“Israel MUST open the borders and allow the United Nations to deliver supplies in sufficient quantities.”
“The United States, which has helped fund the Israeli military for years, cannot sit back and allow hundreds of thousands of innocent children to starve to death,” Sanders (Vt.) said in a statement. “As a result of Israeli bombing and restrictions on humanitarian aid, the people of Gaza are facing an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.”
Israeli forces have killed more than 30,200 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them women and children—while wounding over 71,300 others and displacing around 90% of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people. Children are now starving to death, and experts say adults, especially elders and other vulnerable people, will soon follow absent urgent intervention.
I see, so providing context is conjuring up the image of a boogeyman and using it to call into question the exact death toll of a genocide, but not looking into the accuracy of those numbers or the record of those who provided them and how they held up over time. It’s not really fair to question accuracy when they have no history of fabrication or misreporting in the entire time they’ve been “hamas-run”.
You seem very insistent that neutral facts are just de-facto unassailable but there are so many ways to present “neutral facts” in a way that is absolutely biased. The most simple of which is simply curating which “neutral facts” you choose to present. What important context is provided here other than a flimsy bullshit reason to question the legitimacy of something which has no reasonable justification for being questioned? Why isn’t the context that they have been providing accurate reporting for literal decades also being mentioned when the very thing being questioned is the accuracy of the numbers and not their political association?
Providing context is accurately identifying your source of information. When the IDF gives a statement, that is cited as well, often mentioning the Netanyahu government in-tandem.
For some up-to-date reporting on this subject, I’d like to share this recent NPR piece.
The Gaza health ministry has relied entirely on “reliable media sources” for ~13,000 of the ~30,000 reported deaths so far. ~17,000 of the deaths were input electronically from a hospital.
In addition, “Gaza’s health ministry says 70% of those killed in the territory are women and children. Its most recent breakdown of casualties recorded in hospitals shows women and children make up 58% of those deaths. Al-Qudra could not explain the discrepancy.”
So according to the Hamas-run Gaza heath ministry, “reliable media sources” report that 86% of those killed are women and children, but hospital staff report that only 58% are women and children. This discrepancy is significant and it’s clear that the non-hospital sources skew the data overall.
In addition, they intentionally assign all deaths to “Israeli aggression,” and do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants.
All that to say, I think it is a perfect valid approach to specify that Hamas runs the health ministry when their numbers cannot be independently confirmed and appear to have significant distortions.
Their numbers have repeatedly been independently confirmed and shown to be largely accurate in the past. They have never given any cause to doubt them and calling into question their methodology now is disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst.
I’m glad, at least, that we seem to have agreed that the addition of “hamas-run” is purely meant to cast doubt on the numbers but you seem to think this is justified despite all evidence to the contrary. Even the article you linked seems to reach the conclusion that the numbers are likely mostly accurate, if not under counted. It’s far more likely that any discrepancies that may exist are due to the difficulties of maintaining a health system while a hostile nation bombs your health infrastructure into rubble rather than a literally unprecedented manipulation of the data by Hamas.
Here’s some context for you, from your article:
I guess you didn’t need this lesson on how to lie by omission with “neutral facts”; you already knew what you were doing.
Or maybe there are significant deviations from their previous methodology, that skews their numbers to make it look like Israel is intentionally targeting women and children? It may or may not be malicious, but the bias in their counting is clear as day.
Cast doubt? No. Provide context and showcase potential bias? Yes. I suspect the overall numbers are roughly correct (potentially even undercounted), but their updated methodology shows significant deviation from the past in terms of who they say is being killed. All that to say, I would not blindly trust their data.
Yes. I did read that and I suspect there is a translation issue. Clearly when people die in incidents like February 29th, their deaths are added to the count. It’s not merely "occupation bombardment.”
I’m not lying or omitting facts. You keep repeating the term “neutral facts,” but I have never once expressed that is what I want. I’m ok with bias as long as it is factual. Reading multiple perspectives is helpful in understanding complex topics.
The only complexity is caused by the specters of doubt you’ve invented to justify your own biases. You’ve given one example of a single potentially misreported demographic statistic that is tangentially related at best to the death toll number we’re discussing and that somehow represents a shift from decades of established methodology that has consistently reported accurately literally every single time this exact same shit has happened. Israel themselves trust the numbers out of Gaza!
If you thought it was a translation issue why did you cite it as evidence for your argument rather than discarding the whole thing as an unreliable source? You seem have no issue doing that when it comes to the information from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
I keep repeating neutral facts to try and drive home how fucking absurd that phrase is. It’s tautological; facts are all neutral: they are descriptions of reality. How you present facts and frame them determines bias, not the facts themselves. Do you think people are manipulated and propagandized with only lies?
You keep insisting that it’s mere the addition of context but it’s not because it’s only the subset of context that presents the situation in a certain perspective rather than providing the whole picture. If you’re so concerned about gathering different perspectives I think you’d be more eager to insist on the additional context of Gazas historical integrity in these matters alongside the political affiliation of its government and the state of its healthcare infrastructure. Instead you’re keen to just let the incomplete picture painted by “Hamas-run” slide because you agree with the intent behind adding it. Which is to cast doubt, not illuminate context.
K.
Look, the specific numbers have been off since they started relying on media sources. It’s not just “a single potentially misreported demographic statistic,” it’s a series of misreported incidents causing a dramatic demographic skew. That doesn’t mean the overall number of deaths is that far off. It could potentially be a case of the media ignoring the deaths of adult men.
To a point, maybe. Israeli officials constantly disputes the numbers in public.
You keep jumping to extremes and putting words in my mouth. I’ve never said we should “disregard the whole thing as an unreliable source” when it comes to the Gaza health ministry. Their data is a valuable resource, even if they are not a neutral third party.
Ah, so you were just being redundant by saying “neutral facts,” got it.
In response to the rest of that, I would say that the best lies are blended together with truth.
I meant “whole thing” as in the whole quote. You cited part of a quote you apparently believed to have been incorrectly translated and instead of finding another source for that translation or a corroborating statement you just presented it without any kind of caveat about what you believed to be a potential inaccuracy. Apparently, it’s fine to omit context that calls accuracy into question but only when it supports your disingenuous arguments.
Sorry, I thought when you said “It’s a factual and neutral statement.” what you meant was that it’s neutrality was intrinsic to it’s factual nature, rather than just listing that it was both factual and neutral. In my defense, I assumed this because you made this statement in a context where no one has questioned the factual accuracy of “hamas-run”. If that was not your intent then please feel free to ignore all the points I made regarding the inherent neutrality of facts.
Honestly, I originally pulled the “Israeli aggression” quote from this AP article. It was also included in the NPR article I linked, but it is a widely reported fact.
We also have documented instances where deaths clearly include gunfire, which would not be considered “bombardments,” so it’s fair to assume a translation error resulting from a language barrier.
To clarify, the reason I said “It’s a factual and neutral statement,” is that Reuters prides itself on that being free of bias as much as possible. Whether or not they achieve that is up for debate, but it’s included in their Standards & Values..