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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

Even in Ukraine it's quite possible to code. I worked at Google with people who stayed in Ukraine after Russia started the war. I can't say they were unaffected - there was stuff like meetings interrupted by missile alerts - but they managed to do normal work despite the ongoing war.

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40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old

https://msf.org.uk/article/gaza-msf-survey-shows-almost-half...

Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative, to understand the condition under which Palestinians are surviving.

The website you linked to specifies a subtly different thing from what you’re asserting:

>”Forty-eight percent of the people who died from blast injuries among our colleagues' households were children and 40 percent were under 10 years old.”

That is quite different from saying that “ 40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old”.

Can you clarify the difference between "bombing victims" and "people who died from blast injuries"? I'm not seeing it.

This is really splitting hairs, but i think it's:

48% of bombing victims/people who died from blast injury are children

of those children 40% were under 10 years of age

so .48 * .4 = 0.192 meaning roughly 20% of bomb deaths were under 10.

But like if you're having this conversation you've already lost. There's no way to frame it so it's not horrific.

The text does not say "of those children", the text says that 48% of the whole are children, and 40% are under 10 years. I agree it's a little ambiguous, but I read that as meaning that 40% of the total bombing victims were under 10 years.

It says the dataset is 'colleague's households' which might be different from all of gaza.

The "among our colleagues' households" is the key part. It's not generalizable to the whole of Gaza.

I'd assume that "victims" includes injured, not just killed.

> Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative

Why not?

40% of bombing victims in Gaza are under 10. What fraction of the population is? How does that compare to Ukraine’s demographic and bombing victim distributions?

These are valid questions for contextualising a conflict.

The majority of deaths in Gaza are women and children. Nearly 70%.[1] The reason we talk about "women and children" in Gaza is because Israel can accuse any adult man of being a militant. Statistics from Ukraine are harder to get but according to the OHCR,[2] we know that 39% of non-combatant casualties are women and less than 5% are children. What percent of total deaths are civilians is the hard part, but in Donbas about 25% of casualties were civilian.[3]

  (.39 + .05) * .25 = .11

So we have a 70% women/children rate vs about a 11% (very very roughly calculated) women/children rate. Yes the nature of these conflicts are extremely different.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5wel11pgdo

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/meeting-summaries/2023/07/ukraine-c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

> So we have a 70% women/children rate vs about a 11% (very very roughly calculated) women/children rate

Sure. This is how "comparing it to the war in Ukraine" is both helpful and informative.

Actually the answer is almost 40%. Gaza had a young and fast growing (one of the fastest in the world) population before the war. Some estimates even indicate their population has continued to grow (though at a very reduced rate) even during, but no reliable statistics have been collected.

Unfortunately the reality in Gaza is way more severe than the reality in Ukraine in nearly every conceivable metric: deaths, famine, buildings destroyed, farms, schools, hospitals, journalists killed, shortages (by blockade) of essential goods...

And Ukraine is a massive war with over a million casualties, so imagine that.

Just the fact that there is now a whole generation of children who have missed over two years of school.

One child missing two years of school is already a tragedy. A whole generation missing school, starving, under constant risk of violence and death, this is the first thing I think of when I think of Gaza.

I'm not even a Palestine "supporter" but I will not longer support the state of Israel for any reason, even if the "good guys" come to power.

a lot of these kids are missing limbs, it breaks my heart

How is it more severe if the Ukraine war resulted in over a million casualties?

I have a couple of programmers currently in ukraine. Unless you are in a war zone there is low risk and life is mostly normal. Only risk right now is no electricity or getting snatched on the street to be sent to war.

I had a colleague in Ukraine and one day we joined the daily meeting and the team lead announced that guy is detained by that Ukranian org that abducts people. I never heard from him again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...

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