Hacker News Reader

Comment by regnull | Hacker News Reader

From WSJ article:

"KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—Thousands of hungry Palestinians amassed last Tuesday morning outside a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid center here. The moment the gates cracked open, the crowd surged forward.

American security contractors tried to keep control, but scores of men pushed through barricades and snatched boxes of food awaiting distribution. Others sprinted in behind them. Men on speeding motorcycles raced past the pedestrians to grab whatever food they could. Gunshots rang out—it wasn’t clear from where. Within about 15 minutes, all the food was gone."

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/us-israel-gaza-aid-dea...

I know it's easy to judge being far away, but seriously, men on speeding motorcycles?

View on HN

What are you implying? Genuinely I can’t tell who you think these “men on speeding motorcycles” are?

I don’t see anything obviously suspicious in that - if your family was starving would you sit back and let them die? Or maybe hop on a motorcycle and cut to the front of the queue?

I don’t think the people who are starving are the ones with motorcycles and gasoline.

Last I checked motorcycles aren’t edible and gasoline isn’t drinkable…

But they are storable, far more stable than food. So it should be no suprise that motorcycles continue to function long after the food has run out. And gaza is tiny. It doesnt take more than a cup of fuel to cover considerable distance on these bikes.

If only there was some way to exchange one type of an asset, such a motorcycle, to another, such as food... Too bad nothing like this was invented yet.

There's no food smart guy, who's he going to buy food from?? [0] His motorcycle is also his only means of transportation and thus his livelihood likely depends on it. Even if he could pawn it for 2 days of food for his family, should he?

Jesus christ.

[0] Reminds me of someone saying to a rapt audience that people in coastal areas flooded by sea level rise would just "sell their houses and move" (sell their houses to whom, fucking aquaman?).

What's the actual reason you created an account to only make crassly ignorant and genocidal comments?

If everyone is starving, good luck finding someone who values a motorcycle more than food.

The obesity rate in Gaza is among the largest in the world. Let's stop pretending everyone is starving.

Obesity is pretty high in the US, that doesn't make camp Bayou-Belsen in Florida right.

You are manufacturing lies.

Let's ignore the blatant lie, are you implying obese people can't be starved? Wild take ngl.

I am not implying, I am literally saying that. Obese people can easily live for six months to one year without suffering health issues. Gaza has a clean water problem, not a food problem. And what's the blatant lie? Gaza inhabitants are not suffering from obesity at incredibly high rates? Is Wikipedia lying about this? If you have credible figures indicating that Wikipedia is wrong on this matter, I would be very interested to see them and I would change my opinion on the "starvation" question immediately. I find it weird that you are immediately accusing me of lying instead of assuming that I am wrong in good faith, let alone thinking that you may in fact be wrong.

> A meta-analysis study in Middle East countries found that the prevalence of obesity and overweight was 21.17 and 33.14%, respectively (9). A recent survey conducted in Palestine concluded that the prevalence of overweight and obesity is 23.6 and 19.5% in the Gaza Strip

Norm is 33.14% overweight and 21.17% obese, palestine was (before 2021) 23.6% overweight and 19.5% obese.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9998069/#B10

So, no, Gazans are not suffering from obesity at “incredibly high rates”.

Malnutrition and obesity can also co-exist in the same person at the same time. Most of the articles on obesity in gaza point this out.

> Obese people can easily live for six months to one year without suffering health issues

Jesus christ. Are you really saying forced starvation is ok because some people have the fat reserves to not die from it??

Even if all the obese people in gaza had the fat reserves to last 6 months - which they don’t - you’re still giving the thumbs up to starving the other 80.5% of the population.

Not to mention, aid has been blocked since march so the other 19.5% has two months left of their supposed six months of “no health consequences”.

And for the record, I am so fucking disgusted I had to write this.

During the Bosnian war even gold jewelry was worth less than food and cigarettes in weight, after the initial period. (I read it directly from a survivor's accounts.) You've got no idea how the combo of urban + isolation + starvation looks.

> I know it's easy to judge being far away, but seriously, men on speeding motorcycles?

Why wouldn't they be on "speeding" motorcycles? They have a family to feed. They're probably coming from some distance away. People travel on motorcycles.

> I know it's easy to judge being far away, but seriously, men on speeding motorcycles?

Desperation and survival.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com