1y ago

Gaza health ministry issues list of names of thousands killed in Israeli bombing

english.alarabiya.net /News/middle-east/2023/10/26/Gaza-health-ministry-issues-list-of-names-of-7-000-people-killed-in-Israeli-bombing

Access the list in Arabic: https://www.aljazeera.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D9%86%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%A1-2.pdf

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Transparency in the face of accusations that the death toll is inflated. I'm interested to hear what comes of this
- The list has people's full names of four sections (for those who don't know how it works in Arab naming systems): your first name, your father's name, his fathers name, and the family name (read more here). Married women keep their own full name and don't inherent their husband's, so people's wife's would have a different last name.
  Arabic goes from right to left, so the names furthest to the left are the family name. The first two pages of the spreadsheet all have people from the same family.
  
  And their ID card numbers, which can be indexed to the existing systems that The Israeli government controls.. and I imagine also that the US has access to.
  So now to prove that Hamas is lying about the death toll, they just have to find one person on this list who is still alive and put them on television. Seems easy enough, considering that all the cell phones in Gaza strip are easily monitored.
  Sorry I don't mean to imply they have to prove the Hamas is lying, it's just a great PR opportunity, so they won't pass it up if they have that capability
  
  I was wondering what it is that the health ministry would have to do to be seen as credible. What would be good enough?
  
  Nothing would be seen as good enough. We are in a war, and that includes information war, that means constantly attacking the credibility of your enemy, even if what they're saying is true.
  Releasing IDs, and photos of each body, to create a somewhat morbid wiki death would probably go a long way to establishing credibility.
  But again they would be attacked, because we are in the information war phase.
  Getting third parties in there to certify the deaths would help, but the UNRWA is deliberately not doing that, because they don't want to be political.
  So whatever the ultimate death toll will be, it'll be contested hotly for decades to come. All will be able to agree on is a lot of people died, but not exactly how many...
  
  We are in a war
  As much as I agree, I don't think the main factor now is the fog of war. Seems like it's the White House deliberately removing credibility from a governing entity, which didn't echo well at all, and diplomatically could be seen as giving the middle finger to Gazan civilians are already invisible in their suffering. Biden made them even more invisible. He didn't say that the numbers were inflated (as far as I recall), but that they cannot be trusted at all. This is very different from saying, "take these numbers with a grain of salt".
  
  War is war. Even if the information is 100% accurate and true and undeniable, the war playbook says you deny it, say the enemy is lying, and undermine their credibility at every turn.
  War is not about accuracy, it's not about fairness, it's not about law, it's about winning.
  Deny, deny, deny, until you believe.
  
  I agree with your overall point but take issue with referring to the hostilities in Palestine as a "war". We do not say that Nazi Germany was at war with Jewish People. We call it genocide. This is extermination of a civilian population.
  Palestine does not have a standing army. Calling it a war normalizes the actions of Israel.
- Nothing. Biden will do anything to aid and abet the bloodbath because it's in the US military and economic interests to do so. Palestine is approaching final solution levels of genocide but this time there won't be anyone coming to stop it.
- It's accused of being inflated by two sources that have decisively proven to be definitively untrustworthy, the US and Israel
  Edit: and obviously their allies and supports

36 comments