GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 24 (Reuters) - More than 700 Palestinians were killed in overnight Israeli air strikes, Gaza’s health ministry said on Tuesday, the highest 24-hour death toll since Israel began a bombing campaign to crush Hamas militants who stunned the country with a deadly Oct. 7 attack.
Israel said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in the overnight strikes on the besieged enclave but said its war to destroy the Islamist group would take time.
As aid agencies warned that a humanitarian catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Israel to offer it support.
How many times in the past 20 years has a Palestinian Health Ministry reported numbers that have gone up?
This number has already dropped to 400: https://lemmy.world/post/7270667
Let’s assume the Ministry of Health is lying, what number of dead civilians is enough to condemn Israel of ethnic cleansing? People are dying at the hands of Israeli strikes in the most horrid ways, and everybody is denouncing it publicly as a war crime, and here we are calling them “liars” even though it’s a bunch of overworked medical staff and are running out of body bags. How many dead bodies do we need to see on TV for it to be a tragedy?
There’s a reason that article notes that they “could not independently verify the ministry figures.” They aren’t independent or apolitical. The Ministry of Health aren’t frontline doctors and nurses, they are the Hamas-controlled bureaucracy that oversees them. Hamas long ago purged anyone from the ministry that wasn’t specifically loyal to them.
Why do you think Hamas would work so hard to purge the Palestinians in the Ministry who were neutral or Fatah-aligned? Is there a compelling reason to think an institution designed to serve a party or faction to the exclusion of everyone else would (or could) serve anyone else?
I strongly suspect they are providing an upper bound - based on the number of people who live in a particular residence and declaring them “dead” before actually finding a body or confirming they don’t have a pulse. So their numbers always look really high at first and get revised downwards as they move people from the “dead” count to “injured” or “found alive and well”. In many cases, you can observe that they will announce a large number of fatalities within minutes of a blast - faster than it’s feasible to even count the bodies much less confirm they are fully dead and not merely injured.
Context matters. Dead soldiers from an organization that recently committed terrorism and atrocities are not a tragedy. This is the expected outcome of war. There will be civilian fatalities who were in the wrong place or worse being held as human shields. Those civilian deaths are a tragedy, and the best way to prevent them is to strongly denounce Hamas.
Israel has been strongly denouncing Hamas for a while now and yet the number of bodies increase. Why do you think that’s the case?
The best way for us to prevent them is to strongly denounce Hamas. Take away their support and sympathy. Maybe they’ll release the hostages.
Gee don’t look too hard into how hamas got their funding