Comment by BenChoopao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BenChoopao | Hacker News Reader

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I asked Chatgpt:

how many civilians Israel killed in Gaza. Please provide a rough estimate.

As of January 2025, the conflict between Israel and Hamas has resulted in significant civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip. According to reports from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), approximately 7,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed since the escalation began in October 2023. This figure includes a substantial number of women and children. It's important to note that these numbers are estimates, and the actual toll may be higher due to challenges in data collection and verification in conflict zones. The situation remains fluid, and casualty figures continue to be updated as more information becomes available.

This accusation that American models are somehow equivalent in censorship to models that are subject to explicit government driven censorship is obviously nonsense, but is a common line parroted by astroturfing accounts looking to boost China or DeepSeek. Some other comment had pointed out that a bunch of relatively new accounts participating in DeepSeek related discussions here, on Reddit, and elsewhere are doing this.

is it really primarily an astroturf campaign? cause at this point my expectations is that this is just people having a normal one now.

Isn't the real number around 46,000 people, though?

At least according to the OCHA you're right . Though there's also a dashboard which shows around 7k for the entire Israel Palestine conflict since 2008. Maybe it got confused by the conflicting info on OCHA's website.

https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties

No one knows the real number.

It's way higher than that. 46k is about when the stopped being able to identify the bodies. Gaza Health Ministry was very conservative - they only claimed a death was caused by the occupation when the body could be identified.

Estimate is much higher: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

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