“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.
Based on US intelligence of Hamas casualties, 80% of those 30,000 are civilians. 80%. >50% are below the age of 18.
The 25,000 number given Lloyd Austin wasn’t based on US intelligence.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress on Thursday that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, but the Pentagon later clarified that estimate, saying the figure came from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, not U.S. intelligence.
Hamas-run is sure a weaselly way of implicating disinformation. Their numbers have been consistently confirmed to be very accurate and trustworthy. Which is probably why Israel keeps bombing all those hospitals; so the deaths will stop being tallied accurately.
Do you prepend all information coming out of Israeli institutions with “Likud-run” or everything that comes from the US with “democrat run”?
It’s a factual and neutral statement. Hamas has been governing Gaza since they were elected in 2006. Any governmental officials in Gaza hold power because Hamas gave it to them. They are not, and could never be a neutral party.
Statements about Israeli officials, intelligence, and the IDF are the same.
In the US these same news outlets do refer to officials as Democratic or Republican frequently. Hell, they even talk about which judges were appointed by which president. Similar reporting happens with different government officials throughout Europe as well.
That man consciously chose to put the phrase “hamas-run” in there. What do you propose is the reasoning for doing so, if not to call into question the accuracy of the numbers through that association? It is absolutely not a neutral statement; context exists.
I have never once seen the phrase “Likud-run” next to any of the statements, tallies, or intelligence from Israel that the media reprints without any fact-checking or investigation.
The author likely made the choice to include “Hamas-run” for factual accuracy and neutrality. Merely writing “Gaza health ministry”, would imply a neutral 3rd party. Any official in Gaza is appointed by Hamas and cannot be neutral. As such, it is fair to question the accuracy of the numbers provided.
That said, while their numbers are not something I would take at face value, their death count is still the best one we have.
The Gaza Health ministry existed before 2006. It’s continuity is contingent upon the same personelle doing the grueling work day in and day out. The rank and file are first and foremost medical professionals.
From the Wikipedia entry:
On 10 November 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US intelligence community has growing confidence that death toll reports from the Gaza Health Ministry are roughly accurate. The article also reported that despite US officials had growing confidence, they did not have enough information to confirm for sure. On 6 December 2023, a comparative study published in The Lancet based on publicly available mortality reports stated there was no evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Ministry The US Assistant Secretary of State said that actual death toll was most likely “even higher” than what the GHM reported. In January 2024, Israeli news magazine Mekomit reported that Israeli intelligence officials had concluded that Health Ministry casualty reports are generally reliable and are used in briefings to senior officials.
So if more than vague conjectures, share it.
2 points.
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I don’t see any issues with the information presented in the Wikipedia section you linked.
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Leadership in the Gaza Health Ministry has definitely changed since Hamas took control, I doubt all the workers are the same either. That isn’t super important though, except in understanding that they aren’t a neutral party.
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Yeah they dropped something like 30,000 meals.
For more than two million.
A fucking joke. That’s more likely to start fights between hungry people than to help.
Gotta start somewhere. I bet the airdrops are a stop gap while the trucks get organized.
🤡
According to UNRWA, the number of Palestinians currently in need of food assistance is more like 500k. 30k is a good start, especially when you consider that it was just the first drop. Negotiations are reportedly going well to start bringing in boats, but time will tell if Israel is as open to that as they claim.
Any boots on the ground, even those protecting aid workers, carry a risk of more incidents like the flour riots, so that’s not going to happen without operational coordination agreements. Israel would love it if there were an incident between American soldiers and Palestinians. It would be a propaganda goldmine.
All 2+ million are in need of food assistance. 550k aren’t just in need of food assistance, they’re close to famine and famine is different. That’s when you literally die from starvation and it can take weeks of food assistance to recover from famine.
Also what the fuck are you talking about with this “flour riot” bullshit? It was a massacre. Fuck off trying to blame Palestinians for it.
Flour massacre is fair. I’m not exactly stumping for Israel when I say that they would love to use another incident involving US troops as propaganda. Ultimately, Israel is at fault for their deaths no matter how it occurred.
Again, this was just the first drop, so the number of people needing food immediately is what’s relevant. Air drops are a terribly inefficient way to do this, but they are also the safest for everyone. The air drops are expected to accelerate, and other methods of delivery are being negotiated. The appropriate response is “great, but we need more, and we need to make them unnecessary.” Calling them “a fucking joke” is as likely to contribute to ending deliveries as it is to encourage accelerated deliveries.
The safest way to do this would be to force Israel to stop doing genocide.
EDIT Oh look Israel massacred aid-seekers again!
We don’t need to be airdropping aid packages into Gaza. We need to be airdropping something else onto the IDF.
I appreciate (and share) the desire, but the idea that the US can force Israel to leave Gaza isn’t realistic.
US support for Israel is done in pursuit of US interests. Those interests aren’t going away, and are neither particularly sinister nor altruistic. Israel depends on aid but, under Netanyaho, it doesn’t care where that aid comes from. If the US pulls out, Russia has multiple incentives to take it’s place. That is not an acceptable outcome for America, and would arguably be a disaster for Palestine too.
I do not argue that the Biden administration has done everything it should to restrain Israel but, from a cold foreign policy perspective, the leverage the US has is far more limited than people think.
Of course the US always has the capability to project military force into the situation, and Israel has no realistic means to resist that. However, I don’t see where support would come from for such a move. It’s not there internationally, domestically, or even popular with supporters of Palestine.
First off, Russia doesn’t have the capacity to fight in Ukraine and support Israel. It would bankrupt itself.
Secondly, Russia doesn’t have the geopolitical capacity to alienate its allies like Iran by supporting Israel’s genocide. Russia would basically be cutting itself off from every other ally it has except maybe China, and for what? A country that will gladly backstab Russia at the first opportunity?
Your realpolitik excuse is just that. The reality is that Israel is dependent on the US and has no one else that will step in to fill the void.
Iran is the only ally Russia has that has a real interest in what Israel does to Palestine. If Iran has to choose between Russia and Palestine, that doesn’t end well for Palestine. Countries have interests, not friends. Russia would leap at the chance to be Israel’s protector while fighting the “Nazis” in Ukraine. It fits right in with their narrative and would make it harder for Europe to escalate aid to Ukraine.
Even if it’s not Russia, you already named the other option. China would also love to give the US a black eye.
Biden has no interest in this genocide. It does nothing for him, it damages him politically, and his administration has been against it from the start. The reason he isn’t doing what you think he should is exactly what I’m saying.
Biden is deeply flawed, but his delusion about being a man of principles is real. He does not want this to be his legacy.
How about air bombings? And not against Gaza.
I don’t think killing more people is the answer here.
It doesn’t appear they’re going to stop willingly. We went to war to stop Nazi Germany.
America went to war because Japan bombed them, they were A-OK with Germany’s genocide until they were actually pulled into it.
This is not an argument against intervening in Israel’s genocide, just a note on historical accuracy
I meant “we” more referring to the Allied forces going to war against Nazi Germany’s invasions of Poland, France, etc., like Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
But yeah, nobody cared about the genocide when it was domestic to Germany.
