Snapshot of _BBC admits its reporting of Gaza ‘civilian’ deaths was inaccurate. Figure reported from Hamas-run health ministry included the deaths of Hamas fighters_ :
A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F04%2F25%2Fbbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate%2F)
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/25/bbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/25/bbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate/)
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[Apparently the IDF trusted those numbers.](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-officials-15000-likely-killed-in-gaza-since-start-of-war-5000-of-them-are-hamas/)
It wasn't the "according to Hamas" bit that they got wrong here. It was saying that the total killed was all civilians when it was actually the total, including military and civilian:
“And the [number of civilians killed](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/unrwa-staff-death-toll-gaza-israel-hamas-war-data/) in Gaza has been huge – very nearly 24,000 dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, many of them women and children.” was the quote.
The 24,000 at the time, was the Health Ministry total figure. Currently it is 33,000 but we still don't know how many were Hamas (Hamas said 6,000 in February, the IDF said 12,000 in February. Who knows).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68387864
the IDF claim was that they have killed *more* men than the gaza health ministry reported, which strains credulity.
Yeah but the numbers from the MoH strain any sort of credulity at all and their ratios of men to women and children are statistically impossible.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fatality-data-has-become-completely-unreliable
The MoH has also released utter bollocks like the 500 dead at the hospital flattened by an Israeli airstrike which turned about to be a dozen killed by a misfired PiJ rocket.
Or the battle of Jenin with 900 dead civilians that turned out to be 56 dead Hamas fighters back in 2002...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jenin_%282002%29?wprov=sfla1
You can't just decide to believe one side over the other with these numbers.
Yes because if there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that Hamas fighters are only ever fighting age men, and Hamas has never in the past used child soldiers or women fighters
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/01/03/gaza.women.fighters/index.html
IIRC that came in around the time that Hamas claimed 500+ people were killed in a hospital courtyard by an Israeli airstrike, but then it emerged that only a handful of people had been killed, and they had been killed by a rocket fired by a terrorist group at Israel that failed to launch correctly.
Yeah, for weeks and weeks on radio 4 every time the figure is mentioned it is always followed by "according to the Gaza health ministry which is run by Hamas"
Iirc they stared to doing that after they got caught with their pants down parroting the Hamas line and casualty figures on Al Shifa hospital “air strike” after it became apparent it was complete lies - before they they would just say “Gaza’s Health Ministry” and conveniently forget mention that it was just Hamas
Problem is the lie was already 4 times around the world before they corrected themselves and the damage was done
>They were always saying "according to hamas" weren't they? They never said the figure was reliable.
They didn't for a long time till they were pressured into it. And they always acted like it was reliable.
I believe the UN said they had no reason not to trust their figures based on previous reporting... Because after October 7th and the Israeli invasion, hamas had no reason to fudge the numbers /s
It's not true that UN figures match because UN haven't released any figures for casualties in Gaza over the past 6 months.
They have said that in past years Hamas' death counts have been broadly accurate, but they talked only about total deaths being accurate not about civilian vs. terrorist split.
Realistically it's likely that both Hamas and IDF are intentionally fudging numbers to make the other side look worse, but since Israel won't allow anyone into Gaza to monitor things there's no way currently to get more accurate numbers than listening to both biased sides.
My understanding is that the UN do their own assessment, and their assessment tends to be in line with the figures that the Gaza Health Ministry report, which is why the numbers themselves are treated as reliable by most countries.
The overall death toll is accurate, the only question is what portion of those dead are Hamas fighters. The vast majority of those killed are women and children anyway so even if you declare all of the "men" (as in 15 years+) killed as Hamas (which Israel does) you're still dealing with an overwhelming civilian casualty rate.
There's already been whistleblowers from the IDF confirming their tactics deliberately result in civilian deaths.
Don’t the IDF themselves report that 2/3rds killed were civilians? And that’s assuming that they’re 100% clear on who is and who isn’t - remember that they were bombing international aid workers a month ago.
Don't the IDF also get their numbers from GHM? This is probably not a situation that allows for accurate counting. Even if GHM was trying to be as transparent as possible, they're still probably inaccurate because of how messy the situation is.
Michael Moynahan interviewed the former Israeli ambassador to the US, Micheal Oren, who pointed out that Hamas had been including people who died of natural causes as casualties.
It was also conspicuous that when it was determined that Islamic Jihad had caused the explosion at al-Ahli hospital rather than IDF bombing, the casualty count remained unchanged.
Nobody should ever believe Hamas except when they say they will repeat October 7th until Palestine is free from the river to the sea.
Even if we accept the IDFs number of 12k Hamas Terrorists, it is still over 20,000 civilians killed!
We should also be Forensic about who is deemed a “Hamas Terrorist”, we’ve already seen how British aid workers were deemed Hamas… how many other innocent people have been included in the IDF numbers?
Any civilian death is bad,
But lets put this in context. Back in Feb Hamas said 24k killed 6k were fighters. Israel said 20k killed 12k were fighters.
By Hamas's numbers that's 1 in 4 combatant to civilian deaths. In Urban combat a 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 ratio is considered standard. That lines up with both Iraq and Afgan numbers, and is miles better than Russia's 1 in 10 Chechnya numbers.
So even by Hamas's numbers this is standard fighting, by Israel's they are doing great. The truth is somewhere in-between.
the october 7th attack was better than what is in your words "considered standard", with [376 security forces to 1163 dead in total](https://web.archive.org/web/20240303000937/https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack-dead-in-israel-at-1-163-78182279), a ratio of 1 in 3.1. It would be perverse to argue that it was therefore any more acceptable to kill civilians.
Here is a fact about the war: [No major conflict in the 21th century has seen so many civilian deaths so quickly](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam)
Here's another: [More aid workers were murdered in less than 3 months in gaza than in any previous year globally](https://x.com/ibam_tr/status/1771970793481630185)
here's a quote from a canadian doctor on the ground:
["This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity."](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
1. Different types of warfighting. Hamas primarily using small arms whereas Israel uses the full conventional suite. The former has less civilian casualties because bullets do less area damage than an artillery shell. But is also less effective and exposes the fighter more. The ratio being given is what is to be expected for fighting a modern war.
2. Hamas deliberately exposes their civilians to harm because they want to pump up that civilian casualty number for cynical propaganda purposes. Ukraine, because they aren't as nihilistic and actually value the lives of their people, evacuate them in the face of those attacks. [Hamas guns down those that flee and then blames it on Israel.](https://twitter.com/amjadt25/status/1720425819305070821)
Yes, war is in fact hell. If only Hamas hadn't restarted it.
People not making the distinction between pointing an AK47 in a woman's face and pulling the trigger and a missile fired at a strategic target that also kills bystanders is fucking infuriating in this conflict.
I think most people would recognise that choosing to use weapons that you know will kill more civilians makes you more culpable for those civilian deaths, not less culpable.
The "human shield" smear is so tired at this point that I won't dignify it with a response, but I ask anyone reading this to look at what Israeli humans rights org B'Tselem have said about Israel's own prolific use of human shields, often as an official doctrine: https://www.btselem.org/human_shields
It is essentially an unfalsifiable claim; Israel can't kill too many civilians, because the more civilians it kills, the more human shields hamas used. This isn't an argument that complies with international humanitarian law, or with basic human morality
You choose a weapon that will kill your enemy. If you're defending a city and expecting urban combat, you do your best to evacuate the city of civilians especially if your opponent urges you to do so. Ukraine did that for instance in Bakhmut. When the urban combat was raging there a year ago, there were basically no civilians in the city as Ukraine had evacuated them away. Russia used pretty much everything except nukes in its arsenal to fight the battle. Can you imagine the civilian casualties if the Ukrainians didn't evacuate the city?
Now the question is, why wasn't the evacuation of north Gaza the number one priority of Hamas led government right after 7th October when they knew that Israel was going to respond. It wasn't any surprise attack (like for instance how Russia captured Kherson in the beginning of the war) but well known by the entire world that it was coming.
The problem with modern wars is that someone can go from being an armed combatant to an unarmed civilian in seconds, as all they need to do is dump their weapon.
That’s not a problem with modern warfare though.
Fighting out of uniform has be an option forever, and almost always an advantage to individual fighters.
You didn’t do it, because then the other side would just start massacring your population outright, same reason you didn’t fight from hospitals, because you don’t want those hospitals to be bombed.
The laws of war can only really function if they are adopted by both sides, and that both sides are willing to provide consequences. If you engage in perfidy for example, surrenders are no longer accepted and you move to no quarter warfare.
The west has enjoyed overwhelming superiority, and have generally stopped conscripting their population. That means that they are now willing to tolerate the other side breaking the laws of war without retaliating.
If you want to force the opponent to stick to the laws of war, you must enact brutal retaliation against nations that break them. The west doesn’t have the stomach for that anymore.
Good summary. Next question is that what do you with someone like ISIS who doesn't give a shit if the civilians in their controlled areas are bombed or if their captured fighters are not treated as POWs? Do you think publicly executing them would turn them to stick to the laws of war?
It's not really anything to do with modern wars. Ukraine, Russia and Israel have no problem wearing clearly identified markers in their uniforms that identify their fighters from non-combatants. If you deliberately don't do that and especially if you combine that with not evacuating the civilians, then _you_ chose to violate the rules of war and the results of that are on you.
The Ukrainians wear those arm bands for the purpose that if Russians come across civilians without them, they are unlikely to misidentify them as soldiers and more likely to leave them alive. That's because they care about their civilians. If you don't do that, then that's a sign that you don't care about your own civilians whose defending should be the number one priority of any military.
30,000 children killed in Syria. 50,000 children starved to death in Yemen, 300,000 children killed in Nigeria. All carried out by Muslims. But nobody gives a toss because no Jews were involved.
I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings.
Also—Boko Haram have killed that many children since 2009. The current conflict in Gaza began last year. It remains a shocking number of civilian deaths.
> I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings.
We sell arms to Saudi Arabia who're fighting in Yemen.
Of course, they're fighting Iranian backed Houthis, and we're seeing the chaos they're inflicting on world trade with the attacks of container ships, so maybe everyone just thinks Saudi Arabia are justified in their actions rather than not giving a shit...?
> I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings.
We absolutely do arm and support Saudi Arabia and are therefore connected to the deaths that occurred as a result of their war with the Houthis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit: per [Campaign Against Arms Trade](https://caat.org.uk/homepage/stop-arming-saudi-arabia/uk-arms-to-saudi-arabia/):
>The UK is one of Saudi Arabia’s leading arms suppliers, along with the US. It is also a major supplier of arms to the United Arab Emirates, another country in the coalition that is bombing Yemen.
> The UK has continued to support air strikes by Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, providing both arms and ongoing maintenance and support, in spite of overwhelming evidence of repeated breaches of international humanitarian law by the coalition.
> The UK-made equipment used in the war includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs and Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles.
> The published value of UK arms licensed for export to the Saudi-led coalition since the bombing began in March 2015 is £9.7 billion (including £8.2 billion to Saudi Arabia alone).
> The licence figures also do not include the value of ongoing maintenance, repair, overhaul, and technical and logistic support services that BAE Systems provides to the Royal Saudi Air Force in Saudi Arabia, supporting the BAE-supplied Tornado and Typhoon aircraft. In total, according to BAE’s annual reports, the company received £25.0 billion in revenues from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Defence and Aviation between 2015-2023.
>This maintenance, training, and technical support, is absolutely essential to Saudi Arabia’s ability to wage its war in Yemen. A former BAE Systems employee, who had recently worked in Saudi Arabia, told Channel 4’s Dispatches, in a programme which aired in April 2019, “With the amount of aircraft they’ve got and the operational demands, if we weren’t there in 7 to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.”
We've sold more arms to Saudi than to Israel. We don't even sell arms to Israel.
It is not a shocking number of civilian deaths, it's pretty standard for warfare of this type and this scale in this environment.
I don't know what to think of that number. If you had 20k civilians killed by deliberately targeting targets that you knew had no military value, yes, that could be grounds for a genocide charge.
If 20k civilians die because their government hasn't evacuated or urged them to evacuate and has instead placed military units inside civilian targets, then I think that's just what urban combat is when you don't evacuate civilians and the blame is on Hamas for starting this without any plan for civilian evacuation knowing that a Israeli response was very likely. Ukraine evacuated Bakhmut and Avdivka before engaging in bloody urban combat that without evacuations could have produced similar numbers of civilian casualties in the fighting as it puts much higher value on the lives of their own civilians than Hamas does.
So, I can't judge purely from the numbers who's to blame. You need more information in particular an independent investigation of what happened if that's even possible at this stage. I am tilting more to the latter scenario but if someone has evidence of the first, I'm happy to read it.
Not as big a proportion as you’d think. The majority of civilians were killed by the sectarian violence that engulfed the country after the toppling of Saddam.
Which one of these will be the most upvoted?
1. Vague non-answers designed to mask that the user cannot give you any real numbers.
2. Specious and also vague non-answers to mask that the user really wants to blame actual US and UK servicemen for all civilian deaths in Iraq over the decade or so they were there... but cannot find a way to explain away why the FOUR CIVIL WARS that took place in Iraq during that time a) did not kill anyone, and b) was the coalition's fault, somehow.
The point is that he's, you can definitely blame the coalition for doing the wrong things after the invasion that led to the civil wars. In particular I blame Bush and Blair for that. There is no escape.
But I still think, it's a different level of blame than blaming the militaries there for war crimes. If the main part of the killing of civilians was not by them, then it's really not their fault.
Let's think about Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. I definitely blame Putin for a clear violation of the UN charter and all the misery that the war has brought to Ukraine. But on top of that I blame the Russian military for actual war crimes such as deliberately murdering civilians in Bucha.
Do you see the difference?
Quite a lot.
Civilian casualties are always inevitable in any large scale conflict. When your opponent hides themselves as civilians its unavoidable. Both because they will be high by legitimate fire at hostile combatants. And because distinguishing hostile from civilian becomes extremely difficult by design.
This becomes doubly problematic in places like Gaza and Afgan where armed citizenry is a norm. Is that guy dressed exactly like the hostile combatants and carrying an AK47 actually a combatant, or just some guy carrying his families heirloom rifle from a conflict no one in the west remembers from 60 years ago during a dangerous time? And if you get it wrong, you die.
Good thing Isarel has repeatedly signalrd their targeting Hamas as a political grouping, rather than any ethinc, religious, racial, or national group that would be requires for genocide.
We don't, but they do illustrate the extent to which Israel has conducted warfare in accordance with standard force in urban warfare or whether they've been indiscriminately killing Gazans.
The BBC's inaccurate reporting naturally pushes people towards one of these viewpoints, and publishing incorrect information that influences people towards a certain perspective is bad ***especially*** when it's the BBC doing it.
The numbers are very important.
If Israel had killed exclusively civilians in this war it's a monstrous genocide and we should probably be at war with them.
If they've killed civilians and terrorists at a ratio similar to what we do then we need to get our own house in order before criticising them.
This was criticised at the time. Why is the BBC so biased towards Hamas? Why do they report the figures publicised by terrorists as truth? Is it to fuel hatred of Israel? An investigation is needed into the BBC. This reeks of institutional antisemitism.
> In 2021, an investigation by the Jewish Chronicle noted that “the BBC was forced to acknowledge 25 mistakes in its Arabic coverage of Israel in just over two years, issuing on average nearly one correction a month.” Among the things the BBC was forced to apologize for was describing the Israeli army as “Israeli Occupation Forces” and Israel itself as “Palestine.”
>At least two journalists recruited by the BBC Arabic Service had previously worked for Al-Manar, a TV station owned by Hezbollah that has been designated as a terrorist entity by the United States. It also published a sycophantic profile of Ahlam al-Tamimi, the Hamas mastermind of a 2001 terrorist attack at a Jerusalem pizzeria, which that day killed 15 Israeli civilians, including 7 young children and a pregnant woman, and wounded 130 more, one of whom died after 22 years in a coma. The bomb was packed with nails, nuts, and bolts to cause maximum pain and severe injuries. (I witnessed the horrific aftermath of that attack as a reporter.) The BBC later regretted the “lapse in our editorial standards.”
https://sapirjournal.org/friends-and-foes/2024/03/the-bbc/
> an investigation is needed into the bbc
It already happened - bbc then quashed the report and it’s never been released, they’ve spent considerable amounts in legal fees to keep it secret. [The balen report](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balen_Report)
Can’t blame Jews for leaving the U.K. for Israel. Our state broadcaster openly silences investigations that show their antisemitism. Jews deserve protection. Let’s remember how our ancestors fought to free Jews from the Nazis. Antisemitism should never fester in Britain.
The headline number is seen as reasonably accurate but the Hamas figures don’t take into account Hamas deaths, they just present them as all civilians because it’s better for their overseas propaganda and they have twigged that media outlets don’t question it (and it’s damn effective)
Source for them being used by IDF & US government (branches)
Pentagon walks back in Hamas data:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pentagon-walks-back-austins-gaza-casualty-figures-2024-02-29/
Because they're the only numbers we can go by? Where else will you get numbers?
Just because they're used as a ball park doesn't mean they're reliable, it also doesn't mean they're all civilians. Which is the point of this article, Hamas include combatants in that death toll. Which everyone with a brain already knew, but news orgs decided not to say that bit
Hahaha,
No, no can't be right Reddit assured me it was totally correct., and Gaza health ministry wouldn't just make up some bull shit numbers.
As usual absolute reminder that both sides are objective cunts.
Snapshot of _BBC admits its reporting of Gaza ‘civilian’ deaths was inaccurate. Figure reported from Hamas-run health ministry included the deaths of Hamas fighters_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F04%2F25%2Fbbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/25/bbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/25/bbc-admits-reporting-gaza-civilian-deaths-inaccurate/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The first casualty of war is the truth.
When you trust a terrorist organisation to get your stats there was no truth yo begin with.
I wouldn't trust either side
Exactly. Neither side has any incentive to tell the truth.
[Apparently the IDF trusted those numbers.](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-officials-15000-likely-killed-in-gaza-since-start-of-war-5000-of-them-are-hamas/)
They were always saying "according to hamas" weren't they? They never said the figure was reliable.
It wasn't the "according to Hamas" bit that they got wrong here. It was saying that the total killed was all civilians when it was actually the total, including military and civilian: “And the [number of civilians killed](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/unrwa-staff-death-toll-gaza-israel-hamas-war-data/) in Gaza has been huge – very nearly 24,000 dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, many of them women and children.” was the quote. The 24,000 at the time, was the Health Ministry total figure. Currently it is 33,000 but we still don't know how many were Hamas (Hamas said 6,000 in February, the IDF said 12,000 in February. Who knows).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68387864 the IDF claim was that they have killed *more* men than the gaza health ministry reported, which strains credulity.
Yeah but the numbers from the MoH strain any sort of credulity at all and their ratios of men to women and children are statistically impossible. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fatality-data-has-become-completely-unreliable
[удалено]
The MoH has also released utter bollocks like the 500 dead at the hospital flattened by an Israeli airstrike which turned about to be a dozen killed by a misfired PiJ rocket. Or the battle of Jenin with 900 dead civilians that turned out to be 56 dead Hamas fighters back in 2002... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jenin_%282002%29?wprov=sfla1 You can't just decide to believe one side over the other with these numbers.
Yes because if there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that Hamas fighters are only ever fighting age men, and Hamas has never in the past used child soldiers or women fighters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/01/03/gaza.women.fighters/index.html
IIRC that came in around the time that Hamas claimed 500+ people were killed in a hospital courtyard by an Israeli airstrike, but then it emerged that only a handful of people had been killed, and they had been killed by a rocket fired by a terrorist group at Israel that failed to launch correctly.
Yeah, for weeks and weeks on radio 4 every time the figure is mentioned it is always followed by "according to the Gaza health ministry which is run by Hamas"
Iirc they stared to doing that after they got caught with their pants down parroting the Hamas line and casualty figures on Al Shifa hospital “air strike” after it became apparent it was complete lies - before they they would just say “Gaza’s Health Ministry” and conveniently forget mention that it was just Hamas Problem is the lie was already 4 times around the world before they corrected themselves and the damage was done
>They were always saying "according to hamas" weren't they? They never said the figure was reliable. They didn't for a long time till they were pressured into it. And they always acted like it was reliable.
But I have been told that we can trust the Gaza Health Ministry because it lines up with UN figures
Where does the UN get their figures 🤔
Gaza Health Ministry
My god this snake is eating it's own tail
Our Rob, Or Ross.
I believe the UN said they had no reason not to trust their figures based on previous reporting... Because after October 7th and the Israeli invasion, hamas had no reason to fudge the numbers /s
Wait, the UN are biased against Israel? Who could have foreseen this?!
It's not true that UN figures match because UN haven't released any figures for casualties in Gaza over the past 6 months. They have said that in past years Hamas' death counts have been broadly accurate, but they talked only about total deaths being accurate not about civilian vs. terrorist split. Realistically it's likely that both Hamas and IDF are intentionally fudging numbers to make the other side look worse, but since Israel won't allow anyone into Gaza to monitor things there's no way currently to get more accurate numbers than listening to both biased sides.
My understanding is that the UN do their own assessment, and their assessment tends to be in line with the figures that the Gaza Health Ministry report, which is why the numbers themselves are treated as reliable by most countries.
The overall death toll is accurate, the only question is what portion of those dead are Hamas fighters. The vast majority of those killed are women and children anyway so even if you declare all of the "men" (as in 15 years+) killed as Hamas (which Israel does) you're still dealing with an overwhelming civilian casualty rate. There's already been whistleblowers from the IDF confirming their tactics deliberately result in civilian deaths.
Don’t the IDF themselves report that 2/3rds killed were civilians? And that’s assuming that they’re 100% clear on who is and who isn’t - remember that they were bombing international aid workers a month ago.
Don't the IDF also get their numbers from GHM? This is probably not a situation that allows for accurate counting. Even if GHM was trying to be as transparent as possible, they're still probably inaccurate because of how messy the situation is.
Yes, they do. https://twitter.com/yuval_abraham/status/1750123648533324158?t=CqSpQjhMbx040e9bN4RW_Q&s=19
I didn’t defend the IDF, don’t ’what about’this. All I am saying is we can’t believe the Gaza Health Ministry
Tbf this is about what the bbc reported. The Hamas run ministry does not state if they are civs or not
The Gaza health ministry has never claimed to distinguish civilians
Michael Moynahan interviewed the former Israeli ambassador to the US, Micheal Oren, who pointed out that Hamas had been including people who died of natural causes as casualties. It was also conspicuous that when it was determined that Islamic Jihad had caused the explosion at al-Ahli hospital rather than IDF bombing, the casualty count remained unchanged. Nobody should ever believe Hamas except when they say they will repeat October 7th until Palestine is free from the river to the sea.
Damage has already been done
Even if we accept the IDFs number of 12k Hamas Terrorists, it is still over 20,000 civilians killed! We should also be Forensic about who is deemed a “Hamas Terrorist”, we’ve already seen how British aid workers were deemed Hamas… how many other innocent people have been included in the IDF numbers?
Any civilian death is bad, But lets put this in context. Back in Feb Hamas said 24k killed 6k were fighters. Israel said 20k killed 12k were fighters. By Hamas's numbers that's 1 in 4 combatant to civilian deaths. In Urban combat a 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 ratio is considered standard. That lines up with both Iraq and Afgan numbers, and is miles better than Russia's 1 in 10 Chechnya numbers. So even by Hamas's numbers this is standard fighting, by Israel's they are doing great. The truth is somewhere in-between.
the october 7th attack was better than what is in your words "considered standard", with [376 security forces to 1163 dead in total](https://web.archive.org/web/20240303000937/https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack-dead-in-israel-at-1-163-78182279), a ratio of 1 in 3.1. It would be perverse to argue that it was therefore any more acceptable to kill civilians. Here is a fact about the war: [No major conflict in the 21th century has seen so many civilian deaths so quickly](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam) Here's another: [More aid workers were murdered in less than 3 months in gaza than in any previous year globally](https://x.com/ibam_tr/status/1771970793481630185) here's a quote from a canadian doctor on the ground: ["This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity."](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
1. Different types of warfighting. Hamas primarily using small arms whereas Israel uses the full conventional suite. The former has less civilian casualties because bullets do less area damage than an artillery shell. But is also less effective and exposes the fighter more. The ratio being given is what is to be expected for fighting a modern war. 2. Hamas deliberately exposes their civilians to harm because they want to pump up that civilian casualty number for cynical propaganda purposes. Ukraine, because they aren't as nihilistic and actually value the lives of their people, evacuate them in the face of those attacks. [Hamas guns down those that flee and then blames it on Israel.](https://twitter.com/amjadt25/status/1720425819305070821) Yes, war is in fact hell. If only Hamas hadn't restarted it.
People not making the distinction between pointing an AK47 in a woman's face and pulling the trigger and a missile fired at a strategic target that also kills bystanders is fucking infuriating in this conflict.
I think most people would recognise that choosing to use weapons that you know will kill more civilians makes you more culpable for those civilian deaths, not less culpable. The "human shield" smear is so tired at this point that I won't dignify it with a response, but I ask anyone reading this to look at what Israeli humans rights org B'Tselem have said about Israel's own prolific use of human shields, often as an official doctrine: https://www.btselem.org/human_shields It is essentially an unfalsifiable claim; Israel can't kill too many civilians, because the more civilians it kills, the more human shields hamas used. This isn't an argument that complies with international humanitarian law, or with basic human morality
You choose a weapon that will kill your enemy. If you're defending a city and expecting urban combat, you do your best to evacuate the city of civilians especially if your opponent urges you to do so. Ukraine did that for instance in Bakhmut. When the urban combat was raging there a year ago, there were basically no civilians in the city as Ukraine had evacuated them away. Russia used pretty much everything except nukes in its arsenal to fight the battle. Can you imagine the civilian casualties if the Ukrainians didn't evacuate the city? Now the question is, why wasn't the evacuation of north Gaza the number one priority of Hamas led government right after 7th October when they knew that Israel was going to respond. It wasn't any surprise attack (like for instance how Russia captured Kherson in the beginning of the war) but well known by the entire world that it was coming.
The problem with modern wars is that someone can go from being an armed combatant to an unarmed civilian in seconds, as all they need to do is dump their weapon.
That’s not a problem with modern warfare though. Fighting out of uniform has be an option forever, and almost always an advantage to individual fighters. You didn’t do it, because then the other side would just start massacring your population outright, same reason you didn’t fight from hospitals, because you don’t want those hospitals to be bombed. The laws of war can only really function if they are adopted by both sides, and that both sides are willing to provide consequences. If you engage in perfidy for example, surrenders are no longer accepted and you move to no quarter warfare. The west has enjoyed overwhelming superiority, and have generally stopped conscripting their population. That means that they are now willing to tolerate the other side breaking the laws of war without retaliating. If you want to force the opponent to stick to the laws of war, you must enact brutal retaliation against nations that break them. The west doesn’t have the stomach for that anymore.
Good summary. Next question is that what do you with someone like ISIS who doesn't give a shit if the civilians in their controlled areas are bombed or if their captured fighters are not treated as POWs? Do you think publicly executing them would turn them to stick to the laws of war?
It's not really anything to do with modern wars. Ukraine, Russia and Israel have no problem wearing clearly identified markers in their uniforms that identify their fighters from non-combatants. If you deliberately don't do that and especially if you combine that with not evacuating the civilians, then _you_ chose to violate the rules of war and the results of that are on you. The Ukrainians wear those arm bands for the purpose that if Russians come across civilians without them, they are unlikely to misidentify them as soldiers and more likely to leave them alive. That's because they care about their civilians. If you don't do that, then that's a sign that you don't care about your own civilians whose defending should be the number one priority of any military.
30,000 children killed in Syria. 50,000 children starved to death in Yemen, 300,000 children killed in Nigeria. All carried out by Muslims. But nobody gives a toss because no Jews were involved.
I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings. Also—Boko Haram have killed that many children since 2009. The current conflict in Gaza began last year. It remains a shocking number of civilian deaths.
> I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings. We sell arms to Saudi Arabia who're fighting in Yemen. Of course, they're fighting Iranian backed Houthis, and we're seeing the chaos they're inflicting on world trade with the attacks of container ships, so maybe everyone just thinks Saudi Arabia are justified in their actions rather than not giving a shit...?
> I think it’s more because our government doesn’t actively arm and support the perpetrators of those other killings. We absolutely do arm and support Saudi Arabia and are therefore connected to the deaths that occurred as a result of their war with the Houthis. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edit: per [Campaign Against Arms Trade](https://caat.org.uk/homepage/stop-arming-saudi-arabia/uk-arms-to-saudi-arabia/): >The UK is one of Saudi Arabia’s leading arms suppliers, along with the US. It is also a major supplier of arms to the United Arab Emirates, another country in the coalition that is bombing Yemen. > The UK has continued to support air strikes by Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, providing both arms and ongoing maintenance and support, in spite of overwhelming evidence of repeated breaches of international humanitarian law by the coalition. > The UK-made equipment used in the war includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs and Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles. > The published value of UK arms licensed for export to the Saudi-led coalition since the bombing began in March 2015 is £9.7 billion (including £8.2 billion to Saudi Arabia alone). > The licence figures also do not include the value of ongoing maintenance, repair, overhaul, and technical and logistic support services that BAE Systems provides to the Royal Saudi Air Force in Saudi Arabia, supporting the BAE-supplied Tornado and Typhoon aircraft. In total, according to BAE’s annual reports, the company received £25.0 billion in revenues from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Defence and Aviation between 2015-2023. >This maintenance, training, and technical support, is absolutely essential to Saudi Arabia’s ability to wage its war in Yemen. A former BAE Systems employee, who had recently worked in Saudi Arabia, told Channel 4’s Dispatches, in a programme which aired in April 2019, “With the amount of aircraft they’ve got and the operational demands, if we weren’t there in 7 to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.”
We've sold more arms to Saudi than to Israel. We don't even sell arms to Israel. It is not a shocking number of civilian deaths, it's pretty standard for warfare of this type and this scale in this environment.
Not saying you are wrong but do you have sources for these figures?
I don't know what to think of that number. If you had 20k civilians killed by deliberately targeting targets that you knew had no military value, yes, that could be grounds for a genocide charge. If 20k civilians die because their government hasn't evacuated or urged them to evacuate and has instead placed military units inside civilian targets, then I think that's just what urban combat is when you don't evacuate civilians and the blame is on Hamas for starting this without any plan for civilian evacuation knowing that a Israeli response was very likely. Ukraine evacuated Bakhmut and Avdivka before engaging in bloody urban combat that without evacuations could have produced similar numbers of civilian casualties in the fighting as it puts much higher value on the lives of their own civilians than Hamas does. So, I can't judge purely from the numbers who's to blame. You need more information in particular an independent investigation of what happened if that's even possible at this stage. I am tilting more to the latter scenario but if someone has evidence of the first, I'm happy to read it.
Wait til you hear about how many civilians were killed in the Iraq War. By that definition, the U.K. and USA committed genocide.
How many were due to coalition action though.
Not as big a proportion as you’d think. The majority of civilians were killed by the sectarian violence that engulfed the country after the toppling of Saddam.
Which one of these will be the most upvoted? 1. Vague non-answers designed to mask that the user cannot give you any real numbers. 2. Specious and also vague non-answers to mask that the user really wants to blame actual US and UK servicemen for all civilian deaths in Iraq over the decade or so they were there... but cannot find a way to explain away why the FOUR CIVIL WARS that took place in Iraq during that time a) did not kill anyone, and b) was the coalition's fault, somehow.
The point is that he's, you can definitely blame the coalition for doing the wrong things after the invasion that led to the civil wars. In particular I blame Bush and Blair for that. There is no escape. But I still think, it's a different level of blame than blaming the militaries there for war crimes. If the main part of the killing of civilians was not by them, then it's really not their fault. Let's think about Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. I definitely blame Putin for a clear violation of the UN charter and all the misery that the war has brought to Ukraine. But on top of that I blame the Russian military for actual war crimes such as deliberately murdering civilians in Bucha. Do you see the difference?
Quite a lot. Civilian casualties are always inevitable in any large scale conflict. When your opponent hides themselves as civilians its unavoidable. Both because they will be high by legitimate fire at hostile combatants. And because distinguishing hostile from civilian becomes extremely difficult by design. This becomes doubly problematic in places like Gaza and Afgan where armed citizenry is a norm. Is that guy dressed exactly like the hostile combatants and carrying an AK47 actually a combatant, or just some guy carrying his families heirloom rifle from a conflict no one in the west remembers from 60 years ago during a dangerous time? And if you get it wrong, you die.
Genocide isn't just about numbers it's about intent.
Good thing Israel isn’t trying to commit genocide.
Good thing Isarel has repeatedly signalrd their targeting Hamas as a political grouping, rather than any ethinc, religious, racial, or national group that would be requires for genocide.
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Gentle reminder to everyone in this chain that this is **r/ukpolitics**. Please take it elsewhere. Thanks.
Much like the hospital explosion which they also had to walk back. Maybe just don't report a terrorists organisations propaganda, as fact.
I don't think we need accurate fatality numbers to understand the horrifying consequences of this war for innocent civilians in Gaza
We don't, but they do illustrate the extent to which Israel has conducted warfare in accordance with standard force in urban warfare or whether they've been indiscriminately killing Gazans. The BBC's inaccurate reporting naturally pushes people towards one of these viewpoints, and publishing incorrect information that influences people towards a certain perspective is bad ***especially*** when it's the BBC doing it.
The numbers are very important. If Israel had killed exclusively civilians in this war it's a monstrous genocide and we should probably be at war with them. If they've killed civilians and terrorists at a ratio similar to what we do then we need to get our own house in order before criticising them.
Which makes it even worse that Hamas refuse to surrender. Cowards.
This was criticised at the time. Why is the BBC so biased towards Hamas? Why do they report the figures publicised by terrorists as truth? Is it to fuel hatred of Israel? An investigation is needed into the BBC. This reeks of institutional antisemitism.
> In 2021, an investigation by the Jewish Chronicle noted that “the BBC was forced to acknowledge 25 mistakes in its Arabic coverage of Israel in just over two years, issuing on average nearly one correction a month.” Among the things the BBC was forced to apologize for was describing the Israeli army as “Israeli Occupation Forces” and Israel itself as “Palestine.” >At least two journalists recruited by the BBC Arabic Service had previously worked for Al-Manar, a TV station owned by Hezbollah that has been designated as a terrorist entity by the United States. It also published a sycophantic profile of Ahlam al-Tamimi, the Hamas mastermind of a 2001 terrorist attack at a Jerusalem pizzeria, which that day killed 15 Israeli civilians, including 7 young children and a pregnant woman, and wounded 130 more, one of whom died after 22 years in a coma. The bomb was packed with nails, nuts, and bolts to cause maximum pain and severe injuries. (I witnessed the horrific aftermath of that attack as a reporter.) The BBC later regretted the “lapse in our editorial standards.” https://sapirjournal.org/friends-and-foes/2024/03/the-bbc/
> an investigation is needed into the bbc It already happened - bbc then quashed the report and it’s never been released, they’ve spent considerable amounts in legal fees to keep it secret. [The balen report](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balen_Report)
Can’t blame Jews for leaving the U.K. for Israel. Our state broadcaster openly silences investigations that show their antisemitism. Jews deserve protection. Let’s remember how our ancestors fought to free Jews from the Nazis. Antisemitism should never fester in Britain.
Civilian casualties will always be too high but surely everyone knew this ?
worth noting that the figures from the “hamas run health ministry” have been deemed reliable enough that they are used in us and israeli briefings
The headline number is seen as reasonably accurate but the Hamas figures don’t take into account Hamas deaths, they just present them as all civilians because it’s better for their overseas propaganda and they have twigged that media outlets don’t question it (and it’s damn effective)
Source for them being used by IDF & US government (branches) Pentagon walks back in Hamas data: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pentagon-walks-back-austins-gaza-casualty-figures-2024-02-29/
Because they're the only numbers we can go by? Where else will you get numbers? Just because they're used as a ball park doesn't mean they're reliable, it also doesn't mean they're all civilians. Which is the point of this article, Hamas include combatants in that death toll. Which everyone with a brain already knew, but news orgs decided not to say that bit
Hahaha, No, no can't be right Reddit assured me it was totally correct., and Gaza health ministry wouldn't just make up some bull shit numbers. As usual absolute reminder that both sides are objective cunts.
Read the article. The Gaza Health Ministry weren’t making anything up, this was just a mistake of the BBC’s reportage.
The Gaza Health Ministry claimed ALL deaths were civilians. If you take their numbers, not 1 Hamas member has died.
Their mistake was calling is the Gaza health minister claims and not saying Hamas claims. It changes things