I'm surprised someone as thoughtful as you would buy those.
First, I don't expect you to take IDF reporting, but surely the Hamas ministry of health and UNWRA reporting is at least as biased.
Second, some 60% of the population of Gaza is under 18. I expect they have many fighters who could be classified as children. Many IDF troops are barely more than children.
But really, there is no other option. The US and western governments get that. Elon Musk, god bless him, said he hoped Israel would turn the other cheek. Impossible. But even if you just do a routine, by the numbers, tit for tat, who would be crazy enough to return to living anywhere near Gaza ?
So that would make the massacre a huge win for Hamas and invite more of the same.
But, at the same time, the 7.10 massacre was in a way a blessing.
Israel got off easy, because it seems the Iranian plan was probably to coordinate the same from the North and Gaza at the same time. Imagine 10000 Syrian-war veteran Hizbullah fighters descending on a thinly manned border while people are protesting a judicial reform. Might have taken 6 months to drive them off if at all. Who knows how many dead.
This thought alone, that the north could be captured while I am at the office, makes the ground shake under our collective feet.
So now there is really nothing to it but to kill as many Hamas and friends as possible. And yeah, the hard part will come after, because I have no idea what to do with that black hole.
Personally, I think the PA should control it with IDF backing, sort of reversing the 2005 withdrawl. But that doesn't have much support, so I don't know.
this is due to the 1990s, Palestine and Israel set up the a government beaurcracy that keeps track of things like birth and death records, drivers licenses, etc. It is called the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.
Thus when a person dies, and they can identify the body (not always the case), this bureaucracy is supposed to update the death records in both Palestine and Israel, and thus dead person X can not get a work permit and so on. Thus the “official” death count is likely an undercount. For when Hamas was releasing names Israel can confirm that person actually at one time did exist. Now Israel can not confirm that person is actually dead, humans and bureaucracies can lie after all, but it is not out of thin air, and their are other ways to estimate if we want raw numbers instead of treating human beings as unique souls who have now perished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinator_of_Government_Activities_in_the_Territories
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Of Course those 2 previous paragraphs are now completely out of date, for those Hospitals and Record Keeping buildings have been bombed, records destroy (on the Gaza side), and the places with partial records still will be slower for there is a war still going on
Likewise with 1.8 million people displaced to different parts of Gaza what is going to kill a whole lot of people is not guns or bombs, but instead water, disease, and starvation. For there is a war still going on, and accounting records are real but they are still a fiction, an item of record we “make” we fabricate to have a better understanding of larger systems. It is merely [ac]-counting.
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So I repeat ,with too many words in between, the Hamas Ministry of Stats is likely an under-count. And I do not have total trust in those numbers but I acknowledge if they are in error it is almost certainly the error of undercount. War is happening after all.
