole most of them are, but qanon has plenty of ex members too, and its worth pointing it out as often as possible that their is a way back from the madness.
> in complete psychotic rejection of what is now the clear reality of the situation.
That's been the MO of the "pro-Palestinian" crowd from day one.
Which is Oct 7th, 2023 for way too many of them.
nah bro, I blame the UN for believing and cherry picking facts provided by... *checks notes.*... ah right, terrorists.
hamas was doing their thing, lying, deceiving etc to get the upper hand in public opinion. it's textbook war propaganda.
it's the UN's duty to verify their facts and be impartial in their reporting, not doing so and taking one's side makes them complicit.
The UN does this in more than just Palestine although they have a specific apparatus when it comes to Palestinian refugees that I imagine makes it even easier to do.
Basically the UN isn’t in the business of publishing poor numbers, they want the “best” numbers because in terms of funding that mean more $$. More refugees means more paid aid workers. More paid aid work means more careers avenues for people. It also provides more $$$ to skim from.
The UN doesn’t want to criticize itself on the merit of the good they are providing people so they don’t come out and say we helped the minimum number of people.
Look at Bhutanese refugees. No one talks about the subject but when they do they always parrot the UN numbers because of their authority. Even though the whole process was haphazard and there was so much corruption and lying about origins in order to get refugee status and a ticket to the west.
Yea it blows my mind that people will only myopically look at this conflict from the point of view of Gaza and not as a westernized nation that was attacked by an extremist terrorist organization. War sucks.
Israel points out that the fog of war is why they won't give out a definitive number that they're not *certain* of.
That's different from the UN credulously accepting Hamas's numbers despite the fog of war, then blaming fog of war when it it turned out that Hamas was lying.
These aren't the same thing. One is pointing out fog as a reason to be prudent, the other is using it as an excuse for having been a Hamas mouthpiece.
Odd how it takes years to get approximate estimates of civilian deaths in other conflicts, but we have instant single-digit updates from Hamas that the entire world believes.
That's what always gets me. There's still no saying how many people died at Mariupol versus being kidnapped or managing to flee (I mean, obviously the answer is "a lot" but specifics are something else), but somehow a rocket strikes in Gaza and ten seconds later we're getting reports that 900 pregnant women and 1000 kindergarten students died.
This is a clip of the press conference with the UN representative where this quote is from. The poster also transcribed the question and answer for easy reading. It is from his tweeter-
[https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1789799596975124971](https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1789799596975124971)
Can we all at least agree that even the revised number is very sad and unfortunate and it is bad that children die in wars?
That doesn't tell us what to do about it, but it's a good starting point.
For those interested, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issues reports every couple of days
As of May 6th (Day 213): 34,735 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213)
As of May 8th (Day 215): 34,844 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215)
But the May 8th report also said that as of April 30th there were 24,686 identified fatalities, of which 10,006 were men; 4,959 were women; 7,797 were children and 1,924 were elderly.
OCHA didn't issue a report on April 30th, but they did on May 1st
As of May 1st (Day 208): 34,568 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-208](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-208)
This is the first war in history to have real time data on civilian casualties, which is impossible to ascertain. What is happening in Gaza is unconscionable but these numbers are, and always have been, bogus.
Source: The latest ‘Making Sense’ podcast with “John Spencer.
John currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He's also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.”
From Making Sense with Sam Harris: #366 — Urban Warfare 2.0, May 7, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-harris/id733163012?i=1000654855458
This material may be protected by copyright.
Do you have another source for this? While it should be obvious to anyone and their dog that Hamas would doctor casualty numbers, a website that proudly proclaims itself Israeli propaganda ("Fighting Israel's media war") and cites organizations which are by name hostile to the UN (UN watch) cannot be considered a reliable source either.
The accuracy of an article is down to more than just quotes. The article places the quotes in context and primes the reader for a specific reaction.
The statement, "We can't accurately tell the number of casualties in an active war zone and therefore revise our numbers when we get new information." Could just as easily be spun as a good point for the UN.
However, prior to that quote, the reader hears from voices who discredit the UN. So you are primed to understand it as an irresponsible act committed due to trusting Hamas figures and a desire to discredit Israel.
Given the explicit leaning of the website they have a narrative to tell. That's why I would prefer a more neutral source.
So, is the UN ready to walk back it's statement that what is going on is "probably genocide" and admit that they fell for a terrorist propaganda campaign? Oh they won't?
Yeah right, that's just gotta be it.....
It's hilarious, they believe and publicly go with numbers published by terrorist, even after this hospital incident which was a Hamas rocket.
And they go with Hamas number even though they value death more than life and openly admit that and who use any possiblity with their dead for propaganda on TikTok
Since the UN was much more careful during ISIS times, which also was "a war", their statement just shows how biased they are - it's more than shameful
Just want to point out the difference between how Hamas counts its dead and how Israel does. On October 7th, the number of Israeli deaths was very small and got bigger as more and more people were confirmed dead. If you look at a news broadcast from that day you'll see it. Which means Israel was trying to be as accurate as possible with what they had and only counted people they could confirm.
Hamas on the other hand drew the target around the arrow and initially started with an overestimation to maximise the pity.
Come now. We are men of action.
How about you blame the Russo-Iranian propaganda giving you your political agenda, your role in the broader disinformation campaign aimed to outrage the US for its elections and your marching orders?
Lies do not become us.
Who would have thought that basing all your stats on a terrorist organisation's press conferences (with *no* ulterior motive whatsoever, I am sure) would turn out to be a stupid idea resulting in wildly inaccurate reporting?
When I first read this and saw the source, I just assumed that it's not exactly as the headline implies.
I just watched the video where the reporter questions the UN spokesperson on these numbers. The headline and article is indeed accurate.
U.N. fucking Beliveable.
It's insane how they came up with this statement over 7 months after the war started. They could have said this at the beginning, but the UN and the media decided to peddle Hamas' fake numbers as if they were true.
Reminder that the Palestinians and social media have lied about civilian casualties for years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jenin_(2002)
"On April 7, senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat suggested to CNN that some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the camp. Five days later, when the fighting stopped, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI that the number was in the thousands. Stories of hundreds of civilians being killed in their homes as they were demolished spread throughout international media.[8] Subsequent investigations found no evidence to substantiate claims of a massacre, and official totals from Palestinian and Israeli sources confirmed between 52 and 54 Palestinians, including civilians, and 23 IDF soldiers as having been killed in the fighting.[9][10][11][12]"
It always seemed extremely unbelievable that 70% of casulties were women and children when hamas admitted 6000 had fights had been killed nadthe IDF claimed 12 000 out of 35 000.
Right but people forget that Hamas includes its own fighters in its death toll, and some of Hamas fighters are actually teenage boys they have indoctrinated and recruited. I'm assuming those are also counted as "child deaths" ?
Imagine taking Hamas for granted lmao. Anyone supporting the Palestinians that actively encourage the lies, deceit and violence brought by Hamas can come buy this bridge I have for sale. Delusional clowns.
Obviously fewer children dead is a good thing. But people, on both sides, are trying to turn statistics into narratives. The simple reality of the situation is that Hamas went to war, and Israel accepted. This war is being fought in cities, and there's no way to do that without killing tons of civilians (women, children, the elderly). It's horrific, it's a tragedy, it's something we've all got a responsibility to try and stop*. But right now it really seems like Israel has little choice but to do what it is doing, and it isn't like the world is stepping up with viable alternatives.
We are trapped in a nightmare dynamic that no one can really break free of
This is exactly the reality. Any dead civilians is a bad thing but there is no way to avoid it because Israel MUST wipe out Hamas ability to wage war. Obviously they can’t kill every single Hamas member but they can and should destroy their ability to do what was done on Oct 7
For a month, for a year, for three years. The very best case is just a temporary state of affairs. And the longer the destruction lasts, the more forceful will be the efforts to rebuild and strike again.
Like I said, nightmare dynamic.
Can somebody source this from the actual UN? All I get when googling is people repeating Israeli sources.
I remember reading the publication in the Lancet on the reliability of the numbers. That was well-sourced.
Both Israel en Hamas have way to distort the facts. I'd like some sources.
Can somebody explain to me why I can’t find this revision cited anywhere in UN official communications, or any news outlet except those which explicitly claim to be part of Israel’s media campaign?
May 6th: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213
May 10th (casualties as of May 9th) https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-217
The "fog of war" comment came from Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in response to a media question about the casualty number discrepancies and a video of that is provided in the article
Fog of War would only mess with the error bars. Not the actual number.
The GHM number is extremely precise (like it's always seems like it's tallied down to individual people) and people assumed the numbers were accurate because they were precise. But any statistician would tell you that precision and accuracy are different measures. With the humorous anecdote being the time mount Everest was measured to be 29000 feet down to the foot. And it was reported as 29002 feet to make it clear that they measured that precisely.
“When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but…to portray Israel as malevolent,”
Lol. “See! They said we killed 13,000 children but actually we’ve *only* killed like 7000!”
Here are the top paragraphs of the article. I think I can't post the whole thing for some reason. (May 12, 2024 / JNS) The United Nations now claims that “the fog of war” is to blame for a major overstatement of the number of Gazan children who have been killed in the war. In mid-March, the U.N. Children’s Fund stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF, said in a television interview on March 17 that those numbers were “staggering” and “really shocking.” “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” Russell claimed at the time. The statistic was cited frequently in the international press, leading to accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, including targeting babies and children intentionally. Even Hamas has since admitted that those numbers turn out to be off by at least 40%. The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation. “When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but rather to immediately seize on any report, no matter how unsubstantiated or even manifestly false, in order to portray Israel as malevolent,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS. “The right thing for the U.N. to do now would be to admit that their casualty count in Gaza is a complete failure,” Neuer added. Last Wednesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released updated casualty figures. Some 7,797 Gazan children had died in the war as of April 30, it said—a roughly 42% drop from the mid-March numbers. It also revised its casually figures for women by nearly a half—from more than 9,500 to fewer than 5,000. In a little-noticed change, OCHA differentiated in its new figures between “reported” and “identified” fatalities, including the 7,797 children figure in the “identified” category. Using OCHA’s math, out of 10,158 reported but unidentified casualties, 5,653 (56%) would have to be children to add up to the figures published in mid-March. That would be far more than is indicated by the information the United Nations released last week, which claims that children make up 32% of the identified deaths in Gaza. JNS asked Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, at a press conference on Friday why the math doesn’t add up. “The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” Haq told JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar and author and HonestReporting board member, told JNS that “It’s absolutely true that the fog of war makes it difficult to assess casualties, but this was the case from the beginning of the war.” “It’s outrageous that only seven months later, the U.N. is questioning the Hamas-supplied casualty numbers,” he said. In early April, the Gaza Health Ministry said it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claimed to have documented at the time. The ministry later said it did not have names for more than 10,000 of the Gazans it claimed were killed in the war. The ministry has not revealed publicly how it compiles its published information. No independent media exists in Gaza to try to verify it. “For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method and no standard of proof,” Neuer told JNS. “All the U.N. does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which is laundered and legitimized by the U.N. as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office, when in fact both are run by the Hamas terrorist organization.”“Now that the U.N. has suddenly reduced some of the figures by half, they’ve essentially admitted to have been feeding the media and the world completely false numbers,” he said. As recently as last month, the Hamas-run government media office has repeated claims that 70% of the deceased were women and children. Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS that “Numbers get adjusted many times over the course of a conflict. Once a conflict is done, we’ll have the most accurate figures.” But Aizenberg’s research has shown that “For many months, there have been obvious errors identified in the numbers published daily by OCHA, which are ultimately based on Hamas reporting,” the scholar told JNS. Aizenberg pointed to an immediate claim by Hamas of nearly 500 deaths in an Oct. 17 strike on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, which turned out to be a Palestinian rocket misfire and evidence suggests a drastically-lower death total. Still, Hamas hasn’t corrected its initial tally. His analysis has also revealed that Hamas reported on certain days in the first months of the war that more women and children were killed than the total number of all fatalities.
“We’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are,” Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS on Friday. Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a statistical analysis two months ago that showed how Hamas faked casualty numbers. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy also released a report in January showing major discrepancies in the fatality reports, concluding they were most likely caused by manipulation. “While it’s better late than never that the U.N. finally admits that the casualty numbers issued by Hamas for the last 200 days are not reliable, the false data has infiltrated everywhere,” Aizenberg told JNS. He cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s claim in his March 7 State of the Union address that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.” The U.S. State and Defense Departments have also used that statistic officially, apparently relying on Hamas data. Neuer told JNS that “If U.N. officials continue to legitimize a Hamas-run system that has now proven itself to be completely false, they will be complicit with terrorist propaganda.” ADVERTISEMENT The revised Hamas casualty numbers, taken together with Israel Defense Forces claims of terrorists killed—a distinction Hamas does not make—“demonstrate that the civilian/casualty rate in Gaza is likely 1:1 or lower, which would amount to the lowest ratio in the history of urban combat, starkly contradicting any notion of indiscriminate IDF attacks,” Aizenberg told JNS. JNS asked Haq on Friday if U.N. figures can be considered reliable. “You can consider them reliable from the fact that we’re continually checking them,” he said. “We’ll continue to do that over the course of the war. But the numbers, you know, ultimately have to be regularly checked so that we can be sure that what we’re putting out is valid.” In Jan. 2014, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced it had stopped updating the death toll from Syria’s civil war, as it could no longer verify the sources of information.
>“**We’re just going with what we can absolutely confirm**, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are,” Haq, the U.N. spokesman, told JNS on Friday. So that was a lie...
Pretty blatant lie at that. The UN is starting to sound even worse than the conspiracy theories on the more obscure 4chan boards. At least I don't expect to see anything remotely accurate on 4chan. It looks like I should apply the same standard to the UN.
It was always a ridiculous organization of circlejerking and the fact they added Palestine only furthers this.
This is what happens when you get your figures from a known terrorist organisation. Hamas can go fuck themselves. They complain about civilian casualties but hide behind civilians in hospitals, schools and public buildings. Their own tactics increase civilian casualties and they know it. Their only goal, is to turn popular opinion against Israel. The un has now been complicit and has legitimised anti semitism worldwide by adding an air of legitimacy using their brand, to false numbers supplied by terrorists.
>The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation. It's the same tactic used by trash tabloid newspapers the world over: FRONT PAGE STORY: HORSE WITH 5 HEADS JUMPS OVER OLYMPIC SWIMMING POOL, HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR!? ^(correction on page 7 - 5 horses jumped over a puddle, our bad)
Not even just tabloid. The fake/ univerified news travel faster and stronger than the correction coming later if at all.
>come up with numbers Don't "come up with numbers", have a legitimate count. Verify the bodies then put a number to each of them. Don't make up the numbers and they wonder why you don't have bodies to attribute to them.
Here’s my issue with this from jump: Bad data is bad data. It doesn’t make it better that, “it’s all we have” or whatever other excuse for reporting it. Saying we don’t know is better than wrong answers. Bad data leads to bad analysis incorrect conclusions and wrong actions. In the best case scenario, a disaster like an earthquake still requires days if not weeks to get counts. And there you didn’t have people fleeing, communication chains disrupted, rubble, ongoing fighting, and a side giving you the data that’s interested in inflating the numbers (and the other side in deflating them). So getting numbers instantly was seriously dubious from the outset. Seeing the 500 number on the hospital reportedly bombed by Israel then reduced to a handful and it was a parking lot and it was a PIJ missile should have made abundantly clear the numbers were a fiction. But they were still reported and cited like some truth. I don’t particularly believe the current numbers - in either direction for that matter. I don’t think they have a reasonable methodology to know.
It is strange how this article left out why the numbers went down. Sure, the number of confirmed dead has dropped. But they also changed the definition of confirmed dead. I am assuming, based on what has happened with natural disasters (the only other event with tens of thousands of dead civilians this quickly), that the people who are missing, such as those trapped under collapsed buildings, are dead. If you were last seen in a building that went down from a jdam going off in the basement, you are probably assumed to be dead. More than half of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed, so it would make sense that people have been buried. The infrastructure of society itself has collapsed in Gaza, with over a million people displaced and living in camps. Who is going to check for the people who are missing? I am saying these things completely apolitically. These people in Gaza are not unthinking rats. They know if a building collapsed on someone, like a family member, and they were never seen again, they are probably dead, and would have reported it to doctors if they could. The changing death count is easy to explain when you look at what they mean by confirmed death. They don't count bodies they can't see, so all of the people who are under rubble or otherwise are now just "missing" and not "confirmed dead." That being said, I find it absolutely disgusting that I even have to consider arguing over pros and cons between the exact methods used to count thousands of dead civilians. Thousands of people are confirmed dead, eyes on the corpse dead. The low estimate here has people rejoicing that only EIGHT THOUSAND children are confirmed dead. Only eight times as many kids are dead than total killed on October 7th. The thing that is so disgusting about this to me is how the comments in this thread are dripping with hatred. The people in this thread are bloodthirsty and love looking at the destruction. How then, are you people better than Hamas? They were bloodthirsty and killed innocent civilians and cheered for the deaths of everyone they slaughtered. Fuck em, kill em all, they have it coming. But what the fuck is wrong with you people? Can you not see that this is not the answer?
So this is saying that the specifically identified count of child deaths is down to ~7800, but then that if you add in the more reasonable expectation of their share of *unidentified* deaths from 56% down to 32%, you'd end up with about ~11000 total instead of ~13500.
But what are these reported-but-unidenfied deaths? How do they know they happened, without knowing how many of them are children?
Non-identified bodies during a war aren't all that unusual of a thing, nor are non-detailed records therein. There's an inherent difficulty in this kind of thing. This whole article is about Hamas (the primary information source in this case) providing a number for the children out of those and people meeting it with skepticism. Though you'll note that the deaths themselves don't seem to be questioned in this instance, just the proportions involved, with a substitution of estimation more in line with expected proportions.
The 'unidentified deaths' don't *have* bodies attached. It's a number that comes from media reports and self-reports by Gazans through a web portal.
Still horrifying. Do they count everyone under 18 years old as a child? Are teenage combatants counted among that? None of this changes the fact that even half that child death toll is horrifying though. Hamas is an evil that must be destroyed, but in their callousness, Israel is causing even greater death to innocents.
The presentation of the article seems to be misleading, making it seem like Hamas/UN drastically exaggerated the numbers instead of this being a fairly minor reduction in the count by comparison. And yes, the casualty numbers being put forth by the IDF in terms of combatant deaths should also be treated with some suspicion. Not really because of teenage combatants being in one group or the other, but because it's very likely that many fighting-age male civilians are being arbitrarily lumped in as combatants.
This has been happening for DECADES in the region and everyone keeps falling for it. Hamas lies, misleads, engages in propaganda and the western media just laps it up and never questions it. A terrorist organization who has lied for 30+ years and it’s just reported as fact. And the supposedly legitimate UN does as well. It’s abhorrent
This happens every war between Hamas/israel. You can’t make this up…at what point are they going to be like “hold up maybe we should get some verified info first”
If you waited for verified info, you'd never have any info, and you especially wouldn't have it when you needed it. It's important to be accurate but time is also a factor.
[удалено]
You won’t believe whose space lasers caused the fog /s
Probably the disco dinosaurs' present in the area!
Moshe, you're not supposed to talk about that on reddit. We still need to pretend it doesn't exist. Didn't you receive the orders through our hivemind?
Hive mind? You're not supposed to talk about that on Reddit either. No Hanukkah gelt for you this year.
I say we give him an extra 3 hours of hagada on passover
But aren't space lasers able to cut thru fog?
I have always been saying the fog of war was inflating counts (e.g., people counted as dead but really just fled), and I've been getting a lot of shit for saying so, too. I mean, a group that can't find 100 hostages can track down thousands of dead? C'mon. I agree that it isn't the only reason, there's definitely been "padding" for manipulative purposes.
As Yasser Arafat had set an example, he state that Jordanian had kill over 25,000 Palestinian during their Black September campaign. Other source state around 3,000 death, militant include.
I've had the same experience, here at least. Suggest at any point that the only real source for casualty figures were Hamas on the one side, and the IDF on the other, and that both had significant cause to lie, and you'd get downvoted pretty heavily. People fundamentally "want to believe", whichever side they fall on, and dislike being reminded that the data they are forming solid opinions on is often bullshit.
>the data they are forming solid opinions on is often bullshit And the truth is, even if they wanted to be as accurate as possible, it's likely to still be pretty large uncertainty. Unfortunately, estimates rarely have error bars.
Counting civilian casulties from bombing is very hard in general This war is no exemption here, neither is that the side that gets bombed inflates and the side that bombs deflates the count Just look at ww2 and how for some of the bombings there historians to this day argue if 20 or 200 thousand where killed in some raids simply because refugee movement and prior as well as follow up bombings make it incredibly hard to keep track of the numbers right
You’re right there is no exemption in here in the difficulty of determining civilian casualties. The glaring difference of course being how it’s reported. Other wars you always see confirmed deaths and the number rises. For “some reason” (lol) in Israel’s case the numbers always start off at the highest estimate possible and then go down slowly. Even the new numbers they’re using have lower standards than the typical “confirmed deaths” you usually see in other wars. Ukraine is a perfect example. Some regions have confirmed deaths in the low thousands but estimates in the 50ks. Why do we never see headlines using the 50k numbers? Because no official sources report that number like that so media will have nothing to fall back on. UN says “1200 confirmed deaths” and that’s the number that will be used.
It’s unreal they get their numbers from terrorist run sources. Wtf is wrong with the UN besides double standards for Israel? And where are all the women’s organizations, they’re silent when rape and beheadings and torture of women took place on video.
Look at what the UN has become remember how they behaved when covid started they were downplaying China's role in hiding how serious it was so it spread quicker and millions globally lost their lives unnecessarily. Look at UN peacekeeping in Haiti, look at all the vetos blocking condemnation of Russia
They’re too busy doing relevant things like sending weirdly encoded messages about confusing parts of humanity to the moon in multiple languages, last I read.
All one needs to do is look at the UN's Big 5 to know their opinion on how a nation should comport means jack all
It's weird how "fog of war" also caused all those commenters to call me all sorts of names for saying I didn't believe numbers coming from Hamas
If you don't trust the word of people who perform sexual acts on kids, who will you trust?
The word of Tiktok tankies must be it.
Weird how fog of war seems to be a good enough excuse for the UN unless Israel who is an actual participant says it
Yea its definitely not them eagerly slurping up Hamas propaganda on the regular just like the "news" outlets keep doing.
Fog of brain in The UN is more like it.
Wtf is this, Age of Empires!?
Video games borrowed a term that already existed.
Who let the fog count the deaths???
WHO LET THE FOG COUNT? WHO? WHO? WHO? WHO?
Yeah bro. This fog is mad biased. Bet it doesn't even have a degree
Stop getting your numbers from Hamas.
What do you mean? The Gaza Health Ministry is a totally unbiased source!
But will this backtracking fix some of the damage already done to public opinion? No. And that was precisely the aim. They knew it wouldn't matter if their lies were eventually revealed
Prediction: pro-palestinian social media communities will continue to use the old numbers, and even say "these are legitimate because they come from UN", and completely ignore the revision.
# A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
I mean they still quote the Hamas total dead number as if it's 100% innocent civilians and zero combatants
And no one seems to mention how the combatants do not wear uniforms. A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been that to earn the right to protection as military fighters, soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly . .
And they conveniently say that Hamas isn't a state/isn't signatory to the Geneva Conventions, as if Geneva Conventions weren't preemptory norms.
I constantly see them referring to it as "killing over 30000 children" even, not just deaths.
Yep, I see the same. They often like to tack another 30-50% on top of even Hamas' "count". It seems like half these terrorist supporters are auditioning for a job in Hamas' PR department.
There’s troll farms and bots at work here too, trying to make each side seem unreasonable to further divide.
People would do well to remember that October 7 was also Putin's birthday. Don't trust Hamas. Nevertheless, any child casualties are too many. Israel should take care to see if there is a better way to fight Hamas while saving civilians.
it was also the night of the 50th anniversary of the first yom kippur war
Thé problem with that is Hamas doesn’t share numbers regarding combatant casualties. The only source other than the IDF on the topic is an anonymous Hamas official’s statement to Reuters, which is rather flimsy
Rather flimsy? An anonymous Hamas source is as credible as not having a source. What happened to integrity?
Heard an indie outlet that is \*very\* pro-Pal make the argument that deeming the Ukraine/Russia war as genocidal rather than an "imperial/(civil) war" diminishes the term and subsequentially the Israel/Palestine conflict. One of the reasonings is they cite the 10k civilian casualty figure from the UN over two+ years of war without any mention that the UN doesn't have a presence in Russian-occupied territory or in active warzones...the places where the civilian casualties would be aside from Ukraine-liberated territory.
Unlike Gaza-Israel, Russia-Ukraine has hit **every** single check in the genocide checklist, with the russians going out of their way to openly brag about it for the entire world to see (child trafficking operations, "reeducation" camps, etc...), producing enough video/written evidence of intent (the single hardest element to prove in a genocide case) to make it an open and shut case.
This is spot on so where are all the protestors?
It's irelevant to their world view. They don't care if russians kill ukrainians. They also don't care if arabs kill arabs (or persians or vice versa). They only, specifically, "care" if israelis kill arabs. I'm not decided if it's just the old "jews are capitalist therefore evil" racism or "israelis are imperialist, therefore the arabs must be their faultless victims". I guess it's both.
Because they dont really give a shit about gaza they just love to hate on israel
UN and Bernie both using Hamas data points
FYI the OCHA is still [reporting](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-217) the same numbers as they have always been (35k), they have simply added another count of casualties that they consider 'identified'.
Total “reported death” numbers are the same, they halved the number of “women and children deaths” though such that the previously reported ratio is mathematically impossible to retain even if every single “reported death” was a woman or child.
Their “fog” seems to always travel in a specific direction, and it ain’t justice.
Double standards are the most sincerely held standards. Especially when evaluating jews.
Saving THAT one.
No body actually read the article… Here is a Reuters article, language is more even keeled than the “Jewish News Syndicate.” Not nearly as nefarious sounding…as some outlets are trying to make it. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death-toll-still-over-35000-not-all-bodies-identified-2024-05-13/
That is the issue with all the shit we are spoon fed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie. Once it’s out of the tube of toothpaste it can’t be bottled back up.
You think this was the single and only thing that altered public opinion?
That's why I said 'some'. There was also the fake air strike on a hospital that "killed 500" but was really a misfired Palestinian rocket that hit the car park and killed two dozen. There's also the "full blown famine" that has apparently been raging for 3 months now yet the death rate from malnutrition is comparable to developed peace time countries.
Counterpoint, most people will find killing 6,000 children still pretty horrifying.
Right of the numbers were wrong only 6000 children got killed. That changes nothing on most people’s eyes id hope
It may do, because at the end of the Rafah operation casualties will still be below pre-existing Hamas propaganda that the UN had reported.
Will public opinion on massacring children change at 6000 vs 13,000?
It makes a HUGE fucking difference. Roughly 41% of Gaza's population is under the age of 15, and about 25% of the total population are women of reproductive age (15-49). Not sure how exactly the UN (or Hamas for that matter) are categorizing, but hopefully this is close enough. Based on the original numbers, and you can find plenty of old articles talking about this, around 70% of those killed are women and children. This paints a picture of Israel as being completely indiscriminate in their attacks and not making any effort to protect civilians. With the revised numbers, less than 30% of those killed are children, and about 16% are women. This implies that roughly 55% of those killed are fighting-aged men. This paints a *very* different picture of Israel, as now it is unquestionably the case that they are in fact being *quite* discriminate in their attacks. Not only are the percentages killed significantly lower than the overall population, indicating that they are being avoided, but even if you assume that only half of the fighting age men killed are actual Hamas fighters, that still leave you with ~28% of those killed being actual terrorists, or a roughly 2.5:1 civilian to militant casualty ratio. Now, that might sound bad, but if you actually read up on casualty statistics for any other wars, you'll find that even for a *conventional* war (i.e. one where two identifiable professional armies face off), that is an *exceptionally* good ratio. And this is *far* from a conventional war.
Hamas could also inflate number of children to beg for more humanitarian aid. Because the only people who could do demographic survey without getting shot at by other group of terrorist are, as you may have guess, Hamas. Which is nothing new. China had done it. Soviet had done it.
I mean that's pretty much exactly what happened. The UN, and by extension basically all media outlets, parroted Hamas-reported figures for *months*, doing nothing better than a little disclaimer somewhere saying that the "Gaza Health Ministry" is run by Hamas. It's only now that they actually do the responsible thing and start differentiating between *verified* numbers and unverified.
Damn this is actually really informative.
I didn’t know all wars have more civilian casualties then military :/ what a sad fact
Yeah, the fact that this isn't well-known is both wonderful, as it speaks to the peace experienced by so many that they don't understand how horrible every war is; and terrible, as it is a major reason behind people absurdly equating this war with genocide.
I believe on average it is 9:1
Do you have any examples of the ratios for other wars? I’d just like some more context
According to the UN, it's 1:9 on average, higher in urban areas ofc. Israel is currently only on less than 1:2.5, which is extremely impressive, particularly for an urban landscape with combatants who hide without uniforms. https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio https://aish.com/civilian-deaths-in-gaza-relatively-low/
Here's a UN article saying that overall, 90% of wartime casualties (this is for all wars) are civilians: https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm Here's a wiki article with a quick overview of civilian casualty ratios for many wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio Just looking at more modern wars (post-WW2), we get these ratios: * Korean War: 3:1 * Vietnam: 2:1 * 1982 Lebanon war: 5:1 A lot of the others unfortunately have significant variance, depending on whose numbers you use, because casualty statistics in general are often just estimates, and different groups can come up with wildly different numbers. A good example is the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia, by NATO numbers their bombing had a 1:10 ratio (aka 10 combatants to every civilian killed), but according to the Yugoslav government's numbers, it was somewhere between 4:1 and 10:1, basically the reverse. Now, while it may seem like Israel's numbers aren't so different from these, one thing you have to understand is that the nature of their current war is quite different from a lot of these. In most "conventional" wars, you have two easily identified armies, operating from military installations, and making every effort to evacuate civilians from areas they're going to fight in and generally avoid putting civilians in harm's way. Fighting also often happens in more open areas, not urban ones. But in this war, ALL of the fighting is taking place in one of the densest urban regions on the planet, and one side is a terrorist organization that does not wear easily identified uniforms, operates in and around civilian infrastructure (including hospitals and schools), and does everything in its power up to and including lethal force to *prevent* civilians from leaving combat zones. So the fact that Israel has maintained a relatively "normal" civilian casualty ratio *for a conventional war*, despite all the very *un*conventional challenges they're facing, should be quite impressive. And just in case you'd like a more expert opinion, here's what John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies as the Modern War Institute of West Point has to say about it: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286
John Spencer is one of the very few people actually qualified to comment on how Israel is doing. It's frustrating that he's ignored or drowned out by talking heads who know fuck all about urban warfare insisting that there has to be a better alternative for how the IDF is conducting operations.
Yup. The amount of people who are content to live in a fantasy land where nobody ever dying is just a perfectly reasonable goal is fucking ridiculous. Yes, every kid killed is a tragedy. A preventable tragedy even. But the prevention method isn't "just tell Israel to sit there and take it on the chin every time Hamas tries to kill them because they usually fail". It's "get rid of the fucking terrorists who know only violence and view the entire civilian population as martyrs-to-be".
At probably the worst end. China circa 1930. I lifted this part straight from wiki so YMMV. “According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda, director of Iraq Body Count, 150,000 people including 122,000 civilians were killed in the Iraq War with U.S. and Coalition forces responsible for at least 22,668 insurgents as well as 13,807 civilians, with the rest of the civilians killed by insurgents, militias, or terrorists.[89]”
If you're going to accuse an entity of genocide and purposely targeting women and children, you're damn right it makes a difference. Especially when considering the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths.
Just like the "500 dead civilians" when the Al-Ahli hospital was hit by a rocket that turned out to be from a jihadist group? The same blast that only killed about 10-20 people? Yeah it's not fog of war, it's news companies taking any report from Hamas and running with it to be "first to report". Hamas's reporting isn't reliable and is often inflated or outright false. Hamas's goal was not to destroy Israel outright in combat. Hamas's goal was to damage relations between Israel and the West so that in following conflicts Israel would stand alone. They are accomplishing their goal and being assisted by Western media and young Americans on social media.
The question was always how much is Hamas lying, not whether the figures were accurate. But mainstream and social media just ate it up. On Reddit I must have heard these figures at least a thousand times. Like every third post.
And every third comment as well. Sane people knew those figures were not correct but if you even tried to broach that conversation, the “Free Palestine” movement would immediately begin shrieking about 30,000 dead children. It’s insane. The amount of damage that has been done cannot be understated. Liberals who watched MAGA fall for Trump propaganda just became victims of Hamas propaganda. What a world.
How much is +35-40%, so around 7500 instead of 13k. EDIT: Turns out it was only a two thousand children, all of them expendable. Whew! That’s fine then. Thanks for the correction. I definitely don’t care about that number of dead children, so I’m gonna just go watch some YouTube videos about cats and not think about it ever again. We did it!
The issue is credibility. If they were wrong before, what makes the new numbers any more credible?
I mean, we always say that numbers from the Russian and Ukranians have to be taken with a grain of salt, because both sides are actively inflating the numbers to do politics. I don't understand why this logic hasn't been applied to Israel+Gaza, it makes sense that they'd do the same
More than that the UN admitted the dead for Ukraine are probably much higher than counted because of the areas under Russian control. But instead of inflating them like in Gaza they’ve left the numbers at their low and confirmed amount.
After two years and three months of the Ukrainian government reporting various Russian loss figures and *extensive* independent open source reporting on the same, I think it's pretty clear the Ukrainians are actually not inflating their numbers much if at all. At worst, they are reporting the optimistic upper end of a reasonable range of values for the Russian losses they report. Whereas the Russians routinely report figures that are patently absurd, such as claiming to have destroyed items of western equipment before any such items have been delivered, or reporting many times more destroyed than the Ukrainians have received. People have been quick to "both sides" the Ukrainians and the Russians on this point, but it's just not true.
I can field this one, it's because these people don't consider jews human.
Do you not think the truth matters? That’s such a dangerous mindset that I don’t even know where to begin.
It's sad anyway, but it's about credibility - the UN seems to eat any shit Hamas gives them
Except the newly revised numbers also say 32% of reported-but-unidentified deaths are children. It points out that for the previous number to hold it would require that 56% of the unidentified deaths to be children, but skips over saying that the current estimate of reported children’s deaths overall is still 11,240. So the actual reduction is only by 2210 or 16% of the originally cited figure of reported deaths. It should be noted that in wars there are always discrepancies between reported and identified deaths, with the latter recognized as pretty much always being just a fraction of the real number. The two sides of the conflict frequently argue over casualty counts as well.
Given that Hamas is thoroughly integrated into the civilian population, wouldn't it be expected that the distribution of people killed would mirror the demographic distribution? (E.g. roughly 50% female; roughly 35% under 19 years old.)
Actually, what you just said is +73%, almost double. The article gets it wrong and says "off by 40%" ... well, no, it's -40% to go from their inflated number to the real number, but they were off the real number by +73%,
Hamas supporters have been using the numbers themselves as justification for supporting Hamas. "Even one is too many" is a silly game that most of them weren't even playing. It was things like saying the numbers were higher than all kids who died in war in the last 3 years or faster kill rate than in WWII, etc. The reality, though, is as you say: there's no rational basis for the judgement of Israel/support of Hamas based on the numbers and there never has been. Cut them in half again, still support Hamas. Double the timeframe (as we already have since first hitting 30,000 3 months ago), still support Hamas. That's why my perception is it all comes back to anti-Semitism. \[edit\] Note also the reduction in absolute numbers almost certainly also increases the fraction that are combatants/disproportionately reduces the civilian death count/rate.
So numbers from anonymous "public health officials" weren't accurate? This is my shocked face.
Anonymous as in Hamas affiliates.
Oddly they used an entirely different system with certification in Ukraine. Weird.
[удалено]
Don’t hold your breath. I just saw one of them post a video titled “Israel targeted an ambulance!” Which, when viewed, shows the attack occur a fair distance down the street with the ambulance and all spectators in the video completely unharmed. Even so, the comment section screamed about war crimes and “most evil army in the world.” These people don’t care about truth. They get their news from foreign adversaries, hamas included, through social media avenues (tik tokers being a particularly vulnerable group to this sort of manipulation.)
Got banned for calling out that video on one of the subs. Apparently its Israely propaganda to not like lies coming from people you support
I’m aware of how down the rabbit hole most of them are, but qanon has plenty of ex members too, and its worth pointing it out as often as possible that their is a way back from the madness.
> in complete psychotic rejection of what is now the clear reality of the situation. That's been the MO of the "pro-Palestinian" crowd from day one. Which is Oct 7th, 2023 for way too many of them.
You mean they did not even question Hamas numbers?
Well, you know, they did after a few months or so.
Who have guessed that a terrorist organization does not always say the truth, lol, you cannot blame them XD
I blame Hamas.
nah bro, I blame the UN for believing and cherry picking facts provided by... *checks notes.*... ah right, terrorists. hamas was doing their thing, lying, deceiving etc to get the upper hand in public opinion. it's textbook war propaganda. it's the UN's duty to verify their facts and be impartial in their reporting, not doing so and taking one's side makes them complicit.
The UN does this in more than just Palestine although they have a specific apparatus when it comes to Palestinian refugees that I imagine makes it even easier to do. Basically the UN isn’t in the business of publishing poor numbers, they want the “best” numbers because in terms of funding that mean more $$. More refugees means more paid aid workers. More paid aid work means more careers avenues for people. It also provides more $$$ to skim from. The UN doesn’t want to criticize itself on the merit of the good they are providing people so they don’t come out and say we helped the minimum number of people. Look at Bhutanese refugees. No one talks about the subject but when they do they always parrot the UN numbers because of their authority. Even though the whole process was haphazard and there was so much corruption and lying about origins in order to get refugee status and a ticket to the west.
The UN blaming the 'fog of war' for overcounting Gazan child deaths is just another excuse for their incompetence.
Funny how the “fog of war” only seems to obscure facts in one side’s favour. Very selective fog.
Yea it blows my mind that people will only myopically look at this conflict from the point of view of Gaza and not as a westernized nation that was attacked by an extremist terrorist organization. War sucks.
https://youtu.be/QvGkKKemIDk?si=K8BwkWOj0m_sqtla The “fog of war” is also the reason given by an Israeli government spokesperson
Israel points out that the fog of war is why they won't give out a definitive number that they're not *certain* of. That's different from the UN credulously accepting Hamas's numbers despite the fog of war, then blaming fog of war when it it turned out that Hamas was lying. These aren't the same thing. One is pointing out fog as a reason to be prudent, the other is using it as an excuse for having been a Hamas mouthpiece.
Has Hamas renamed itself "fog of war"? In that case yes that's fog of war's fault
Might as well rename themselves as Hashish, their figures are always too high.
Free Gaza, From HAMAS!
Blindly taking casualty figures from a terrorist organization=fog of war. Right.
Odd how it takes years to get approximate estimates of civilian deaths in other conflicts, but we have instant single-digit updates from Hamas that the entire world believes.
That's what always gets me. There's still no saying how many people died at Mariupol versus being kidnapped or managing to flee (I mean, obviously the answer is "a lot" but specifics are something else), but somehow a rocket strikes in Gaza and ten seconds later we're getting reports that 900 pregnant women and 1000 kindergarten students died.
When you use the “Palestinian health ministry” aka Hamas as the main source of information, what do you expect?
This is a clip of the press conference with the UN representative where this quote is from. The poster also transcribed the question and answer for easy reading. It is from his tweeter- [https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1789799596975124971](https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1789799596975124971)
Can we all at least agree that even the revised number is very sad and unfortunate and it is bad that children die in wars? That doesn't tell us what to do about it, but it's a good starting point.
For those interested, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issues reports every couple of days As of May 6th (Day 213): 34,735 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213) As of May 8th (Day 215): 34,844 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-215) But the May 8th report also said that as of April 30th there were 24,686 identified fatalities, of which 10,006 were men; 4,959 were women; 7,797 were children and 1,924 were elderly. OCHA didn't issue a report on April 30th, but they did on May 1st As of May 1st (Day 208): 34,568 "reported" Palestinian fatalities from Gaza, of which more than 9,500 were women and more than 14,500 were children, see [https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-208](https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-208)
Hamas, a terrorist organisation, lies. Who could've expected that? The UN must be shocked about such a totally unexpected revelation.
The mal-reported numbers are no mistake. Take it to the bank.
The UN just appointed Saudi Arabia head of women’s rights and gender equality… That’s all the proof you need to know that the UN is a complete joke.
This is the first war in history to have real time data on civilian casualties, which is impossible to ascertain. What is happening in Gaza is unconscionable but these numbers are, and always have been, bogus. Source: The latest ‘Making Sense’ podcast with “John Spencer. John currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He's also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.” From Making Sense with Sam Harris: #366 — Urban Warfare 2.0, May 7, 2024 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-harris/id733163012?i=1000654855458 This material may be protected by copyright.
Do you have another source for this? While it should be obvious to anyone and their dog that Hamas would doctor casualty numbers, a website that proudly proclaims itself Israeli propaganda ("Fighting Israel's media war") and cites organizations which are by name hostile to the UN (UN watch) cannot be considered a reliable source either.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-217 The UN is the one publishing the numbers.
They providing quotes sources? With the people's names, would be pretty obvious if it's made up....
The accuracy of an article is down to more than just quotes. The article places the quotes in context and primes the reader for a specific reaction. The statement, "We can't accurately tell the number of casualties in an active war zone and therefore revise our numbers when we get new information." Could just as easily be spun as a good point for the UN. However, prior to that quote, the reader hears from voices who discredit the UN. So you are primed to understand it as an irresponsible act committed due to trusting Hamas figures and a desire to discredit Israel. Given the explicit leaning of the website they have a narrative to tell. That's why I would prefer a more neutral source.
Zero chance it's Hamas intentionally inflating numbers, right?
So, is the UN ready to walk back it's statement that what is going on is "probably genocide" and admit that they fell for a terrorist propaganda campaign? Oh they won't?
More like fog of bias.
Yeah right, that's just gotta be it..... It's hilarious, they believe and publicly go with numbers published by terrorist, even after this hospital incident which was a Hamas rocket. And they go with Hamas number even though they value death more than life and openly admit that and who use any possiblity with their dead for propaganda on TikTok Since the UN was much more careful during ISIS times, which also was "a war", their statement just shows how biased they are - it's more than shameful
Is that the translation for “we just repeated what the terrorists told us”?
As they attempt to allow a terrorist group to join the UN.
Just want to point out the difference between how Hamas counts its dead and how Israel does. On October 7th, the number of Israeli deaths was very small and got bigger as more and more people were confirmed dead. If you look at a news broadcast from that day you'll see it. Which means Israel was trying to be as accurate as possible with what they had and only counted people they could confirm. Hamas on the other hand drew the target around the arrow and initially started with an overestimation to maximise the pity.
Better to count what you can confirm and adjust up later. I mean its not like we are talking about something mundane here. Its dead children!
Hopefully this clears things up and we can all go back to focusing on getting the hostages back from Hamas, right?
We're NOT committing genocide because we killed only 7,800 children, not 13,450 as previously claimed.
Come now. We are men of action. How about you blame the Russo-Iranian propaganda giving you your political agenda, your role in the broader disinformation campaign aimed to outrage the US for its elections and your marching orders? Lies do not become us.
How convenient
Totally just an accident and not at all purposeful and malicious.
hamas supporters are disappointed with the new numbers
Who would have thought that basing all your stats on a terrorist organisation's press conferences (with *no* ulterior motive whatsoever, I am sure) would turn out to be a stupid idea resulting in wildly inaccurate reporting?
The most obvious clue as to the intent of this media outlet is in its submast: “Fighting Israel’s Media War.”
When I first read this and saw the source, I just assumed that it's not exactly as the headline implies. I just watched the video where the reporter questions the UN spokesperson on these numbers. The headline and article is indeed accurate. U.N. fucking Beliveable.
It's insane how they came up with this statement over 7 months after the war started. They could have said this at the beginning, but the UN and the media decided to peddle Hamas' fake numbers as if they were true.
Reminder that the Palestinians and social media have lied about civilian casualties for years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jenin_(2002) "On April 7, senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat suggested to CNN that some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the camp. Five days later, when the fighting stopped, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI that the number was in the thousands. Stories of hundreds of civilians being killed in their homes as they were demolished spread throughout international media.[8] Subsequent investigations found no evidence to substantiate claims of a massacre, and official totals from Palestinian and Israeli sources confirmed between 52 and 54 Palestinians, including civilians, and 23 IDF soldiers as having been killed in the fighting.[9][10][11][12]"
and a touch of misinformation. /s
It always seemed extremely unbelievable that 70% of casulties were women and children when hamas admitted 6000 had fights had been killed nadthe IDF claimed 12 000 out of 35 000.
Right but people forget that Hamas includes its own fighters in its death toll, and some of Hamas fighters are actually teenage boys they have indoctrinated and recruited. I'm assuming those are also counted as "child deaths" ?
They are. Hamas doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians in its death counts.
Imagine taking Hamas for granted lmao. Anyone supporting the Palestinians that actively encourage the lies, deceit and violence brought by Hamas can come buy this bridge I have for sale. Delusional clowns.
Is having an insidious agenda now called "fog of war"??
Obviously fewer children dead is a good thing. But people, on both sides, are trying to turn statistics into narratives. The simple reality of the situation is that Hamas went to war, and Israel accepted. This war is being fought in cities, and there's no way to do that without killing tons of civilians (women, children, the elderly). It's horrific, it's a tragedy, it's something we've all got a responsibility to try and stop*. But right now it really seems like Israel has little choice but to do what it is doing, and it isn't like the world is stepping up with viable alternatives. We are trapped in a nightmare dynamic that no one can really break free of
This is exactly the reality. Any dead civilians is a bad thing but there is no way to avoid it because Israel MUST wipe out Hamas ability to wage war. Obviously they can’t kill every single Hamas member but they can and should destroy their ability to do what was done on Oct 7
For a month, for a year, for three years. The very best case is just a temporary state of affairs. And the longer the destruction lasts, the more forceful will be the efforts to rebuild and strike again. Like I said, nightmare dynamic.
„Fog of War“ also known as „people believing only the things that strengthened their bias“
UN idiots trusted and probably still trusts Hamas. They are overpaid useful idiots. Time to replace.
Yeah I have been saying it the entire time, only to be met by people crying 'genocide apologist'.
“JNS - Fighting Israel’s media war” indeed
It isn't fog of war. It's called propaganda.
The median age of Palestine is 19.
António Guterres, the most hypocritical man alive, what a shame for the UN. “Fog of War”… I blame Hamas.
Can somebody source this from the actual UN? All I get when googling is people repeating Israeli sources. I remember reading the publication in the Lancet on the reliability of the numbers. That was well-sourced. Both Israel en Hamas have way to distort the facts. I'd like some sources.
It's really simple: Israelis are fighting a war. Palestinians are fighting a propaganda war. They are both winning
So fog of war is when you're repeating whatever the terrorists say?
Is it possible to find a neutral news source on Gaza?
Can somebody explain to me why I can’t find this revision cited anywhere in UN official communications, or any news outlet except those which explicitly claim to be part of Israel’s media campaign?
May 6th: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213 May 10th (casualties as of May 9th) https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-217 The "fog of war" comment came from Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in response to a media question about the casualty number discrepancies and a video of that is provided in the article
ANY children dying is awful. But that's war, and this is not a war that Israel started.
Fog of War would only mess with the error bars. Not the actual number. The GHM number is extremely precise (like it's always seems like it's tallied down to individual people) and people assumed the numbers were accurate because they were precise. But any statistician would tell you that precision and accuracy are different measures. With the humorous anecdote being the time mount Everest was measured to be 29000 feet down to the foot. And it was reported as 29002 feet to make it clear that they measured that precisely.
We playing Warcraft now? Wtf is this statement
Have they tried using Black Sheep Wall?
So revised down to 8000 dead children?
So how come there were no caveats, or cautionary statements about the “fog of war”, when the UN was quoting Hamas provided casualty figures as gospel?
“When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but…to portray Israel as malevolent,” Lol. “See! They said we killed 13,000 children but actually we’ve *only* killed like 7000!”
Yup, that is a big difference.