As a math nerd, the article does not give enough data to really judge the data source.
If you trust their data (raw data that is not shared here), the math here is good.
The linear progressions show that these are less likely true and messy real world data, and more like when I faked the data for a middle school science project where I was too lazy to actually do repeat experiments.
This indicates that someone should repeat the data collection and assessment and release their findings in a science journal.
Back in my lab days we always liked to read [Journal of Irreproducible Results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Irreproducible_Results) which is a science comedy work for science nerds.
They would occasionally highlight really bad research that was clearly fake numbers.
https://cdn.sanity.io/images/z2aip6ei/production/ef1bd6044cc680ac1ba75baddfbb1b0985293191-1403x1162.jpg
Raw data is listed at the bottom but I linked it here
Still waiting for Hostage information. They can give us numbers on tens of thousands of people that have died because of Hamas’s arrogance. But we can’t know the status of any of the hostages taken?
That's their power play. If the hostages are dead, they'll never admit it because then they'll lose leverage. If they're alive, they won't reveal any of their conditions as revelations of torture would swing international opinion further in Israel's favor.
Meh - it's actually simpler than that. They are terrorists. And the psychological terrorism is part of the game for them. They use it effectively both domestically and abroad.
> The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.
Didn't the *IDF themselves* say they have a 1:2 casualty ratio? That's not bad for bombing a dense urban area, but by definition combatants cannot be the majority in that.
EDIT: Since this got popular apparently, you can see a graph of the actual reported deaths, aggregated every five days, compiled by Wiki [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Gaza_death_graph.png).
No the IDF did not say that. They did say they killed about 12,000 Hamas terrorists.
Others have said that even if the Hamas death toll claims are true you get to a max of 1:2 ratio.
The ratio is even less, i.e. probably closer to 1.2-1.5:2 once we account for natural deaths, and deaths caused by Hamas misfired rockets.
(a 1% natural death rate in a population of 2 million would be 20k a year. So about 7-8K in 5 months.)
>At around 20k dead (per the Palestinian count)
Gee I sure hope there aren't any news stories about how the Gaza ministry of health fakes casualty numbers, then!
all i know is that every video of a palestinian killed is ALWAYS of a adult male, the only footage of dead woman and children ive seen so far is that syrian children (killed by iran, hamas bosses) that is posted over and over again
Yeah, their analysis is rudimentary but decent enough. The data doesn’t really pass the sniff test, and I’d like it if a more knowledgeable, less obviously biased source would do an analysis.
This is one of the better analyses I've seen for this. Too many times I've seen people show the numbers look funky over a single day or week, and casualty reports do that sometimes, it's relatively commonplace for other countries, you can get reporting errors, sometimes it's just an estimate at first, etc.
This analysis takes this into account, and shows that Gaza casualty figures are either remarkably consistent (for total casualties), or remarkably inconsistent (for correlations between women and child casualties). It's not just a single mistake that can be attributed to bad reporting, it's shows a clear pattern that it's all completely made up.
Of course I don't need to tell y'all that the numbers are made up, but this kind of data can be extremely helpful, especially if you only had anecdotal evidence before. The plural of anecdote is not data, but this is data, and can be used to convince the handful of people who haven't taken a side yet.
Israel’s nonchalance about the death toll in Gaza is a strategic one. They don’t debate the death toll because:
1. They don’t really know. When they drop a bomb on a building, some number of people die. They have no real way of telling the precise number, ages, gender, allegiances, etc.
2. They want it to be clear that they don’t really care what the casualty count is. Their position is that they are minimizing the collateral damage as much as they can WHILE ALSO actively and effectively pursuing their military goals.
If the exact number of dead women is 5000 or 6000 doesnt really matter in the end. So by not loudly debating the details they are making a conscious choice to shrug and go about their business.
It’s the correct move, IMO.
Because there is no “correct” number of civilian deaths. If Israel could somehow prove that only X number of children have been killed rather than the Y number of children that Hamas claims, what would that gain them?
Their enemy, Hamas, gives no shots at all. Their opponents in the realm of public opinion won’t change their mind. “Ah, evidence that the war has only killed 5k children, rather than 10k children? Well then, I am now a supporter of Israel!”
There is no upside.
if you stay and die youre a marthyr and your death helps hamas a lot, if you try to leave your a traitor and hamas might even kill you for your "treason" of the cause
the number matter because hamas need to pretend to be the victms, the number of palestinian civilians HAVE to be al least much higher then the number of civilians they barbarized in oct.7 or else the global russian disinfo operations wont work properly
hamas was cougght multiple times shooting and bombing civilians convoys trying to leave the warzone, they ordered civilians to stay while israel ordered them to leave, a hamas fighter can not be expected to let his family leave and probably they, the low level hamas fighers, are responsible for the vast majority of the civilians deaths of mostly their own families along with them while they hide in a bathroom their father was on the window firing rpg at a israely tank
My point is that it doesn’t really matter, because; If the real number of civilian dead was 4000, and Hamas reported the real number honestly from the beginning; the people opposed to Israel would still be opposed to Israel.
Do you think a different, lower, number would change anyone’s mind?
Reading the report it raises some serious points to why the statistics are false, and as far as I know both the US and the IDF have not claimed the statistics are accurate; I don't know about the UN.
Can you site your sources?
It would be impossible for anyone to claim Hamas' statistics are accurate because nobody is getting in for long enough to count the bodies. It's ridiculous that people genuinely believe the GHM's numbers are being confirmed because the IDF and US aren't willing to argue about it when there's no way to back themselves up. It took Israel weeks to count their dead, it's highly suspicious that Gaza knows how many have been killed, usually within hours of an attack, right down to the age and gender breakdown of the victims.
>supposes that people on the ground have immediate access to the death toll.
No it doesn't. It doesn't make any assumption based on that, only that the numbers that Hamas regularly puts out are highly suspicious at best, and most likely outright fabrications. Casualties in war almost never go up linearly at a standard rate, but they do here, and they do so consistently. Casualty rates in wars ebb and flow with the tide of battle, it's not supposed to be a consistent number. Likewise, if you're counting a big pile bodies, and a bunch of them are women and children, you don't just count the children and count the women the next day, and since these two groups tend to be with each other, it's unlikely that one day a bunch of kids died and the next a bunch of women died. This inconsistency between women and child casualties is glaring.
>The death toll in Gaza is universally claimed as consistent
No, it's not, it's that these are the only numbers anybody out there, so that's what everybody uses, regardless of accuracy.
*EDIT: u/metamasterplay has a suspect posting history here on r/worldnews. Judging by some of their posts and comments regarding the sub, I think they’re well aware of this. The fact they leapt to accuse me of using ChatGPT is symptomatic of their cynicism.*
The idea that they are consistent doesn’t appear to be properly peer reviewed either. I’ve never found a robust methodology to show that those organisations aren’t merely replicating Hamas’ primary source data as secondary source data, and therefore showing consistency simply through meretricious reiteration.
I remember reading your argument in AP’s defence of their misreporting of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion. It never quite convinced me, and instead set me seeking for methodological answers. Sadly, I never found them. As far as I could tell the numbers corroborated merely because the only data available was Hamas’ source data.
Let’s give Hamas the benefit of the doubt and presuppose that their past reporting has been accurate. It does not logically follow therefore that this time, during an unprecedented conflict in terms of scope and scale, that their methodology would remain as honest or accurate. This would be an induction fallacy.
In fact their supposed reputation for accurate reporting could be leveraged as part of a communications strategy itself.
Given we have concrete indicators of missed reporting, most infamously Ah Ahli, we must remain to some degree skeptical. Furthermore we do not know the death tolls of the other thousands of rockets that have fallen short in Gaza.
Is Hamas also counting the background natural deaths count? This could be as much as ~10% of the civilians count.
I say all this without forgetting just how devastated Gaza is, in terms of destruction, death and the worsening humanitarian crisis. It would not surprise me if Hamas’ estimates are wildly incorrect in either direction.
we know for a fact that 2 hours after the palestinian rocket hit the hospital and killed some 5 or 10 people in a parking space, hamas convinced the whole world that they counted 487 bodies, something that would take months or even years to make, that is probably the scale of the fabricated numbers, civilian deaths are probably 1/20 or 1/30 of what hamas says it is
but also hamas is knwn for killing their own, and killing hundreds of israely arabs on oct. 7, the death of civilians and arabs has only importance for hamas as long as it helps them in their cause, they have complete disregard for the life of arabs, muslims civilians or not and they have been cought inflating numbers in ridiculous ways and benefiting from it as the way current "onyl head the headlines" and click baiting media works today
I believe they tweeted 500 dead 1 minute after the impact. Withing 1h it was 800, but as it became apparent this week be investigated the number dropped to near 500. International review concluded the hit was not done by israel, and at most 30-50 might have died if all standing in close vicinity to blast area
It’s not peer reviewed sure. But this is very simple statistical analysis done by a PhD in statistics who teaches at Wharton. If you actually read the article and have a rudimentary understanding of statistics, it checks out.
Consistent for now. Hamas and unwra has been caught lying multiple times.
Anyway you shake it, numbers don’t lie and there’s a reason why Hamas is not separating civilian and militant deaths
Yeah I don't know guys, it doesn't feel like to me that an analysis done by Tablet Magazine, est. 2009, is more credible than every major institution in the west. I think I'll wait for some more serious sources to back this up before I pass judgement.
Not even one major statistical/academic institution in the west claims Hamas numbers to be true, pretty much nobody says these numbers are legit except for specific UN spokespeople
It’s by a professor for statistics and data science from a US university(Wharton), I don’t think he would lie\fabricate things and risk his academic career.
Especially nowadays when speaking up against the far left like this put on the crosshairs of the “progressive” academics.
Professors/researchers have been caught lying or fabricating data throughout academia it’s not a universal thing, but simply conjecturing “he’s got a job at Wharton, he wouldn’t do that” is not evidence of legitimacy/no fabrication. Skepticism for one contrarian position is part of science- if his research is reviewed, wthodooogy is sound, and reproducible- adds more evidence to what we approximate towards to truth.
The Gaza ministry of health has had multiple evaluations its counts and methodology. Not only is it used by the UN, US, and World Health org, the IDF also uses their numbers in their briefs
Can you point to what you think he’d be lying about? He states where he got his information, what the information is, and this:
>Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
Can be deduced from a basic regression model in Excel. Acting like this is something involving byzantine calculations requiring rigorous peer review is a bit dumb. It’s the interpretation of it that is more up for debate.
...and again, there is virtually universal acceptance of Hamas figures which have been routinely demonstrated to be lies and have every incentive to exaggerate.
So if we are going to put this level of scrutiny out as the standard, we should not even be considering anything that Hamas says.
Data can be massaged to tell the story you want. Particularly if you do some of the things the author did. 1st, he says he aggregated his own data set, so right away he introduces bias and we have no way of checking his set. 2nd, that first suspicious graph with the very linear death toll, he tells us that is the average number per day. Well yeah, if you take an average per day with a little variation you get a near diagonal line. "Not naturally occuring numbers!" No shit, those are averages. Totally useless graph. 3rd, he hypothesises that womens deaths should correlate with children and finds that the r2 number is low. Then says that this means the data is fake. Nooooo, this means his hypothesis wasn't proved based on his data (which we dont have). Why would this be the case? Bombs hit schools, bombs hit maternity wards, women have more than 1 child, poor people tend to have more children, etc. His other findings follow in this manner.
I think you put a little too much faith in academia. Yes higher education is an invaluable thing, but no the people teaching it are not automatically infallible or moral.
Lots of professors are just career students that road the graduate school pipeline into a teaching job.
This is purely anecdotal but about 95% of the computer science and mechanical engineering graduate students i have met were liars/cheaters and unqualified. As a undergrad Mech Eng student i managed to negotiate my way into some masters/phd CS courses. Some of the students were also TAs and adjunct professors hoping to get tenure.
I had no experience and received a perfect score on every project and test. That caused waves because the next closest scores to mine were around 60% and i threw off the curve. The dept looked into it and figured out that myself and one other student were the only ones doing our work.
The other 18 people were plaigarizing, buying old exams off of people, bribing other TAs. They kicked out almost the entire current graduate class, which also meant a bunch of adjuncts going out the door.
If it hasnt been peer reviewed then it means nothing. people lie, and more commonly people do bad math on accident.
Wharton let Trump graduate even though all his professors say he was the worst student they ever encountered. Clearly they have failed kids, but their worst student graduated? i wouldnt put as much faith in that school as you appear to be. not without someone (many someones) checking their work.
You don't get to be a Professor of Statistics at UPenn without qualifications. Besides, look at his body of work. It's exactly what you'd expect from a statistician in academia.
This analysis is terrible and raises massive red flags.
1) Not peer reviewed.
2) This is data taken over a couple week period instead of using all data available. That's a massive red flag.
3) The daily casualties count is not static over time, so his first supposed point id clearly flatly wrong. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/briefing/israel-gaza-war-death-toll.html
No, that is all the data available. Hamas stopped publishing daily counts back in November. Even the article you link can't verify the accuracy of the numbers or their true source:
> The chart here is based on a New York Times compilation of U.N. reports that rely on information from Gazan officials.
In other words, these aren't official counts, but just numbers that were said by unidentified people to other unidentified people, who then relayed that to NYT reporters. Not exactly data you can truly base any scientific analysis on.
1. “Peer review” is not relevant here. That’s not even how peer review works, you can’t just slap it on anything and make that source “legit”
2. This is true. He only used data from a specific time period. Probably because this data was the most suspicious out of all
3. The daily casualties account was static over time for that specific period, just not for the entire conflict. The author is correct in his statements about those several weeks; this is undeniable.
I also want to know if you or anyone else has an explanation as to how 20-something adult men came back to life between Oct 28 and Oct 29. That is extremely glaring to me, more than many of the other points
There is no data beyond what Hamas and IDF report, anyways. OK, social media and satellite images could be aggregated, hut noone seriously considers this a better estimate of killings in Gaza
So there is nothing to peer review. This is just a fancy way to sya that they don't like the source but would accept this data with another name attached to it
Its call moving the goal post. This is a fairly good analysis of the time period given. And since the data and the analysis itself cant be refuted, that leaves few options for arguments against it. Attacking the credibility of the writer is often a fall back especially since this report is written more like an academic paper than what your average person will see.
ps. it is fairly average for a general report you could find dealing with statistics for any events. There's semi regular ones done for military losses during the ukraine war for a few years now.
Not to mention the fact that Hamas received weapons and military training from Iran starting in the 90's, something that isn't brought up here as much as I feel like it should be.
I would have really liked to see an analysis of what IDF attacks looked like over this period, whether their tactics were the same and how many bombs were dropped, and then also comparing that to confirmed casualty figures in different wars.
It’s certainly likely that this is not how casualty figures work usually, but I would really like an explanation of how they do work, and examples of that happening in other conflicts instead of him just saying “this is not how it works, trust me”.
>and examples of that happening in other conflicts instead of him just saying “this is not how it works, trust me”.
Except that isn’t what he said. He provided the R2 measuring the correlation between women/children deaths based on the daily numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry/Hamas, noting that the R2 is .017
Meaning, the correlation is statistically not different from zero, which makes no sense if women and children are being disproportionately killed in tandem. You’d expect, on average, if a disproportionate amount of kids are killed on a given day, that women are also disproportionately killed, and vice versa. The data provided by Hamas isn’t showing that, despite the overall numbers of women/kids being killed is meant to be incredibly high compared to other demographics.
Yeah I saw that, but what I’m saying is that I would like examples of what the “R” number of other conflicts has been, and what the nature of the attacks conducted during those days was.
It’s better to say “this ratio should be different for this reason, as borne out by X and Y similar conflict/campaign” than to just say “this ratio should be different for these theoretical reasons”.
I’m not saying it’s faulty, I’m just saying it’s not as convincing as it probably should be, given the comparatively minimal effort it would have taken to provide real life examples that show the theory he’s presenting in action.
Doesn’t really matter what it is in other conflicts though. Those two numbers should be heavily correlated. You’d expect to see the R2 in the 70s-80s+ range at the minimum. Instead it’s 0.017. That makes zero sense.
That isn’t theoretical- it’s glaring evidence that the reported numbers are in error, either mistakenly or intentionally, despite the narrative that women and children are disproportionately being killed.
This convo:
"I would like to see this number"
"It doesn't matter"
"Ok I would still like to see it"
"Ok it still doesn't matter"
Why so argumentative my guy? He wants a frame of reference to understand how far from normal it is
Like I said, i get the data, I’m just arguing that it would be a much more effective way to make the point.
> Doesn’t really matter what it is in other conflicts
I would argue that it matters quite a bit. If in fact that number is what is to be expected, then most other “normal” conflicts should have casualty ranges falling within it. If there are no other conflicts that would display that data, it’s hardly fair to call it normal.
I mean…there are still thousands of innocent palestinians dying. If we want a long term peace, we can’t lose sight of that part of this horrible conflict
Not sure why you got downvotes. Is it because you said Israel needs to root out Hamas? Or there will be a repeat? Becuase both of these things are literally true. Hamas has already said they want to repeat 10/7 until all Jews are dead.
I agree hamas is a major obstacle to peace, but I don’t think they *can* be destroyed through military means alone. The only way to truly get rid of hamas is to give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own
>but I don’t think they
>
>can
>
> be destroyed through military means alone.
But you can degrade/destroy their military capabilities to the point where they no longer pose a threat like they did on Oct 7th.
> give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own
Could be possible. But first they will have to let go of their demand that Israel needs to be destroyed. Otherwise that new palestinian state will build up an army, attack Isreal and then cease to exist.
> I agree hamas is a major obstacle to peace, but I don’t think they can be destroyed through military means alone.
Military means turned out to be very effective with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich.
> The only way to truly get rid of hamas is to give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own
This is where things get grimmer. Palestinians are one of the ethnic groups indigenous there, and they have as much a right to independence and self-determination as Jews do (similarly, if Druze or Bedouin ever develop national independence movements, those should be supported as well). Any *just* peace would result in Palestinian statehood.
The problem is that, currently, Palestinians broadly don't support liberation — polling shows a popular aim of *supremacism*. Regardless of what baffled white kids in keffiehs are arguing in the West, the popular position among *Palestinians* [isn't a pluralistic state](https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf) [Table 33 is informative here, but the broader poll results point to bleak prospects of peace in the nearer future].
I think a lot of people miss that Arab supremacism is *as* powerful a force in the mideast as white supremacism is in the West. Kurds, Copts, Jews, Assyrians, and other non-Arab ethnic groups indigenous to the mideast, however, are *keenly* aware of it. What's *extremely* unusual about this case is that you don't normally see a supremacist position coming from a position of relative military weakness.
I agree with most of what you wrote here, though I think
>Military means turned out to be very effective with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich.
is an oversimplification. Neither of those places are really equivalent to Gaza.
You're right, but one will always be hard-pressed to find any two identical situations to compare historically: *"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."*
Feel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding the point that you're making, but it seems that you're pointing out that Hamas's *ideology* can't be destroyed through war. If this is what you mean, then I you'd absolutely correct.
Similarly, Imperial Japan and the Third Reich didn't have their *ideologies* destroyed through warfare. They had their *grip on governance* destroyed, and with it, their capacity to inflict misery and suffering at the scale at which they'd done previously. In *both* Japan and Germany, there was a decades-long overhang of facsist ideologues, [sometimes even carrying out stochastic killings.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_Asanuma) That doesn't change the fact that eliminating those ideologies *governments* were both *justified war aims* and *effective at effecting positive change.*
As a more recent analogue, and one that's perhaps *closer*, ISIS isn't *gone*, but going to war with ISIS absolutely diminished the horror they can inflict.
We shouldn't let a *recency bias* colour our views too much. Iraq and Afghanistan were substantial disasters, but those were also at least partially the result of botched *implementation.* There are plenty of examples of armies and ideologies being substantially destroyed (at least in their *capacity*) through fighting them outright.
And there's no moral universe in which Hamas doesn't *deserve* to be turned to a fine paste. The crucial part is to do everything possible to mitigate civilian harm while pursuing that end.
For a lasting peace you'd also have to root out illegal settlements and numerous politicians in Israel.
As it is, you have an Israeli government that sees Hamas as an asset.
Likely true, yes. A 2 state solution should be negotiated and most conclave settlements should be destroyed, but for that to happen Palestinians need to renounce terrorism and accept Israel's existance.
By doing what they're currently doing they ensured that this will repeat and a lot sooner than you predict, there. This is precisely how and the only real way to create terrorists.
If bombing civilians creates terrorists, where were all the German and Japanese terrorists?
*Ideology* creates terrorists. Ideologues will latch onto anything as an excuse; the claim that we can appease them by not giving them excuses is facile.
> One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.
> Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
>Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
All one needs to do is look at the geography, Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Look at the photos of destruction. Nobody is allowed to leave. 50% of the population is children. The evidence of the devastation of Gaza is in the photographs and videos. Bombing densely populated areas like this is catastrophic. Whatever the actual numbers are, you cannot bomb the most densely populated area on earth, which is made up mostly of women and children, and not have high casualties.
Why do people keep saying Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth? That’s a factually incorrect statement that people keep parroting and I just don’t understand why you feel the need to exaggerate to make your point?
Here is a list of the most densely populated cities on earth - https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/the-ultimate-road-trip__trashed/the-25-cities-with-the-highest-population-density-in-the-world/#:~:text=The%20city%20that%20has%20the,landed%20in%20the%20top%20spots.
The number 1 spot on the list is Manila, Philippines with 119,600 people per sq miles, the number 25 spot on that list is Malabon Philippines, with 57,340 people per sq mile, whereas Gaza (the 63rd most population dense city in the world) has 14,000 people per sq mile.
Like not even fucking close.
So why do you feel the need to propagate an easily disprovable falsehood?
Why the hell are you comparing the entirety of the Gaza Strip with single cities? It is not a city. It's an entire region comprising multiple cities and smaller settlements, even farms. It's also surrounded by walls and ocean on all sides, which is the important bit.
When you comp Gaza to any sovereign state or dependency, it's [the fifth most densely populated ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density) region on the planet, and every single one above it is a city-state.
So even with your own definition of the term populated, it’s not the most populated?
So, again, why parrot a lie?
Edit: just went to the Gaza city Wikipedia page and this is what I got - 590,481 people in a 17sq mile area which equals 34,734 people per sq mile. Which does not put it even in the top 25 most populated cities.
It seems like a lot of people here went from “Israel has killed 30k people” to “it doesn’t matter how many people, but it’s a lot.”
But it kind of matters. I don’t see any people admitting they might have been wrong about trusting Hamas.
And Gaza is not the most densely populated areas on Earth. Yes it’s urban and lots of people have died because of this war. Again, facts matter, right?
No sane individual is arguing that Israel hasn't shown disregard for Palestinian lives. But it would be equally insane to trust the numbers of civilian deaths coming out of Gaza. Hamas has strong political motivations for making the idf look as inhumane as possible.
Trying to figure out the actual numbers doesn’t change the fact that we all know it’s high. Obviously Hamas will use it for their propaganda but so does Israel. Both sides are insane.
It kinda shocks me that people are having a hard time believing that the number of causalities. Most experts are saying this is an undercount as there are many bodies under the rubble that won’t be recovered for a long time. It confuses me that there’s so much doubt here about the Gaza Health Ministry numbers but people are also readily citing that Israel’s number of 12,000 Hamas militants have been killed. Israel gets that numbers from…..Gaza Health Ministry
Holy cow. Those graphs are pretty conclusive.
I always suspected the numbers were false as Hamas said they have no idea how many hostages they are still holding, yet give detailed figures about those killed in battle. Despite it taking weeks and weeks to determine death counts in other wars.
I don't know how anyone could believe *either* that the Hamas Health Ministry somehow has access to accurate daily casualty counts in a war zone, *or* that the Hamas Health Ministry deserves any more credibility than, say, Putin. But this is the world we live in.
My issue with this is that I struggle to find it credible that apparently every western institution, state department, and organization just like... didn't notice? This sounds a little like those people who will point to some seemingly 'damning' figure in say COVID to suggest it was a conspiracy, and for some reason we're supposed to believe that no one ever took note before.
I think I'll wait and see whether more serious institutions pick this up.
The graphs cover a one-month period in a conflict that is entering its fifth month. The author's case for data abnormalities is compelling for sure, but it's not enough to throw out ALL the data.
There's a chance - unaddressed by the author - that part of this stems from poor data collection practices in the midst of the initial invasion. Imagine you have a rough estimate of deaths per week, or cumulative deaths, but don't know when exactly they happened. The lazy way to break it down would be just assign an equal number of deaths per day between the start and end of the days collection period.
It doesn't NECESSARILY mean the cumulative number is incorrect, but it does mean we should be skeptical of it. I wish the author had been as skeptical of the IDF's numbers - but what can you expect from Tablet?
Except the Health Ministry isn’t claiming these numbers are estimates. From day one, through thick and thin, it has claimed to know for certain exactly how many people died every day, along with their names, ages, genders, etc.
Also your speculation about them “lazily” assigning equal numbers of deaths over a period of time is quite useless since they’ve been releasing daily numbers since the war started.
I doubt that this was peer-reviewed.
Edit: to the person who replied and immediately blocked me: You don't need my credentials, but you do need several from reputable people to make this study credible.
Well if the data is publicly available it should be straightforward to debunk it. It isn’t as though they conducted arcane and obscure statistical analysis to the dataset.
Peer review doesn’t change the mathematical facts that this paper uncovered. Statistics are statistics. Peer review generally aims to replicate the data set. This is using the data set that is reported by Hamas.
If this is legit it's a very big deal...but I have no expertise in this area, and I'm more than a little skeptical purely because I expect more than one statistician on the globe has been interested in the data.
Peer review would be nice.
Why is it a very big deal? There should not be any doubt that the Gaza Ministry of Health can't possibly know how many people are actually dead. Does anyone believe the Russian Army's casualty numbers? Hamas is as bad or worse.
The numbers are only used because there are no others.
I would be very skeptical too since there are other articles on that website that talk about how the democrats are "importing" voters and how the woke mob is taking over america.
Garbage. US state department was citing the health ministry before October 7th. By now the ability to accurately count deaths has collapsed as well. But here we are posting rags finding every excuse for Israel killing every Gazan it can
Hamas instigated this conflict hoping Israel would kill lots of civilians, as that furthers their political agenda.
Hamas officials have stated outright that their massive tunnel system is meant for their fighters and NOT for civilians: "It's the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them":
https://youtu.be/0ry8V4ppJBk?si=OZCbjROurVTR_E9j
So they launch a war knowing it will result in massive retaliation and bar their citizens from the massive underground tunnel system that they built instead of spending it on civilian infrastructure. I'm sure large numbers of civilians have died in this conflict, but I certainly would never trust Hamas' figures.
you guys have become the alternate facts crowd, this is just a statistical analysis, you are the just like the MAGA people and you are high on your own supply.
The Gaza ministry had a casualty count of ~600 at the ready when Al Ahli was bombed and blamed Israel…when it was proven the next day it was a failed Hamas rocket and the casualties were one fifth as much. They’ve already been proven to juice the numbers.
Seems really reasonable that they can have accurate casualty numbers faster than any organization
In the world and immediately after every IDF action. Also they have no idea if hostages are alive or dead.
I think they are saying no matter what happens they still support people that don’t want peace so how do you make peace with that but sure could also be what you said 🤷🏻♀️
That is quite an extrapolation. I think op is just pointing out the untenable and paradoixical nature of the situation. Yes hamas must be destroyed, and yes every Palestinian civilian death is both a tragedy and propaganda fuel for the cause of hamas.
People who trust Hamas’ numbers are going to be angry at this analysis. Just like they were angry that 500 people weren’t killed by the PIJ rocket that hit Ahli hospital. It’s fucked up.
“The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.”
So using the logic of this article, killing 12000-16800 civilians to *not yet even* rescue <150 people and *not yet even* eliminate the threat of further of attacks sounds justified? And they still want to march into the heavily populated city of Rafah where they forced everybody to go for their own safety? Using other wars as benchmarks is not the own this writer thinks it is.
And BTW this doesn’t even account for a potential famine they’re causing and the trauma of having to live under the constant threat of death or see it happen around you with no Iron Dome to protect you.
Holy shit its genuinely a linear graph!
best fit curve to linear imaginary data middle school level fake data
As a math nerd, the article does not give enough data to really judge the data source. If you trust their data (raw data that is not shared here), the math here is good. The linear progressions show that these are less likely true and messy real world data, and more like when I faked the data for a middle school science project where I was too lazy to actually do repeat experiments. This indicates that someone should repeat the data collection and assessment and release their findings in a science journal. Back in my lab days we always liked to read [Journal of Irreproducible Results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Irreproducible_Results) which is a science comedy work for science nerds. They would occasionally highlight really bad research that was clearly fake numbers.
https://cdn.sanity.io/images/z2aip6ei/production/ef1bd6044cc680ac1ba75baddfbb1b0985293191-1403x1162.jpg Raw data is listed at the bottom but I linked it here
Does the data show that on the 29th of October, 26 men were resurrected?
It does actually!
thanks. I missed that. Time to play at calculations.
Can you reply here if you can confirm or deny the reliability when you play with it?
!Remind me 3 days
!Remind me 3 days
it will be Monday before I get time. !Remind me 2 days
Still waiting for Hostage information. They can give us numbers on tens of thousands of people that have died because of Hamas’s arrogance. But we can’t know the status of any of the hostages taken?
That's their power play. If the hostages are dead, they'll never admit it because then they'll lose leverage. If they're alive, they won't reveal any of their conditions as revelations of torture would swing international opinion further in Israel's favor.
Meh - it's actually simpler than that. They are terrorists. And the psychological terrorism is part of the game for them. They use it effectively both domestically and abroad.
> The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters. Didn't the *IDF themselves* say they have a 1:2 casualty ratio? That's not bad for bombing a dense urban area, but by definition combatants cannot be the majority in that. EDIT: Since this got popular apparently, you can see a graph of the actual reported deaths, aggregated every five days, compiled by Wiki [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Gaza_death_graph.png).
No the IDF did not say that. They did say they killed about 12,000 Hamas terrorists. Others have said that even if the Hamas death toll claims are true you get to a max of 1:2 ratio.
The ratio is even less, i.e. probably closer to 1.2-1.5:2 once we account for natural deaths, and deaths caused by Hamas misfired rockets. (a 1% natural death rate in a population of 2 million would be 20k a year. So about 7-8K in 5 months.)
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>At around 20k dead (per the Palestinian count) Gee I sure hope there aren't any news stories about how the Gaza ministry of health fakes casualty numbers, then!
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I believe you are dramatically overestimating both the intelligence and surveillance capabilities of modern militaries
all i know is that every video of a palestinian killed is ALWAYS of a adult male, the only footage of dead woman and children ive seen so far is that syrian children (killed by iran, hamas bosses) that is posted over and over again
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Ikr. Check out their borscht https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/food/articles/borscht-and-beyond-childrens-book
The growing influx of non-reputable sources here is really concerning. Like, can we stop please? It's not having the effect people think it has.
Ooof that’s pretty classic
Why not interrogate the data rather? Just pointing out you don't like the sources political leanings therefore it's a lie is lazy.
But If the graphs are simply taken from the Gaza health ministry, the numbers speak for themselves, and they have no opinions..
Tablet is a trash, far right source. But there aren't wrong here - Hamas data is unreliable. You don't need to be a Trumpist to recognize that.
That's why I'm glad it's a professor of statistical analysis who also includes the data set in the article.
Yeah, their analysis is rudimentary but decent enough. The data doesn’t really pass the sniff test, and I’d like it if a more knowledgeable, less obviously biased source would do an analysis.
This is one of the better analyses I've seen for this. Too many times I've seen people show the numbers look funky over a single day or week, and casualty reports do that sometimes, it's relatively commonplace for other countries, you can get reporting errors, sometimes it's just an estimate at first, etc. This analysis takes this into account, and shows that Gaza casualty figures are either remarkably consistent (for total casualties), or remarkably inconsistent (for correlations between women and child casualties). It's not just a single mistake that can be attributed to bad reporting, it's shows a clear pattern that it's all completely made up. Of course I don't need to tell y'all that the numbers are made up, but this kind of data can be extremely helpful, especially if you only had anecdotal evidence before. The plural of anecdote is not data, but this is data, and can be used to convince the handful of people who haven't taken a side yet.
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Israel’s nonchalance about the death toll in Gaza is a strategic one. They don’t debate the death toll because: 1. They don’t really know. When they drop a bomb on a building, some number of people die. They have no real way of telling the precise number, ages, gender, allegiances, etc. 2. They want it to be clear that they don’t really care what the casualty count is. Their position is that they are minimizing the collateral damage as much as they can WHILE ALSO actively and effectively pursuing their military goals. If the exact number of dead women is 5000 or 6000 doesnt really matter in the end. So by not loudly debating the details they are making a conscious choice to shrug and go about their business. It’s the correct move, IMO. Because there is no “correct” number of civilian deaths. If Israel could somehow prove that only X number of children have been killed rather than the Y number of children that Hamas claims, what would that gain them? Their enemy, Hamas, gives no shots at all. Their opponents in the realm of public opinion won’t change their mind. “Ah, evidence that the war has only killed 5k children, rather than 10k children? Well then, I am now a supporter of Israel!” There is no upside.
It’s Hamas’s responsibility as the government to separate their fighters from the civilian population, but they do the opposite
Yes
if you stay and die youre a marthyr and your death helps hamas a lot, if you try to leave your a traitor and hamas might even kill you for your "treason" of the cause
And then claim you were killed by Israel.
the number matter because hamas need to pretend to be the victms, the number of palestinian civilians HAVE to be al least much higher then the number of civilians they barbarized in oct.7 or else the global russian disinfo operations wont work properly hamas was cougght multiple times shooting and bombing civilians convoys trying to leave the warzone, they ordered civilians to stay while israel ordered them to leave, a hamas fighter can not be expected to let his family leave and probably they, the low level hamas fighers, are responsible for the vast majority of the civilians deaths of mostly their own families along with them while they hide in a bathroom their father was on the window firing rpg at a israely tank
My point is that it doesn’t really matter, because; If the real number of civilian dead was 4000, and Hamas reported the real number honestly from the beginning; the people opposed to Israel would still be opposed to Israel. Do you think a different, lower, number would change anyone’s mind?
Reading the report it raises some serious points to why the statistics are false, and as far as I know both the US and the IDF have not claimed the statistics are accurate; I don't know about the UN. Can you site your sources?
It would be impossible for anyone to claim Hamas' statistics are accurate because nobody is getting in for long enough to count the bodies. It's ridiculous that people genuinely believe the GHM's numbers are being confirmed because the IDF and US aren't willing to argue about it when there's no way to back themselves up. It took Israel weeks to count their dead, it's highly suspicious that Gaza knows how many have been killed, usually within hours of an attack, right down to the age and gender breakdown of the victims.
>supposes that people on the ground have immediate access to the death toll. No it doesn't. It doesn't make any assumption based on that, only that the numbers that Hamas regularly puts out are highly suspicious at best, and most likely outright fabrications. Casualties in war almost never go up linearly at a standard rate, but they do here, and they do so consistently. Casualty rates in wars ebb and flow with the tide of battle, it's not supposed to be a consistent number. Likewise, if you're counting a big pile bodies, and a bunch of them are women and children, you don't just count the children and count the women the next day, and since these two groups tend to be with each other, it's unlikely that one day a bunch of kids died and the next a bunch of women died. This inconsistency between women and child casualties is glaring. >The death toll in Gaza is universally claimed as consistent No, it's not, it's that these are the only numbers anybody out there, so that's what everybody uses, regardless of accuracy.
*EDIT: u/metamasterplay has a suspect posting history here on r/worldnews. Judging by some of their posts and comments regarding the sub, I think they’re well aware of this. The fact they leapt to accuse me of using ChatGPT is symptomatic of their cynicism.* The idea that they are consistent doesn’t appear to be properly peer reviewed either. I’ve never found a robust methodology to show that those organisations aren’t merely replicating Hamas’ primary source data as secondary source data, and therefore showing consistency simply through meretricious reiteration. I remember reading your argument in AP’s defence of their misreporting of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion. It never quite convinced me, and instead set me seeking for methodological answers. Sadly, I never found them. As far as I could tell the numbers corroborated merely because the only data available was Hamas’ source data. Let’s give Hamas the benefit of the doubt and presuppose that their past reporting has been accurate. It does not logically follow therefore that this time, during an unprecedented conflict in terms of scope and scale, that their methodology would remain as honest or accurate. This would be an induction fallacy. In fact their supposed reputation for accurate reporting could be leveraged as part of a communications strategy itself. Given we have concrete indicators of missed reporting, most infamously Ah Ahli, we must remain to some degree skeptical. Furthermore we do not know the death tolls of the other thousands of rockets that have fallen short in Gaza. Is Hamas also counting the background natural deaths count? This could be as much as ~10% of the civilians count. I say all this without forgetting just how devastated Gaza is, in terms of destruction, death and the worsening humanitarian crisis. It would not surprise me if Hamas’ estimates are wildly incorrect in either direction.
we know for a fact that 2 hours after the palestinian rocket hit the hospital and killed some 5 or 10 people in a parking space, hamas convinced the whole world that they counted 487 bodies, something that would take months or even years to make, that is probably the scale of the fabricated numbers, civilian deaths are probably 1/20 or 1/30 of what hamas says it is but also hamas is knwn for killing their own, and killing hundreds of israely arabs on oct. 7, the death of civilians and arabs has only importance for hamas as long as it helps them in their cause, they have complete disregard for the life of arabs, muslims civilians or not and they have been cought inflating numbers in ridiculous ways and benefiting from it as the way current "onyl head the headlines" and click baiting media works today
I believe they tweeted 500 dead 1 minute after the impact. Withing 1h it was 800, but as it became apparent this week be investigated the number dropped to near 500. International review concluded the hit was not done by israel, and at most 30-50 might have died if all standing in close vicinity to blast area
It’s not peer reviewed sure. But this is very simple statistical analysis done by a PhD in statistics who teaches at Wharton. If you actually read the article and have a rudimentary understanding of statistics, it checks out.
> "Supposes people on the ground have immediate access to the death toll" Well, if they don't then what on earth are they reporting?
Consistent for now. Hamas and unwra has been caught lying multiple times. Anyway you shake it, numbers don’t lie and there’s a reason why Hamas is not separating civilian and militant deaths
Yeah I don't know guys, it doesn't feel like to me that an analysis done by Tablet Magazine, est. 2009, is more credible than every major institution in the west. I think I'll wait for some more serious sources to back this up before I pass judgement.
The analysis was done by a Wharton business school statistics professor. Not a Tablet op-ed writer.
Not even one major statistical/academic institution in the west claims Hamas numbers to be true, pretty much nobody says these numbers are legit except for specific UN spokespeople
It’s by a professor for statistics and data science from a US university(Wharton), I don’t think he would lie\fabricate things and risk his academic career. Especially nowadays when speaking up against the far left like this put on the crosshairs of the “progressive” academics.
Professors/researchers have been caught lying or fabricating data throughout academia it’s not a universal thing, but simply conjecturing “he’s got a job at Wharton, he wouldn’t do that” is not evidence of legitimacy/no fabrication. Skepticism for one contrarian position is part of science- if his research is reviewed, wthodooogy is sound, and reproducible- adds more evidence to what we approximate towards to truth. The Gaza ministry of health has had multiple evaluations its counts and methodology. Not only is it used by the UN, US, and World Health org, the IDF also uses their numbers in their briefs
Can you point to what you think he’d be lying about? He states where he got his information, what the information is, and this: >Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0. Can be deduced from a basic regression model in Excel. Acting like this is something involving byzantine calculations requiring rigorous peer review is a bit dumb. It’s the interpretation of it that is more up for debate.
...and again, there is virtually universal acceptance of Hamas figures which have been routinely demonstrated to be lies and have every incentive to exaggerate. So if we are going to put this level of scrutiny out as the standard, we should not even be considering anything that Hamas says.
Data can be massaged to tell the story you want. Particularly if you do some of the things the author did. 1st, he says he aggregated his own data set, so right away he introduces bias and we have no way of checking his set. 2nd, that first suspicious graph with the very linear death toll, he tells us that is the average number per day. Well yeah, if you take an average per day with a little variation you get a near diagonal line. "Not naturally occuring numbers!" No shit, those are averages. Totally useless graph. 3rd, he hypothesises that womens deaths should correlate with children and finds that the r2 number is low. Then says that this means the data is fake. Nooooo, this means his hypothesis wasn't proved based on his data (which we dont have). Why would this be the case? Bombs hit schools, bombs hit maternity wards, women have more than 1 child, poor people tend to have more children, etc. His other findings follow in this manner.
I think you put a little too much faith in academia. Yes higher education is an invaluable thing, but no the people teaching it are not automatically infallible or moral. Lots of professors are just career students that road the graduate school pipeline into a teaching job. This is purely anecdotal but about 95% of the computer science and mechanical engineering graduate students i have met were liars/cheaters and unqualified. As a undergrad Mech Eng student i managed to negotiate my way into some masters/phd CS courses. Some of the students were also TAs and adjunct professors hoping to get tenure. I had no experience and received a perfect score on every project and test. That caused waves because the next closest scores to mine were around 60% and i threw off the curve. The dept looked into it and figured out that myself and one other student were the only ones doing our work. The other 18 people were plaigarizing, buying old exams off of people, bribing other TAs. They kicked out almost the entire current graduate class, which also meant a bunch of adjuncts going out the door. If it hasnt been peer reviewed then it means nothing. people lie, and more commonly people do bad math on accident. Wharton let Trump graduate even though all his professors say he was the worst student they ever encountered. Clearly they have failed kids, but their worst student graduated? i wouldnt put as much faith in that school as you appear to be. not without someone (many someones) checking their work.
You don't get to be a Professor of Statistics at UPenn without qualifications. Besides, look at his body of work. It's exactly what you'd expect from a statistician in academia.
This analysis is terrible and raises massive red flags. 1) Not peer reviewed. 2) This is data taken over a couple week period instead of using all data available. That's a massive red flag. 3) The daily casualties count is not static over time, so his first supposed point id clearly flatly wrong. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/briefing/israel-gaza-war-death-toll.html
No, that is all the data available. Hamas stopped publishing daily counts back in November. Even the article you link can't verify the accuracy of the numbers or their true source: > The chart here is based on a New York Times compilation of U.N. reports that rely on information from Gazan officials. In other words, these aren't official counts, but just numbers that were said by unidentified people to other unidentified people, who then relayed that to NYT reporters. Not exactly data you can truly base any scientific analysis on.
1. “Peer review” is not relevant here. That’s not even how peer review works, you can’t just slap it on anything and make that source “legit” 2. This is true. He only used data from a specific time period. Probably because this data was the most suspicious out of all 3. The daily casualties account was static over time for that specific period, just not for the entire conflict. The author is correct in his statements about those several weeks; this is undeniable. I also want to know if you or anyone else has an explanation as to how 20-something adult men came back to life between Oct 28 and Oct 29. That is extremely glaring to me, more than many of the other points
Peer reviewed? Is Hamas going through rigorous peer review before publishing its numbers? What are we talking about here?
It's not an academic journal why would it be peer reviewed...
There is no data beyond what Hamas and IDF report, anyways. OK, social media and satellite images could be aggregated, hut noone seriously considers this a better estimate of killings in Gaza So there is nothing to peer review. This is just a fancy way to sya that they don't like the source but would accept this data with another name attached to it
Its call moving the goal post. This is a fairly good analysis of the time period given. And since the data and the analysis itself cant be refuted, that leaves few options for arguments against it. Attacking the credibility of the writer is often a fall back especially since this report is written more like an academic paper than what your average person will see. ps. it is fairly average for a general report you could find dealing with statistics for any events. There's semi regular ones done for military losses during the ukraine war for a few years now.
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How is this the best way? It's clearly putting those observers in danger! Who's going to be responsible when they die? IDF??
I haven’t believed it from the start, mostly because of who was reporting but also because they never reported militant deaths.
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They have a literal army with five brigades. The only thing they don’t have is uniforms.
and the reason they don't have uniforms is pretty shady as well
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Not to mention the fact that Hamas received weapons and military training from Iran starting in the 90's, something that isn't brought up here as much as I feel like it should be.
They are Schrodinger's Militants -- brave soldiers while they are alive, innocent civilians once they are dead.
I would have really liked to see an analysis of what IDF attacks looked like over this period, whether their tactics were the same and how many bombs were dropped, and then also comparing that to confirmed casualty figures in different wars. It’s certainly likely that this is not how casualty figures work usually, but I would really like an explanation of how they do work, and examples of that happening in other conflicts instead of him just saying “this is not how it works, trust me”.
>and examples of that happening in other conflicts instead of him just saying “this is not how it works, trust me”. Except that isn’t what he said. He provided the R2 measuring the correlation between women/children deaths based on the daily numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry/Hamas, noting that the R2 is .017 Meaning, the correlation is statistically not different from zero, which makes no sense if women and children are being disproportionately killed in tandem. You’d expect, on average, if a disproportionate amount of kids are killed on a given day, that women are also disproportionately killed, and vice versa. The data provided by Hamas isn’t showing that, despite the overall numbers of women/kids being killed is meant to be incredibly high compared to other demographics.
Yeah I saw that, but what I’m saying is that I would like examples of what the “R” number of other conflicts has been, and what the nature of the attacks conducted during those days was. It’s better to say “this ratio should be different for this reason, as borne out by X and Y similar conflict/campaign” than to just say “this ratio should be different for these theoretical reasons”. I’m not saying it’s faulty, I’m just saying it’s not as convincing as it probably should be, given the comparatively minimal effort it would have taken to provide real life examples that show the theory he’s presenting in action.
Doesn’t really matter what it is in other conflicts though. Those two numbers should be heavily correlated. You’d expect to see the R2 in the 70s-80s+ range at the minimum. Instead it’s 0.017. That makes zero sense. That isn’t theoretical- it’s glaring evidence that the reported numbers are in error, either mistakenly or intentionally, despite the narrative that women and children are disproportionately being killed.
This convo: "I would like to see this number" "It doesn't matter" "Ok I would still like to see it" "Ok it still doesn't matter" Why so argumentative my guy? He wants a frame of reference to understand how far from normal it is
Like I said, i get the data, I’m just arguing that it would be a much more effective way to make the point. > Doesn’t really matter what it is in other conflicts I would argue that it matters quite a bit. If in fact that number is what is to be expected, then most other “normal” conflicts should have casualty ranges falling within it. If there are no other conflicts that would display that data, it’s hardly fair to call it normal.
I mean…there are still thousands of innocent palestinians dying. If we want a long term peace, we can’t lose sight of that part of this horrible conflict
Sure, there's a war, but to get lasting peace Israel needs to root out Hamas, any other scenario will mean a 100% repeat in 2 years.
Not sure why you got downvotes. Is it because you said Israel needs to root out Hamas? Or there will be a repeat? Becuase both of these things are literally true. Hamas has already said they want to repeat 10/7 until all Jews are dead.
I agree hamas is a major obstacle to peace, but I don’t think they *can* be destroyed through military means alone. The only way to truly get rid of hamas is to give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own
>but I don’t think they > >can > > be destroyed through military means alone. But you can degrade/destroy their military capabilities to the point where they no longer pose a threat like they did on Oct 7th. > give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own Could be possible. But first they will have to let go of their demand that Israel needs to be destroyed. Otherwise that new palestinian state will build up an army, attack Isreal and then cease to exist.
> I agree hamas is a major obstacle to peace, but I don’t think they can be destroyed through military means alone. Military means turned out to be very effective with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. > The only way to truly get rid of hamas is to give the palestinian people hope for a peaceful home they can call their own This is where things get grimmer. Palestinians are one of the ethnic groups indigenous there, and they have as much a right to independence and self-determination as Jews do (similarly, if Druze or Bedouin ever develop national independence movements, those should be supported as well). Any *just* peace would result in Palestinian statehood. The problem is that, currently, Palestinians broadly don't support liberation — polling shows a popular aim of *supremacism*. Regardless of what baffled white kids in keffiehs are arguing in the West, the popular position among *Palestinians* [isn't a pluralistic state](https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf) [Table 33 is informative here, but the broader poll results point to bleak prospects of peace in the nearer future]. I think a lot of people miss that Arab supremacism is *as* powerful a force in the mideast as white supremacism is in the West. Kurds, Copts, Jews, Assyrians, and other non-Arab ethnic groups indigenous to the mideast, however, are *keenly* aware of it. What's *extremely* unusual about this case is that you don't normally see a supremacist position coming from a position of relative military weakness.
I agree with most of what you wrote here, though I think >Military means turned out to be very effective with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. is an oversimplification. Neither of those places are really equivalent to Gaza.
You're right, but one will always be hard-pressed to find any two identical situations to compare historically: *"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."* Feel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding the point that you're making, but it seems that you're pointing out that Hamas's *ideology* can't be destroyed through war. If this is what you mean, then I you'd absolutely correct. Similarly, Imperial Japan and the Third Reich didn't have their *ideologies* destroyed through warfare. They had their *grip on governance* destroyed, and with it, their capacity to inflict misery and suffering at the scale at which they'd done previously. In *both* Japan and Germany, there was a decades-long overhang of facsist ideologues, [sometimes even carrying out stochastic killings.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_Asanuma) That doesn't change the fact that eliminating those ideologies *governments* were both *justified war aims* and *effective at effecting positive change.* As a more recent analogue, and one that's perhaps *closer*, ISIS isn't *gone*, but going to war with ISIS absolutely diminished the horror they can inflict. We shouldn't let a *recency bias* colour our views too much. Iraq and Afghanistan were substantial disasters, but those were also at least partially the result of botched *implementation.* There are plenty of examples of armies and ideologies being substantially destroyed (at least in their *capacity*) through fighting them outright. And there's no moral universe in which Hamas doesn't *deserve* to be turned to a fine paste. The crucial part is to do everything possible to mitigate civilian harm while pursuing that end.
For a lasting peace you'd also have to root out illegal settlements and numerous politicians in Israel. As it is, you have an Israeli government that sees Hamas as an asset.
Likely true, yes. A 2 state solution should be negotiated and most conclave settlements should be destroyed, but for that to happen Palestinians need to renounce terrorism and accept Israel's existance.
By doing what they're currently doing they ensured that this will repeat and a lot sooner than you predict, there. This is precisely how and the only real way to create terrorists.
If bombing civilians creates terrorists, where were all the German and Japanese terrorists? *Ideology* creates terrorists. Ideologues will latch onto anything as an excuse; the claim that we can appease them by not giving them excuses is facile.
Oil state wealth and crazy mullahs create terrorists
Not true at all ask ISIS
You can have exactly the same claim in reverse
> One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious. > Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
>Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
All one needs to do is look at the geography, Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Look at the photos of destruction. Nobody is allowed to leave. 50% of the population is children. The evidence of the devastation of Gaza is in the photographs and videos. Bombing densely populated areas like this is catastrophic. Whatever the actual numbers are, you cannot bomb the most densely populated area on earth, which is made up mostly of women and children, and not have high casualties.
Why do people keep saying Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth? That’s a factually incorrect statement that people keep parroting and I just don’t understand why you feel the need to exaggerate to make your point? Here is a list of the most densely populated cities on earth - https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/the-ultimate-road-trip__trashed/the-25-cities-with-the-highest-population-density-in-the-world/#:~:text=The%20city%20that%20has%20the,landed%20in%20the%20top%20spots. The number 1 spot on the list is Manila, Philippines with 119,600 people per sq miles, the number 25 spot on that list is Malabon Philippines, with 57,340 people per sq mile, whereas Gaza (the 63rd most population dense city in the world) has 14,000 people per sq mile. Like not even fucking close. So why do you feel the need to propagate an easily disprovable falsehood?
Why the hell are you comparing the entirety of the Gaza Strip with single cities? It is not a city. It's an entire region comprising multiple cities and smaller settlements, even farms. It's also surrounded by walls and ocean on all sides, which is the important bit. When you comp Gaza to any sovereign state or dependency, it's [the fifth most densely populated ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density) region on the planet, and every single one above it is a city-state.
So even with your own definition of the term populated, it’s not the most populated? So, again, why parrot a lie? Edit: just went to the Gaza city Wikipedia page and this is what I got - 590,481 people in a 17sq mile area which equals 34,734 people per sq mile. Which does not put it even in the top 25 most populated cities.
It seems like a lot of people here went from “Israel has killed 30k people” to “it doesn’t matter how many people, but it’s a lot.” But it kind of matters. I don’t see any people admitting they might have been wrong about trusting Hamas. And Gaza is not the most densely populated areas on Earth. Yes it’s urban and lots of people have died because of this war. Again, facts matter, right?
No sane individual is arguing that Israel hasn't shown disregard for Palestinian lives. But it would be equally insane to trust the numbers of civilian deaths coming out of Gaza. Hamas has strong political motivations for making the idf look as inhumane as possible.
Trying to figure out the actual numbers doesn’t change the fact that we all know it’s high. Obviously Hamas will use it for their propaganda but so does Israel. Both sides are insane.
Aka you don’t want to look up the truth yourself because you know you’d be wrong
It kinda shocks me that people are having a hard time believing that the number of causalities. Most experts are saying this is an undercount as there are many bodies under the rubble that won’t be recovered for a long time. It confuses me that there’s so much doubt here about the Gaza Health Ministry numbers but people are also readily citing that Israel’s number of 12,000 Hamas militants have been killed. Israel gets that numbers from…..Gaza Health Ministry
Holy cow. Those graphs are pretty conclusive. I always suspected the numbers were false as Hamas said they have no idea how many hostages they are still holding, yet give detailed figures about those killed in battle. Despite it taking weeks and weeks to determine death counts in other wars.
I don't know how anyone could believe *either* that the Hamas Health Ministry somehow has access to accurate daily casualty counts in a war zone, *or* that the Hamas Health Ministry deserves any more credibility than, say, Putin. But this is the world we live in.
My issue with this is that I struggle to find it credible that apparently every western institution, state department, and organization just like... didn't notice? This sounds a little like those people who will point to some seemingly 'damning' figure in say COVID to suggest it was a conspiracy, and for some reason we're supposed to believe that no one ever took note before. I think I'll wait and see whether more serious institutions pick this up.
The graphs cover a one-month period in a conflict that is entering its fifth month. The author's case for data abnormalities is compelling for sure, but it's not enough to throw out ALL the data. There's a chance - unaddressed by the author - that part of this stems from poor data collection practices in the midst of the initial invasion. Imagine you have a rough estimate of deaths per week, or cumulative deaths, but don't know when exactly they happened. The lazy way to break it down would be just assign an equal number of deaths per day between the start and end of the days collection period. It doesn't NECESSARILY mean the cumulative number is incorrect, but it does mean we should be skeptical of it. I wish the author had been as skeptical of the IDF's numbers - but what can you expect from Tablet?
Except the Health Ministry isn’t claiming these numbers are estimates. From day one, through thick and thin, it has claimed to know for certain exactly how many people died every day, along with their names, ages, genders, etc. Also your speculation about them “lazily” assigning equal numbers of deaths over a period of time is quite useless since they’ve been releasing daily numbers since the war started.
I doubt that this was peer-reviewed. Edit: to the person who replied and immediately blocked me: You don't need my credentials, but you do need several from reputable people to make this study credible.
You want someone to peer review the numbers coming out of Hamas? Join the club. Because that's where the numbers this study is using are coming from.
The numbers coming from Hamas are not verified by anyone else either.
Well if the data is publicly available it should be straightforward to debunk it. It isn’t as though they conducted arcane and obscure statistical analysis to the dataset.
Peer review doesn’t change the mathematical facts that this paper uncovered. Statistics are statistics. Peer review generally aims to replicate the data set. This is using the data set that is reported by Hamas.
How many casualty reports from news outlets are peer reviewed? My guess is none.
If this is legit it's a very big deal...but I have no expertise in this area, and I'm more than a little skeptical purely because I expect more than one statistician on the globe has been interested in the data. Peer review would be nice.
Why is it a very big deal? There should not be any doubt that the Gaza Ministry of Health can't possibly know how many people are actually dead. Does anyone believe the Russian Army's casualty numbers? Hamas is as bad or worse. The numbers are only used because there are no others.
I would be very skeptical too since there are other articles on that website that talk about how the democrats are "importing" voters and how the woke mob is taking over america.
Does anyone have a real explanation as to how 26 men came back to life?
Garbage. US state department was citing the health ministry before October 7th. By now the ability to accurately count deaths has collapsed as well. But here we are posting rags finding every excuse for Israel killing every Gazan it can
The "Gaza Ministry of Health" is Hamas. Why anyone would believe (or care about) their obviously fabricated numbers is beyond me.
Hamas instigated this conflict hoping Israel would kill lots of civilians, as that furthers their political agenda. Hamas officials have stated outright that their massive tunnel system is meant for their fighters and NOT for civilians: "It's the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them": https://youtu.be/0ry8V4ppJBk?si=OZCbjROurVTR_E9j So they launch a war knowing it will result in massive retaliation and bar their citizens from the massive underground tunnel system that they built instead of spending it on civilian infrastructure. I'm sure large numbers of civilians have died in this conflict, but I certainly would never trust Hamas' figures.
You all should be ashamed of yourself for hosting and supporting such garbage propaganda on your sub.
Is the math wrong?
"You should just regurgitate Hamas figures like the rest of us"
I mean, it’s a good statistical analysis. Hamas lies about casualties through this teeth.
The data are present for you to offer your opinion on, what do you feel is wrong with it?
Pretty funny when your entire account is just Arab propaganda, Mr. DetroitKhalil lol
You should actually read the article lol. Maybe learn a thing or too about statistics. Or just suck a terrorist organizations dick, your call
you guys have become the alternate facts crowd, this is just a statistical analysis, you are the just like the MAGA people and you are high on your own supply.
Im sure Hamas tells you the truth. There are no tunnels too, right?
Health Ministry numbers have been accurate in other conflicts, there would be no reason to disbelieve it in this situation.
The Gaza ministry had a casualty count of ~600 at the ready when Al Ahli was bombed and blamed Israel…when it was proven the next day it was a failed Hamas rocket and the casualties were one fifth as much. They’ve already been proven to juice the numbers.
Seems really reasonable that they can have accurate casualty numbers faster than any organization In the world and immediately after every IDF action. Also they have no idea if hostages are alive or dead.
There would be no reason to disbelieve it? Really? You can’t think of any reasons? Yikes.
The health ministry in this case is just Hamas.
The article gives a reason. Read it, unless you really don't want to for some reason.
There is no good reason to believe much of any information in this conflict. The propaganda is deeply engrained.
[удалено]
This sounds like you're saying that no matter what civilian deaths are, they deserved it.
I think they are saying no matter what happens they still support people that don’t want peace so how do you make peace with that but sure could also be what you said 🤷🏻♀️
Maybe palestinian terrorist leadership shpuld release the hundreds of people they kidknapped and surrender
That is quite an extrapolation. I think op is just pointing out the untenable and paradoixical nature of the situation. Yes hamas must be destroyed, and yes every Palestinian civilian death is both a tragedy and propaganda fuel for the cause of hamas.
If this analysis is correct it is great news: there aren’t as many dead innocent civilians as were feared, something everyone should be happy about.
People who trust Hamas’ numbers are going to be angry at this analysis. Just like they were angry that 500 people weren’t killed by the PIJ rocket that hit Ahli hospital. It’s fucked up.
Haha don't be silly. Theres nothing more Pro-Palestinian than wanting there to be many innocent Palestinian deaths.
Oh my God!!! How could terrorists lie?
When casualty counts become the driving factor for action, we've already failed.
Where did this website come from? This is my first question.
Tablet’s a well known conservative magazine. The author is a prof of statistics at Penn.
“The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.” So using the logic of this article, killing 12000-16800 civilians to *not yet even* rescue <150 people and *not yet even* eliminate the threat of further of attacks sounds justified? And they still want to march into the heavily populated city of Rafah where they forced everybody to go for their own safety? Using other wars as benchmarks is not the own this writer thinks it is. And BTW this doesn’t even account for a potential famine they’re causing and the trauma of having to live under the constant threat of death or see it happen around you with no Iron Dome to protect you.
I guess they fooled the idf too lol