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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.

> that's not war, thats war crimes

It’s both. And unfortunately, it’s the variety of war crime that’s essentially normalised to modern urban warfare. (Especially if one side hides its assets among civilians.)

The only war crimes we seem to hold others to account on are WMD ones, and even then it seems there’s a pass for chemical weapons.

I hate this. But I’m contextualising the figure. Anyone going to war in the Levant racks up those numbers. Including if the Palestinians got UN approval to conquer Israel. The difference between these unfortunately common war crimes and “regular” war is the difference between tens of thousands and 11,000.

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> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.

The 11,000 figure the other poster cited is the approximate number of children that have been killed whose death was been identified and linked with a name by the Gaza Health Ministry in September. GHM was part of a barely functional government before 10/7 and now is part of a barely functional government in a war zone. The actual figure is significantly higher, but with a wide confidence interval: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/health/gaza-death-toll.ht...

Tens of thousands is not an understatement. Numbers are not meaningless, indeed.

> 11,000 is not “tens of thousands.” It’s a horrible number. But horrible doesn’t mean numbers are meaningless.

1) you're splitting semantic hairs that no one but you actually cares about. No one who is still on the fence is going to see your comment and think "hmm I guess I still don't know". If you'll excuse the death of 11,000 children you'll excuse the death of any amount of children.

2) this conflict has been going on for over a year but that quote only reflects a years worth of data so the real number will be higher than the one I supplied.

3) I take it you don't know what conservative means in this context? Let me break it down for you another way then.

The lancet's conservative estimates up to 186,000 deaths will be attributable to the IOF's handling of Gaza. Given 43% of the population of Palestine was children before Oct 7th that means we can expect about 80,000 children will have died as a results of Israel's actions even if the ceasefire holds.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

So again, you're splitting semantic hairs to try and imply that the damage is being overstated when it is in fact as accurate as one can be.

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