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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

All I'm saying is that if any other country attacked Gaza using any normal means of war, they'd end up with the same statistic. Israel is not doing anything out of the ordinary for war. The statistics you quoted is a side-effect of Gaza's demographics.

Note that I don't condone Israel's actions in Gaza. I'm just saying that those actions are no worse than one would expect, but this statistic is purposefully deceptive and is being trumpeted across the Internet specifically to make Israel look worse than they are actually acting.

You support one of the two sides above the other. That's your right. But please don't support them through chosen talking points intended to deceive the audience.

PS: One of the two sides in this war targeted civilians on purpose and failed at doing so. The other site targeted combatants and failed at doing so. Which would you say is the more superior position?

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Just based on your comment, I can promise you I have payed attention to the conflict less than you and have less of a 'dog in the fight' in terms of supporting a side. I just noticed your comment begging the question regarding mortalities that reflect makeup of a civilian population being the null case in urban warfare that needs no explanation.

It's a positive claim that requires empirical support, which you aren't providing.

A quick squiz would suggest this women+children death toll is the greatest in some time by some margin, despite some quite bloody and urbanised conflicts in recent years [1]. Perhaps you have justified knowledge that this case is different than any other or just better-documented, and the deaths are unavoidable insofar as urban warfare is to be conducted.

But even if it is the case that urban warfare should be expected to be conducted quite inefficiently (to the point that combatants are successfully targeted at a rate barely greater than random members of the population), you are also taking it as a given that conducting it at all is justified and shouldn't be alarming.

That doesn't appear to be a given by military standards of developed countries:

> Destroying an urban area to save it is not an option for commanders. The density of civilian populations in urban areas and the multidimensional nature of the environment make it more likely that even accurate attacks with precision weapons will injure noncombatants.…If collateral damage is likely to be of sufficient magnitude, it may justify avoiding urban operations, which though tactically successful, would run counter to national and strategic objectives.

United States Army and Marine Corps 2017 Manual on Urban Operations, quoted in [2]

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-child... [2] https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/04/27/urban-warfa...

Please re-read my statements, I’m choosing my words carefully.

Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.

In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.

Gaza has ridiculously skewed demographics with fully half of the population below the age of 18. (Don’t take my word for it, just Google it.)

Hence the civilian deaths in Gaza reflect this skewed demographics. Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!) but because fifty percent of the civilians are children!

I don’t disagree with the facts. It’s just that facts are being presented without the background detail to make Israel look insanely evil. Which they are not… they just a normal amount of evil.

> Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.

You are begging the question still. Citation needed.

> In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.

That dog won't hunt. ~58k Ukranian soldiers killed + 12k civilians = 70k total [1]. 633 Ukrainian children killed [2]. 20% of the population is children but they make up < 1% or those directly killed in the conflict. You will probably take issue with the degree of urbanisation etc., but it was your example.

> Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!)

I suggest you are strawmanning the argument here — I don't think Israel is actively targeting children is an accurate representation of the concerned 'side' overall (I'm sure you can find a tweet making it). But it is plain their actions are pretty indiscriminate wrt the combatant:civilian kill ratio.

> they just a normal amount of evil.

You haven't supported this claim, and its a considerable leap from 'Gaza has a pyramid-shaped age structure'. Yet, there is data available on recent urbanised conflicts and what the 'normal amount' is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

[2] https://www.savethechildren.org.au/media/media-releases/chil...

Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately?

Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something to that effect.

Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.

> arguments being made here

Being made where though? I google '65% of women children gaza' and among the front page of results, all but one reporting that figure do not indicate that women and children were selected for. Civilian infrastructure yes (e.g., "Israeli military has relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival." which is true, considering 14 hospitals were hit directly). The exception is the State of Palestine ("The Israeli aggression continues to target civilians in Gaza Strip" [1]), and I don't believe the wording is even incorrect — when you bomb a hospital knowing there are civilians inside (whether or not there were militants), you have targeted civilians.

> Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.

Consider that is a subjective interpretation, others might find it indicates a strikingly indiscriminatory approach such that targeting is moot. That was my impression reading that figure. Let that be an answer to your initial question in the parent comment

I suspect that this is about to begin going in circles since no new arguments or evidence are being presented for your claims. So to conclude: I will reiterate that this is a matter that can be informed by empirical data, and the only data that has been provided in this thread with which we can interrogate the norms and outcomes of warfare (numbers from the example you invoked of Ukraine and other recent bloody and heavily urbanised conflicts in the Oxfam link) weighs heavily against assuming that mortalities should reflect the civilian population's demographics in a military action It strikes me as an undercooked, and insofar as it reflects reality, an appalling assumption.

Even assuming every adult male is a militant, they are killing two women/children per 1 militant. Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming: it does not matter if the goal of the dropped bombs is to preferentially kill women and children.

[1] https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4614#_edn1

> Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming

Oh, I agree! The problem Israel faces is that HAMAS fighters don't wear uniforms, are often under 18 years old, and uses civilian buildings for protection.

The dilemma I see as an outsider is that I honestly don't know what else could have happened after October 7th. A bunch of dominos were set up, someone knocked over one, and things unfolded along a nigh-inevitable path from there.[1]

IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault. It's like kicking a dog repeatedly. Eventually, it will bite you, but once a dog has its teeth sunk into your calf, you're not going to treat it nicely.

Let me ask you a simple question. Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done? What alternative choices do you think would have been available to you, that the people would accept? What decisions could you have made that would "stick", that wouldn't result in you being kicked out of your position of power on the 9th and replaced by someone else willing to do something horrible that is certain to result in civilian deaths? Keep in mind that to this day there are many abducted civilian Israelis being held in Gaza as hostages.

I've been thinking about this for months and I honestly can't come up with anything.

[1] Look at what the US did after 9/11! Same setup, same story, same depressing outcome.

> Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done?

Steering well clear of the greater picture and focusing just on the man himself there are a number of people, including a block of Israeli Jews, that would strongly suspect he quietly, behind closed doors, fist pumped in delight and had a moment with a few in his circle.

They'd charge he had knowingly and with forethought been inching up the pressure on Palestine for some time in order to provoke an extreme reaction that served to justify righteous overkill.

This goes to your:

> IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault.

which I'd mostly agree with save I'd lay the blame as mostly the fault of a ruling extreme faction in Israel.

Palestine itself has also had to broadly deal with the consequences of the actions of smaller core extreme.

Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.

So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.

Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.

Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.

There’s no deception done imo.

Your argument is that it’s ok that Israel has killed this many women and kids because they’re over represented in the population.

Most people’s perspective is that you shouldn’t kill kids and women and target civilians, regardless of anything else.

And you’re ignoring the mountain of evidence of israel deliberately targeting civilians. Just the other day the times published a thorough report on israeli snipers deliberately targeting toddlers. That truth does not square with your “it’s just collateral damage” argument.

> report on israeli snipers deliberately targeting toddlers.

Link please.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-...

https://www.nytco.com/press/response-to-recent-criticisms-on...

For reference, I'm willing to accept every factual statement of the article: the doctor worked in Gaza, he saw many children with bullet wounds to the head or chest, many were single shots, etc...

A relative of mine is a nurse working in a hospital. I noticed a long time ago that her perspective on the statistics of illnesses is very skewed. She sees only very sick patients because -- duh -- she works in a hospital. Hence, she thinks every sniffle of her nephew is an emergency -- because she sees only emergency cases!

There are ~40K dead, ~100K wounded in Gaza by the war, of which half are children: about 70K child casualties of which 50K didn't die.

Parents and hospitals will prioritise children over adults. A child with multiple gunshot wounds will more than likely die on the spot and not be taken to hospital. A child with a single gunshot wound is more likely to cling to life long enough to make it into a hospital. In absolute terms, the few dozens cases mentioned in the article are just the inevitable statistics. I would be very surprised if doctors in Gaza had not treated many more such cases! I would expect a couple of hundred per hospital (there are only 32) at least.

To reiterate: None of this is in any way good, none of the children deserved any of this, and in no way is Israel innocent in the matter. It's just that it is the natural consequence of warfare in a high-density urban setting with that demo.

Mate, idk, now you’re arguing that it’s ok for toddlers to be sniped during war as long as your government claims they were “human shields”.

I literally don’t know what to say to that.

There is no way for a doctor to know from a bullet wound that someone got "sniped". All bullets lodged in the body look the same, whether they just happened to run in the path of fire, or if a a sniper targeted them on purpose.

This -- this -- is precisely the emotion-laden but evidence-free language that I'm trying to warn people from avoiding. It doesn't help your cause (whatever it is) to misrepresent, assume, or just make things up. People will see through it and stop listening to you. I've largely stopped listening to propaganda coming from Russia and Gaza because they're both very transparently made up bullshit.

The sad thing is that at least in the case of Gaza the plain unvarnished facts are more than enough! Israel is bombing them, they are levelling large chunks of the city, they are killing tens of thousands of children, etc...

State the facts. Don't guess. Don't interpret. Don't weave a sob story based on hearsay from very highly biased people who themselves are necessarily ignorant of the facts on the ground. The doctor didn't witness the shooting, he just dealt with the aftermath.

The facts are bad enough:

Kids are being shot in huge numbers.

This just doesn't make any sense.

On one hand, it's trivially correct in that no forensic information can ever tell us anything about the intent of the person who fired the bullet.

But otherwise, what you're saying just doesn't hold up to basic common sense. First, "All bullets lodged in the body" definitely do not look "the same" -- some are fragmented or marked in ways that otherwise show signs of having passed through something besides human flesh (more suggestive of an indirect hit) while others are not (suggesting a direct hit).

The circumstances of the entrance would can also say something about the bullet's approximate velocity when it entered the body, and direction of fire. Finally, the location of the wound is itself very important - a disproportionate number of people with gunshot wounds to the head tends to suggest that, well, that's where whoever was firing at them was aiming at.

Such indications may not be sufficient to determine conclusively that someone was sniped. But they do shift the overall balance of evidence, and require us to weight our probabilties for any such interpretations of what happened accordingly (in the context of other available evidence, of course).

It isn't as if the condition of the bullet and the circumstances of the wound provide no signal at all in this regard, as you're suggesting.

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