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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

I actually think Nate is wrong on this, especially on how he states the wrong-ness of the two parts of the story. It seems very likely to me that initial death counts were overstated. But the probability that it was an Israeli bomb that went off in the parking lot carries a lot more uncertainty and I think there's still a decent chance that it's true. There's still a lot of investigation to be done but, if when all is said and done, it turns out the bomb likely was from Israel, will Nate stick to his own standards of retraction?

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On what basis do you believe the explosion was more likely to be Israeli than Hamas? From what I've been able to glean it seems like the exact opposite.

1. Hamas is extremely willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of their goals.

2. Hamas was making homemade rockets out of water pipe. Far less reliable than Israeli munitions.

3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties despite Hamas literally using them as human shields.

4. Israel is not shy about taking credit for bombings even if civilians were causualties when they have credible evidence of Hamas presence.

5. Hamas are documented liars in the region and even their Arab neighbors don't trust them.

Balance of evidence makes it far more credible that Hamas is trying to use their own failure to gin up support.

Do you have real and credible evidence to the contrary?

>On what basis do you believe the explosion was more likely to be Israeli than Hamas?

First, you'll notice I never actually said this.

>1. Hamas is extremely willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of their goals.

Not even Israel claims it was Hamas intentionally bombing the parking lot.

>2. Hamas was making homemade rockets out of water pipe. Far less reliable than Israeli munitions.

Sure, but not sure the relevance of this, yes, it could be an accidental misfire Hamas munition. It could also be a purposeful firing of Israeli munition.

>3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties

I do not believe this is true.

>4. Israel is not shy about taking credit for bombings even if civilians were causualties when they have credible evidence of Hamas presence.

Israel is pretty shy about taking credit for things that get them in hot water in the foreign press. For example, when IDF soldiers deliberately targeted, shot, and then denied medical aid (killing) to American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the Israeli government blamed her death on Palestinians for months.

>5. Hamas are documented liars in the region and even their Arab neighbors don't trust them.

As noted, Israel are also documented liars.

Anyways, I liked this reporting from the UK which does a pretty good job of laying out the uncertainty one way or the other: https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospit...

>3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties

> I do not believe this is true.

You must be living in a bubble. Roof knocks, pamphlets, phone calls etc. They do everything they can to remove civilians before their strikes. Additionally, use your common sense, what is the benefit to the IDF of civilians dying vs the benefit to Hamas.

An Israeli munition would have left a crater.

What makes you certain about that enough to dismiss the parent post? Israel does seem to posses low collateral damage weapons that can also be set in air-burst mode, GBU-39/B just to name one. And bellingcat's own cursory investigation (at the time) identified a crater—"Bellingcat was able to identify what appears to be the impact crater, after analysing footage and images of the aftermath". There's simply too much confusion about this event to come to any conclusion, it's best to simply wait to know more, because there are some strong arguments that can't be dismissed and repeating the same usual points doesn't help.

The video evidence of the aftermath, published by HAMAS, is sufficient to dismiss the possibility of air-burst of even smaller weapons such as GBU-39/B, because that would have resulted in much more distant blast-wave damage (e.g. broken nearby windows which were intact in the video of the scene).

The impact crater that was identified (it's clearly visible in the same HAMAS videos of the aftermath) is approx 1 meter wide and 30 cm deep - in the context of glide bombs that's "not a crater", as it's far too small for a GBU-39/B sized bomb.

While we definitely will need to wait to know the whole truth, there is already sufficient information to come to at least some conclusions (e.g. that Gaza health officials definitely lied about the casualties).

And the primary reason for "too much confusion" IMHO is people disseminating hypotheses that are already disproven by the evidence that we do already have, such as the GBU-39/B suggestion.

> IMHO is people disseminating hypotheses that are already disproven by the evidence that we do already have, such as the GBU-39/B suggestion

Yes, this is the problem, and you see it in many of the comments here. There is plenty of compelling technical evidence, but people come in with a cursory read of the topic and listen to some "expert" who says "oh it whistled like a bomb". And given how incredibly badly some people want to pin it on Israel, incredibly moronic* analyses keep getting shared.

* like the people claiming that Iron Dome intercepted a rocket 6 seconds after launch. It's a terminal intercepter! that literally can't happen!

That's just one data point of many that wasn't already mentioned in this thread. I didn't intend to dismiss parent. I don't have my mind made up on this. I find it weird that they would have targeted the parking lot when they seem capable of hitting specific areas of a building in many of their other strikes.

They miss their intended target all the time.

There was a story just last week about a man who lost multiple family members and was injured when they struck his house instead of their target a few hundred meters away.

This doesn’t make any sense.

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