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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

Someone from kashmir.

Can You IMAGINE 30k deaths? A genocide happened in gaza and it took months, i think a year to reach 30k target and you are saying iran judt straight up killed 30k civilians in 1-2 days?

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The Gaza numbers are confirmed deaths, with bodies and identities and all, it's not counting people they can't identify or who are missing and presumed dead (buried under rubble and the like). The confirmed death tolls are considered to be a vast undercount of actual total deaths. This 30k number is much less rigorous and we have no way to know it's accuracy.

The Gaza numbers that most Western media uncritically report are nonsense spewed out by Hamas whose agenda is aided by making that number as high as possible.

That's not true. Many independent estimates have been made. Israel doesn't release any numbers at all, which they could easily do if they wanted to claim that casualty numbers were falsified.

I don't see what Israel could possibly provide which the people who mischaracterize war as "genocide" would find compelling. Are they going to produce examples of claimed casualties who actually turn out to be alive or imaginary? Well - surprise - they've done that.

If the war is indeed mischaracterized, then Israel sharing figures would provide an alternative source to the "Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry" for those who haven't already decided who's correct or don't trust those numbers. If Israel doesn't care to provide any information, then they are tacitly agreeing that the "Hamas" numbers are correct. That's just common sense politics.

This is a bit pointless since whatever number you're given, if more than ~1,200 Gazans have been killed, you'll continue to assert that this defensive and provoked war is a "genocide" due to your misunderstanding of how proportionality is defined.

Without any stated goals or definitions of a proportional response from Israel, how are outsiders supposed to know what their final goal is? If they give every indication of fighting a war of extermination (public statements calling for eradication of Gazans and emptying of the strip, support for illegal settler colonies, support for rape and torture) and don't give reasonable objectives for completion of the war, of course it will be labeled a genocide. Israel's refusal to communicate with the rest of the world is why they are being "misunderstood". They either don't want to be understood, or we have the correct interpretation of events and they don't care to hide it.

The official government policy, which they have communicated many times, is that the goal was return of the hostages and dismantling of Hamas. Since the return of all the hostages, there has been a drastic drop in fighting - the figures have not changed much in recent months (although the condemnations haven’t subsided). The stalemate at the moment is waiting for Hamas to disarm and hand over control to a civilian Palestinian government.

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