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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

I really is ridiculous, and somehow the number only gets bigger as the stories are told! Last I saw was "40,000 protestors murdered in just 24 hours!", or something very close to it.

The US and Israel have been carpet bombing Iran for weeks now, blowing up hospitals, schools, power plants and residential buildings, yet the Iranian death toll is "only" around 1,500 so far. Yet we are to believe that Iran killed 40k of its own people in a day - you would literally be able to see piles of corpses from space!

Israel has also claimed that they've hacked every traffic camera in Tehran, yet are mysteriously unable to provide any actual evidence of the supposed massacre - meanwhile, Iran released several videos showing foreign agitators distributing weapons, people attacking civilians etc.

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> The US and Israel have been carpet bombing Iran

No they haven't. The US started phasing out carpet bombing[0] half a century ago. You discredit yourself by making such trivially falsifiable assertions.

The US and Israel use precision strikes. It is why the ratio of targets per sortie is by far the highest ever recorded in a major conflict.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing

While I somewhat agree, you should also look at the results of those precision strikes. Usually, when they kill a senior Iranian officer sleeping in his appartment, they level the building or at lest blow up several adjacent units, probably killing at last 10 innocent people.

That's an inherent limitation of precision strikes. The objective is minimizing the collateral damage required to achieve the objective, not avoiding it entirely. Even the various explosive-free precision-guided munitions the US uses have a non-zero damage radius.

One can argue whether or not it is a good idea for the bombs to be flying around in the first place, but there is no version of physics that allows anyone to avoid collateral damage as a practical matter.

This one from the 12 day war did https://www.twz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iran-scientis...

I know. I'm just saying that the way we talk about 'precision strikes' in the west, make one feel like only the target is eliminated, while in reality we usually blow half of the building the target was in, along with all the people. I would actually be interested by a poll on what people in the US think about how many innocent people are killed in a precision or elimination strike on average - I bet it would be something like less than 1.

Which is not “carpet bombing”.

Use words and phrases correctly, or expect an argument.

I agree that targeted strikes which miss or take out adjacent areas is not carpet bombing.

However, the above commenter suggested the U.S. has phased out carpet bombing, and while I'm suspect of that, we know with certainty that Israel will happily "carpet bomb" an area if it can string together a few words justifying it.

Even if it's true that what they've done isn't technically carpet bombing in the sense that they may not just dropping bombs out of planes indiscriminately, the same effect can be achieved with nominally "targeted" strikes now, especially with many of these being conducted by automated "targeting" systems.

Seriously, it's unlikely in this age of advanced weaponry that we'd see carpet bombing like we did in Vietnam, when the U.S. and Israel are capable of creating the same effect, but with thousands of supposedly tactical strikes over the entirety of some densely populated area.

Look at the videos coming out of Iran - civilian infrastructure and residences are clearly being targeted. Some unexploded bombs have been found that lack a JDAM guidance package.

And regardless of the USA, Israel is most certainly not above carpet bombing civilians.

Again, that's not "carpet bombing". Carpet bombing requires a type of aircraft that Israel doesn't have (though the US does).

Why would you expect a precision bomb to have a JDAM package? That is not the only type of guidance package. In fact, most of the footage I've seen (largely Israeli) has clearly been laser-guided bombs. They aren't the same thing, and the latter is more precise than JDAM in any case.

Use of precision-guided bombs in a city is not "carpet bombing".

Even if their actions might not precisely meet some dictionary definition of "carpet bombing", you know well what I meant - civilians and civilian infrastructure are being deliberately targeted with complete disregard for loss of life and environmental consequences.

That’s called war.

You’re parroting IRGC propaganda, which is why people are arguing with you.

“We are innocent civilians and the Israelis are carpet bombing us”… said by the people that funded October 7th and killed more of their own people than the Israeli bombs did.

Iran’s government has been violently belligerent for decades, and continues to this day to bomb its Arab neighbours including hitting their civilians! They don’t get to whine about the morality of civilian versus military deaths.

Iran has absolutely not been violent for decades. And they don't "continue" to bomb their Arab neighbours - they are only bombing them now because they allowed their land to be used to attack Iran.

What exactly are Iran supposed to do here? Just give up, allow their country to be infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda, allow their country balkanised, their citizens massacred indiscriminatly?

You meant to lie, and you did lie, and you continue to lie. Standard TikTok rage where words no longer have meaning, reality must be rejected, and any headline is true even if the article directly negates it or there's no source, so long as it makes Israel look bad.

I swear, it's almost as if the anti-Israel mob _wants_ it to be true.

I think there are 5-7 thousand confirmed deaths by the UN, and medical reports in Iran estimated there could be 20,000+ casualties.

7 thousand confirmed death, 9 thousand unconfirmed death. Among that 1200 confirmed death from the regime forces, and 400 to be confirmed bystanders. The nurse burned to death by protesters is among those 400.

I don't know enough to dispute, but could you link such a report

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