GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 24 (Reuters) - More than 700 Palestinians were killed in overnight Israeli air strikes, Gaza’s health ministry said on Tuesday, the highest 24-hour death toll since Israel began a bombing campaign to crush Hamas militants who stunned the country with a deadly Oct. 7 attack.
Israel said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in the overnight strikes on the besieged enclave but said its war to destroy the Islamist group would take time.
As aid agencies warned that a humanitarian catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Israel to offer it support.
Let’s assume the Ministry of Health is lying, what number of dead civilians is enough to condemn Israel of ethnic cleansing? People are dying at the hands of Israeli strikes in the most horrid ways, and everybody is denouncing it publicly as a war crime, and here we are calling them “liars” even though it’s a bunch of overworked medical staff and are running out of body bags. How many dead bodies do we need to see on TV for it to be a tragedy?
I strongly suspect they are providing an upper bound - based on the number of people who live in a particular residence and declaring them “dead” before actually finding a body or confirming they don’t have a pulse. So their numbers always look really high at first and get revised downwards as they move people from the “dead” count to “injured” or “found alive and well”. In many cases, you can observe that they will announce a large number of fatalities within minutes of a blast - faster than it’s feasible to even count the bodies much less confirm they are fully dead and not merely injured.
Context matters. Dead soldiers from an organization that recently committed terrorism and atrocities are not a tragedy. This is the expected outcome of war. There will be civilian fatalities who were in the wrong place or worse being held as human shields. Those civilian deaths are a tragedy, and the best way to prevent them is to strongly denounce Hamas.
There’s a reason that article notes that they “could not independently verify the ministry figures.” They aren’t independent or apolitical. The Ministry of Health aren’t frontline doctors and nurses, they are the Hamas-controlled bureaucracy that oversees them. Hamas long ago purged anyone from the ministry that wasn’t specifically loyal to them.
Why do you think Hamas would work so hard to purge the Palestinians in the Ministry who were neutral or Fatah-aligned? Is there a compelling reason to think an institution designed to serve a party or faction to the exclusion of everyone else would (or could) serve anyone else?
The reason is that they are neutral and no one is allowed to Gaza (thanks to Israel) to verify this.
Anyway again it’s Frontline doctors and nurses who report these numbers.
The reason is that they’re a problematic source. Everyone’s also being much more cautious since the al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast because several major news organizations had to apologize for uncritically reporting Hamas/MoH claims that turned out to be false.
I’m sure first responders report numbers to the ministry but you’re wrong to think that they’re reporting to you. The voice that speaks through the ministry is Hamas. You’re taking it purely on faith that it’s otherwise, but it ain’t true just because you’d like it to be. I’m not sure Hamas has really earned your faith. They’re being widely reported because, as you said, there’s no one else in a position to report. But best-we-have doesn’t really mean good, does it? And it shouldn’t mean that we stop evaluating them critically as a source.