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Comment by some_guy_nobel | Hacker News Reader

Small thought exercise: What if the numbers were real? Would that change any of your stances/views? Would you self-reflect and consider that you had been tricked into spreading lies at the expense of thousands of lives?

Maybe it helps to start smaller. Many (Israeli's) have told me that the IDF is the world's most 'honest' military - one that even warns buildings before they're bombed!

Then, you can imagine how difficult it was for me to reconcile that with many facts from the ground. Here's one. Only one. The Rafah paramedic massacre:

"Israel at first claimed that the medics' vehicles did not have emergency signals on when troops opened fire but later backtracked. Cellphone video recovered from one of the medics contradicted Israel's initial account."[0]

Is that a one-off lie?

0: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/nx-s1-5370617/israeli-probe-k...

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Let me turn the mirror around a bit. If numbers or incidents turn out to be false, exaggerated, or stripped of context, would you also self-reflect and consider that you might have been tricked into spreading lies - at the expense of Israelis whose lives are also on the line?

Of course, militaries make mistakes and sometimes issue wrong statements, just as governments everywhere do in the fog of war. The Rafah paramedic case you cite is tragic, and investigations matter. But a single flawed or retracted statement doesn’t prove a systematic policy of “lying” or “massacre” just as one instance of misconduct in any country’s army doesn’t automatically invalidate its overall values or procedures.

if we’re going to judge Israel by its errors, we should also weigh the context in which those errors happen (urban warfare, Hamas embedding itself in civilian areas, use of ambulances to smuggle fighters or weapons, etc.). And we should also judge Hamas by its admitted policies - deliberately targeting civilians, embedding in hospitals, rejecting coexistence.

If we’re honest, both of us need to be open to the possibility that our sources and interpretations can be incomplete or biased. Real reflection means asking hard questions in both directions - not only of Israelis, not only of Palestinians.

You're right that there are two sides to every story, things aren't black-and-white.

To your first point, I've already agreed that the numbers seem faulty. Beyond that, I'm not sure what you're asking me to consider, beyond suspending belief. 60k people did die on the low end, many of them children.

From an outsider's perspective, the killing of 60k people in a small, corralled environment, many of which are children, says everything that can be said about the actor in question. This is without the additional context of years of West Bank occupations, experiencing the crazy two-tiered apartheid like system that is Israel (I've visited and was personally quite shocked), and other things.

Is Hamas terrible? Certainly. Would they do the same to Israel if they had the capabilities? Probably. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground.

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