naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Okay yeah, I believe the IDF now. I wouldn’t put it past them to hit a hospital if they thought it was an important target, but I don’t think they’d bomb a parking lot full of civilians.
Also looks small, as others have noticed. This looks like an explosion that killed 20 people, not 200.
Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.
But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.
This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.
Whatever the casualty count was (and it could still be pretty bad - the parking lot was reportedly packed), the initial claim from Hamas was very obviously bullshit simply from how quickly it came out.
Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.
(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)
This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?
There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead. There certainly weren't hundreds of bodies piled onto the burned part of that parking lot.
Also, there is no meaningful crater, not all windows are blown out of nearby buildings or cars, etc... I have a really hard time seeing this being the aftermath of a targeted missile strike, this looks like the aftermath of what was mostly a fire.
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Notes -
Okay yeah, I believe the IDF now. I wouldn’t put it past them to hit a hospital if they thought it was an important target, but I don’t think they’d bomb a parking lot full of civilians.
Also looks small, as others have noticed. This looks like an explosion that killed 20 people, not 200.
Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.
But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.
This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.
Whatever the casualty count was (and it could still be pretty bad - the parking lot was reportedly packed), the initial claim from Hamas was very obviously bullshit simply from how quickly it came out.
Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.
(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)
This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?
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Is there any confirmation of the casualty numbers?
From whom? There is no possible trustworthy source here. No pictures (I'm aware of) show anything like the scale claimed though.
I dunno, video footage of a couple hundred bodies? Red Crescent Society? I'm perfectly happy to accept dubious evidence as useful.
There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead. There certainly weren't hundreds of bodies piled onto the burned part of that parking lot.
The main buildings of the supposedly bombed hospital are visible in that photo.
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Also, there is no meaningful crater, not all windows are blown out of nearby buildings or cars, etc... I have a really hard time seeing this being the aftermath of a targeted missile strike, this looks like the aftermath of what was mostly a fire.
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