Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

> There is no genocide, the population of Gaza went up during the operation against Hamas

The only reports I can find of "population of Gaza went up" are people quoting the CIA Factbook, which was only using growth estimates from months before "the operation against Hamas".

View on HN

Yes, this is a nasty bit of hasbara the Zionists have been spreading. The population is obviously down. Israel blew up all of the hospitals and killed everyone who was tracking casualties, which is why the number never grew past 75,000 despite daily killings and bombings. Even the 75k number is obviously not population growth.

The 75k number is not at all limited to casualties recorded in a hospital. They've been pulling casualty reports from a variety of sources, including a Google form, which later became this form: https://sehatty.ps/moh-registration/public/add-order

A Google form is not an official source of information (obviously). Actually no one knows how many people Israel killed, since Israel won't let independent auditors into the Gaza. What we do know is that Israel has not stopped killing innocent people (since Nakba really).

Official or not, those web form reports are absolutely incorporated into the numbers you're citing. E.g. as of 03/23/2025, 11,069 of the counted casualties were from the web forms.

No, actually the Google form is not a source for that number at all. The number comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, but was also independently confirmed via other methods (not that form) by Lancet:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

The Gaza MoH absolutely does incorporate those web form submissions into its numbers. They've said so themselves on several occasions.

The 11,069 number is from [1], or [2] is from a more neutral source:

> Gaza's health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned. [...] Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

[1] https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/pdf/...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/thousands-of-names-removed-from-o...

The fact remains, the 75k number is roughly agreed on by everyone prior to Israel destroying so much infrastructure and killing so many people that they stopped being able to count. Israel continues to kill people, that number isn't being counted anywhere. We'll probably never no for sure how many Palestinians have been killed in this genocide.

One thing is for absolute certain though, the population of Gaza has not gone up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com