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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
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.
I specifically wrote that it is half-complete. It is possible that more under-18s will come out in the full list, but 40 is also the widely distributed number of children killed.
The Haaretz paper has every name and age of half the killed… which I linked and specified. So your original point wasn’t very relevant, though I grant the unlikely possibility they are holding back on the children’s’ names. If you look at the number provided, it’s half the total of the dead. Here’s someone doing an age breakdown: https://twitter.com/lqgist/status/1717623479225241672
The only number we have ever gotten on children killed is 40, which came from the original reporting, and was briefly (and falsely) amalgamated with a story of beheaded babies: here’s a link. Israel has been opaque on total numbers.
Anyway, I stand by my original sentence as being adequately sourced and qualified:
The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
and appears to be up to 1097 names out of "over 1300" -- so a pretty big sample now. Not sure whether any of the deboonkers have updated their figures, and I'm sure not going through all those names -- but scrolling over it a lot of them do seem to have military ranks next to there names.
Which does not preclude many of them being civilians no longer on active duty, but would be weird if there were many babies like that.
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
I mean I agree that c.e. is just using this stuff as a tool in service of his pre-existing agenda -- but the dearth of photographic evidence is kind of key to the discussion for me. I think you are talking about the picture of the burnt corpse, said to be a baby and then significantly embellished with some weird enhanced MRI to include the baby being bound with barbed wire that you can't see in the photo -- as usual this was bad enough without the embellishment, in that most charitably Hamas was setting houses on fire or attacking them indiscriminately with rockets/mortars/incendiaries.
But the embellishment (as with the beheading story) makes me less supportive of Israeli authorities, not more -- because it seems like they are promoting some sort of 'two wrongs make a right' theory to justify their own plans that they are fully aware will kill a lot of babies.
I'm aware of all the 'laws of war' discussion around this, but ultimately it doesn't matter to me -- I don't support taking actions that will kill babies, no matter how many of one's enemies you can get with the same stone -- and would rather that my country not provide material and/or moral support to people taking these actions.
I’m genuinely at a loss trying to understand your position. Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly,
why do you believe that? Do you have evidence to believe that they are intentionally withholding the names and ages of under-18s? Or do you believe that someone would read the half and assume a total?
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
What’s so interesting about this back and forth (beside the fact that either I am embarrassingly missing something obvious or you are aiming for criticism like Hamas aims their rockets) is that we are comparing 2,664 children killed by Israel to the “40 children” figure. Let us suppose that the 40 figure is wrong, and the final count comes to 100. Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that?
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
I just found a UNOCHA report today, updated as of November 4th, that also reinforces my numbers (courtesy of Paul Graham of all people, weird world). 31 out of 1135 identified casualties out of 1400 total reported casualties. If we extrapolate from the ratio it’s still a little under 40 children. Now to address the reasons for thinking there could be many more childrens’ names released,
they won't be in many photos / databases / no nearby family
I’m just not so persuaded by this. It’s 2023, I think they know exactly who is living in these areas especially so close to Gaza. Every Israeli is reaching out to other Israelis in the affected areas, there’s social media, there’s employers, there’s property records, cell phone plans … so I’m not persuaded here. But of course, I can be wrong! But I think my assessment is somewhat more probable. This isn’t a natural disaster where all the lines are down and hundreds of thousands have fled to various shelters.
norms
Possible, I guess. But I think Israel would also be interested in determining deaths from youngest to oldest, identifying younger individuals first.
how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts
My original linked article from the intercept provided a compelling argument that we should trust the ministry of health figures, because they have historically proven to be accurate. By that I mean, their reports during past conflicts were later concluded to be accurate by international bodies like the UN.
Do you suggest that Israel use children as human shields, so that they can increase the number of Israeli children killed, in which case it would be proportional.
You're just penalizing Israel for being able to protect their own people.
There is a serious question of whether Hamas was ever using “human shields” during the air bombings in the current conflict, given that they have 300 miles of semi-sufficient infrastructure underground and it was not in their interest to scare the Gazan population from fleeing infrastructure. If the members are overwhelmingly underground, safe from bunker busters, then they were not at all using human shields, and Israel was just punishing the civilian population.
They will definitely be using “human shields” during the ground invasion which we have already seen, but this is no different than how various other rebellions have used human shields, like the Zionists against the British and the resistance against the Nazis.
Another question is whether Israel is actually targeting Hamas members with reasonable precision, when they can just claim an ambulance convoy was being used by Hamas and their supporters will simply believe them. There is almost never evidence provided to the public for these strikes.
The fact that out of a densely populated city of two million, using modern missiles, even the Hamas health ministry declares only 9000 people have died suggests an extreme degree of targeting. The allies killed 25,000 in a night in Dresden, which had a population of perhaps 800,000 at that time. The British lost 50,000 men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, of whom 20,000 were killed.
If Israel wanted to, they could have killed hundreds of thousands by now. But even Hamas has alleged they have killed fewer than 10,000.
The ‘number of children’ argument is ridiculous because civilian casualty demographics depend on wider demographics. Civilian casualties in Niger will, as a proportion of the total, involve more children than civilian casualties in South Korea will.
Gaza has a very high total fertility rate (and it was still higher years ago), so of course child casualties will be high. Half the population is children, it is unsurprising that children will make up a substantial proportion of civilian casualties.
But Israel can’t get away with killing that many people. If they tried to “Tokyo Firebomb” Gaza they risk being Dresden’d by Hezbollah, not to mention further alienated by Arab countries.
The question is perhaps not whether Israel is targeting people, but whether those they are targeting are actually militants. Are they targeting the innocent families of journalists and Hamas members? There are claims they have intentionally targeted journalists. If you were a member of Hamas with 300 miles of semi-sufficient tunnels impervious to missiles, wouldn’t you hang out in the tunnels a couple weeks after launching your largest attack in 50 years? Isnt this pretty much a given?Remember, these tunnels are stocked with many months of supplies, and there have been 7000 strikes in Gaza and there are 25k Hamas combatants. It seems more probable to me that these combatants are in their tunnels, and that whoever Israel strikes is probably not a militant most of the time.
From what I can gather on population pyramids, Gaza is 47% under 18 and Israel is 33% under 18. But that Israel figure also includes Arabs so maybe the real value we’re looking for is much lower?
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Notes -
I specifically wrote that it is half-complete. It is possible that more under-18s will come out in the full list, but 40 is also the widely distributed number of children killed.
And now you don't even have a link.
The Haaretz paper has every name and age of half the killed… which I linked and specified. So your original point wasn’t very relevant, though I grant the unlikely possibility they are holding back on the children’s’ names. If you look at the number provided, it’s half the total of the dead. Here’s someone doing an age breakdown: https://twitter.com/lqgist/status/1717623479225241672
The only number we have ever gotten on children killed is 40, which came from the original reporting, and was briefly (and falsely) amalgamated with a story of beheaded babies: here’s a link. Israel has been opaque on total numbers.
Anyway, I stand by my original sentence as being adequately sourced and qualified:
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
I'm not that clear on the timelines or any of it really, but Haaretz seems to be updating the article as more names are released; it's here:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-19/ty-article-magazine/israels-dead-the-names-of-those-killed-in-hamas-massacres-and-the-israel-hamas-war/0000018b-325c-d450-a3af-7b5cf0210000
and appears to be up to 1097 names out of "over 1300" -- so a pretty big sample now. Not sure whether any of the deboonkers have updated their figures, and I'm sure not going through all those names -- but scrolling over it a lot of them do seem to have military ranks next to there names.
Which does not preclude many of them being civilians no longer on active duty, but would be weird if there were many babies like that.
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
I mean I agree that c.e. is just using this stuff as a tool in service of his pre-existing agenda -- but the dearth of photographic evidence is kind of key to the discussion for me. I think you are talking about the picture of the burnt corpse, said to be a baby and then significantly embellished with some weird enhanced MRI to include the baby being bound with barbed wire that you can't see in the photo -- as usual this was bad enough without the embellishment, in that most charitably Hamas was setting houses on fire or attacking them indiscriminately with rockets/mortars/incendiaries.
But the embellishment (as with the beheading story) makes me less supportive of Israeli authorities, not more -- because it seems like they are promoting some sort of 'two wrongs make a right' theory to justify their own plans that they are fully aware will kill a lot of babies.
I'm aware of all the 'laws of war' discussion around this, but ultimately it doesn't matter to me -- I don't support taking actions that will kill babies, no matter how many of one's enemies you can get with the same stone -- and would rather that my country not provide material and/or moral support to people taking these actions.
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I’m genuinely at a loss trying to understand your position. Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that? Do you have evidence to believe that they are intentionally withholding the names and ages of under-18s? Or do you believe that someone would read the half and assume a total?
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
What’s so interesting about this back and forth (beside the fact that either I am embarrassingly missing something obvious or you are aiming for criticism like Hamas aims their rockets) is that we are comparing 2,664 children killed by Israel to the “40 children” figure. Let us suppose that the 40 figure is wrong, and the final count comes to 100. Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
I just found a UNOCHA report today, updated as of November 4th, that also reinforces my numbers (courtesy of Paul Graham of all people, weird world). 31 out of 1135 identified casualties out of 1400 total reported casualties. If we extrapolate from the ratio it’s still a little under 40 children. Now to address the reasons for thinking there could be many more childrens’ names released,
I’m just not so persuaded by this. It’s 2023, I think they know exactly who is living in these areas especially so close to Gaza. Every Israeli is reaching out to other Israelis in the affected areas, there’s social media, there’s employers, there’s property records, cell phone plans … so I’m not persuaded here. But of course, I can be wrong! But I think my assessment is somewhat more probable. This isn’t a natural disaster where all the lines are down and hundreds of thousands have fled to various shelters.
Possible, I guess. But I think Israel would also be interested in determining deaths from youngest to oldest, identifying younger individuals first.
My original linked article from the intercept provided a compelling argument that we should trust the ministry of health figures, because they have historically proven to be accurate. By that I mean, their reports during past conflicts were later concluded to be accurate by international bodies like the UN.
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Do you suggest that Israel use children as human shields, so that they can increase the number of Israeli children killed, in which case it would be proportional.
You're just penalizing Israel for being able to protect their own people.
There is a serious question of whether Hamas was ever using “human shields” during the air bombings in the current conflict, given that they have 300 miles of semi-sufficient infrastructure underground and it was not in their interest to scare the Gazan population from fleeing infrastructure. If the members are overwhelmingly underground, safe from bunker busters, then they were not at all using human shields, and Israel was just punishing the civilian population.
They will definitely be using “human shields” during the ground invasion which we have already seen, but this is no different than how various other rebellions have used human shields, like the Zionists against the British and the resistance against the Nazis.
Another question is whether Israel is actually targeting Hamas members with reasonable precision, when they can just claim an ambulance convoy was being used by Hamas and their supporters will simply believe them. There is almost never evidence provided to the public for these strikes.
The fact that out of a densely populated city of two million, using modern missiles, even the Hamas health ministry declares only 9000 people have died suggests an extreme degree of targeting. The allies killed 25,000 in a night in Dresden, which had a population of perhaps 800,000 at that time. The British lost 50,000 men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, of whom 20,000 were killed.
If Israel wanted to, they could have killed hundreds of thousands by now. But even Hamas has alleged they have killed fewer than 10,000.
The ‘number of children’ argument is ridiculous because civilian casualty demographics depend on wider demographics. Civilian casualties in Niger will, as a proportion of the total, involve more children than civilian casualties in South Korea will.
Gaza has a very high total fertility rate (and it was still higher years ago), so of course child casualties will be high. Half the population is children, it is unsurprising that children will make up a substantial proportion of civilian casualties.
But Israel can’t get away with killing that many people. If they tried to “Tokyo Firebomb” Gaza they risk being Dresden’d by Hezbollah, not to mention further alienated by Arab countries.
The question is perhaps not whether Israel is targeting people, but whether those they are targeting are actually militants. Are they targeting the innocent families of journalists and Hamas members? There are claims they have intentionally targeted journalists. If you were a member of Hamas with 300 miles of semi-sufficient tunnels impervious to missiles, wouldn’t you hang out in the tunnels a couple weeks after launching your largest attack in 50 years? Isnt this pretty much a given?Remember, these tunnels are stocked with many months of supplies, and there have been 7000 strikes in Gaza and there are 25k Hamas combatants. It seems more probable to me that these combatants are in their tunnels, and that whoever Israel strikes is probably not a militant most of the time.
From what I can gather on population pyramids, Gaza is 47% under 18 and Israel is 33% under 18. But that Israel figure also includes Arabs so maybe the real value we’re looking for is much lower?
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