Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

This is utter nonsense. Let's take the Vietnam war protests of 1969 that are so remembered to this day. They were massive and culturally influential. Yet they gave Nixon one of the biggest victories in US history.

The problem is that protesters are often delusional and don't understand complex problems. The civil rights protests were very carefully and accurately led by MLK and this very careful narrative to educate white people was indeed successful.

But the obvious hint is at the student protests about Palestine. That's one of the bad protests. First, it targets only Israel without laying any blame or responsibility on the Hamas (which started this specific conflict and is still holding civilian hostages). This also targets the entire country instead of the current leadership, which again is a bad target. The result of these protests is obvious from miles away:

* The Israeli right gains power and becomes more aggressive - they use the protests to show how everyone hates Israel and there's no point in trying to satisfy the "antisemites" and the idiots.

* Trump gains power - Biden can't control these people... He will make matters worse for the Palestinians.

* Hamas is emboldened - they are the reason Palestinians don't have a state (which Israel offered twice to two separate Palestinian leaders).

* Putin and Iran are emboldened by the weakness of the West.

I understand why people are protesting. They want to help and have good intentions, they are also deeply misinformed (e.g. the UN just updated its casualty statistics which were VERY wrong and are probably still pretty far off). Also the Israeli government is indeed terrible, but Hamas is even worse. Uninformed protesters like this are making things worse for the moderate Palestinians and Israelis.

> it targets only Israel without laying any blame or responsibility on the Hamas

The reason students are asking their schools to divest from Israel but not from Hamas is because no western schools are funding Hamas or corporations that sell weapons to Hamas. You want protest camps set up to demand schools keep not doing that?

> the UN just updated its casualty statistics

I just looked them up (https://www.ochaopt.org/). 34,904+ killed, 70,000 homes destroyed, and 1.7 million people displaced in Gaza. I agree Hamas is probably worse than the Israeli government in some sort of doctrinal or deontological sense, but in terms of actual atrocities committed, it is not even close at this point.

> You want protest camps set up to demand schools keep not doing that?

No. I want protests to have the Israeli flag too. Acknowledge Israel has the right to exist. Also not rip out posters for the hostages that are held by Hamas to keep the war going.

What do you hope to achieve by divesting from Israel?

Make Jews feel persecuted. Mission accomplished. Make Hamas feel that pressure is being put on Israel. Again, success. This is blaming an entire country instead of the people responsible for the occupation and settlements. There are ways to target those. E.g. banning products from the settlements, or banning instituted from the settlements. These are things many Israelis can get behind.

> I just looked them up

They updated the ratio of civilians. Turns out the majority of those are adult male combatants. Not Women and Children like Hamas claimed and was parroted by the media.

> They updated the ratio of civilians. Turns out the majority of those are adult male combatants.

As of yesterday, the UN is reporting that 60% of deaths are women, children, and the elderly. So even if you want to pretend that all adult men in Gaza are combatants, your minimization is verging on genocide denial. (And the total figures are "not including more than 10,000 reported missing or under the rubble" so the death stats are almost certainly low.)

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...

I guess they didn't update their site: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1lxlcjxr

But that article reports the same numbers as currently on the UN site: "7,797 children (32%), and 4,959 women (20%.)" That's most of the fatalities.

The site is also simply wrong:

> The UN now claims that in total 24,686 people were confirmed killed,

The correct statement is that “The UN now claims that 24,686 people who have been confirmed killed and fully identified. There are over 10,000 confirmed victims who are confirmed dead, but not yet fully identified, and then there are around 10,000 more missing and presumed dead under the rubble, in undiscovered mass graves, etc. Bringing the total number of dead closer to 50,000.

This site is willfully misleading, and is actively lying by only counting identified victims and claiming that is the total number of victims.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll...

Which are half of what it used to report with no explanation. These numbers are very different from the Israeli published numbers with no explanation.

That is simply wrong, they gave the explaination pretty clearly:

> The U.N. says Gaza's Health Ministry has been able to fully identify 24,686 deaths out of more than 35,000 people the ministry says have been killed in the Gaza Strip.

> U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq says Gaza's Health Ministry is still working to fully identify 10,000 or more deaths. Based on the identities confirmed so far, though, the U.N. now says about 52% of those killed have been women and children.

> Haq, who is the deputy spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, was asked in a briefing Monday about media reports, one of which was shared by Israel's foreign minister, that said the U.N. had halved the number of women and children it had been saying were killed in Gaza.

> "It's not quite the case," Haq said. "The overall number of fatalities that has been tallied by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is our counterpart on dealing with the death tolls, that number remains unchanged," he said, reiterating the figure stands at more than 35,000.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll...

To summaries, they lowered the number because now they are only using confirmed dead and fully identified, whereas previously they included confirmed dead and not yet fully identified. So out of all the confirmed deaths, only about 70% (not half, as you claimed) has been fully identified. The UN is now using that 70% figure.

If you want to get to half, you will have to include presumed but not confirmed deaths (missing, under rubble, in undiscovered mass graves, etc.) this number is believed to be another 10,000, bringing the total number of dead or presumed dead to 45,000. About 55% of confirmed or presumed deaths have been fully identified. The UN is now using that 55% figure.

> The U.N. says Gaza's Health Ministry has been able to fully identify 24,686 deaths out of more than 35,000 people the ministry says have been killed in the Gaza Strip.

Then where did the false numbers come from?

They just made them up. Typically, when statistics are proven wrong you go back to the numbers and then check if other numbers have been completely false. Or maybe a different source of numbers was more correct. Maybe the source for the false numbers is still lying.

The problem is that people use the brand "UN" which is generally a respected brand. Unfortunately, on the ground in Gaza it means Palestinians who are often connected to the Hamas directly. That means a lot of the information that the UN broadcasts to the world as fact is corrupted by Hamas.

To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't many civilian casualties. I'm not saying this is anything less than tragic. I am saying that these casualties are far lower due to a conscious effort by the IDF to reduce these numbers. I'm also saying that Hamas has made a significant effort to increase civilian casualties (especially children) e.g. by using children as couriers between their tunnels and preventing civilians from leaving siege areas (e.g. firing on refugees).

I don’t know how I—or the UN—can make this more clearer, there are no false numbers. There is the number for confirmed and fully identified victims, which stood at 24,686 at the time of writing, and then there is the number of confirmed dead but not yet fully identified, which stands at above 10,000.

It takes time to identify dead bodies, especially in an active warzone where it is not unheard of that whole families are dead, and double so when large powerful munitions are used. And as the health care system collapses, it gets harder and harder to identify quickly, so you can expect the latter number to grow.

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