I feel like its very hard to draw any conclusions from these numbers without distinguishing between those cases (other than of course that war is a tragedy and innocents generally pay the price of war).
And no, it's unlikely these are journalists who picked up a gun - the IDF is dropping up to 2,000 Lbs bombs, and that's possibly how many are killed; however there have been many reports of journalists homes being targeted in direct strikes, at least one journalist I heard who's wife and children/whole family were killed but he wasn't.
It's not surprising in reality if it's 170+ journalists amongst 30,000+ killed.
There are videos of IDF soldiers harassing and brutally assaulting journalists, if that's any indication of the rules of engagement they subscribe to; I'm obviously not linking to any here on HN - this topic is already a minefield.
What HN is missing is going one layer up, where all of the various points brought up are catalogued-organized - and then allow a second round of discussion, perhaps with a more sophisticated UI/UX for people (from "both"/all sides) to contribute things like citations to evidence/data support the claim/statements, etc; and then those cited sources and data could also then be another layer deeper to constrain or contain further contextualized-narrowed conversation to the analysis of those sources.
Yes. One is a clear cut war crime, the other is not. (Or at least not in and of itself. There are of course factors that could make those civilian deaths be a war crime, but it depends on the circumstances.)
(To be clear, what i am saying is that intentionally targeting journalists (who have not picked up a gun and joined the fight) is an unambigious war crime. Killing journalists incidentally while targeting something else may or may not be a war crime depending on all sorts of factors)
I consider things that are war crimes to be much worse than things that are not. So i do think there is a big difference between the two scenarios.
I think its also important to recognize that this sort of thing has huge propaganda value for the Palestinian side, so its important to be careful when evaluating circumstantial evidence (and to be clear i would say that about any side in any war when it comes to information that makes their oponent look bad). As the saying goes, truth is the first casualty of war. It can be very difficult to know what is going on in the middle of a conflict.
It's also the case that more generally, Israel's practice of dropping 2000-pound bombs on civilian areas is a war crime. Any targeting of civilian areas has to weigh the military gain against the damage to civilians, and Israel is not doing that. It has emerged that Israel is knowingly targeting buildings where it knows hundreds of civilians will die, just to kill one individual who is suspected of being associated in some way with Hamas. Israel specifically targets suspected Hamas associates when they're at home. These people are identified based on a pattern of behavior and things like cell-phone data, without Israel even knowing whether they really are combatants.[0] In this conflict, Israel has completely taken the gloves off and quite obviously does not care about civilian casualties.
0. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...