| > Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it. It's not wrong, you're wrong. You called it an estimate of casualties. The UN calls it a list of verified casualties and say that they estimate the number is "far higher". I don't have a problem with citing those numbers if you call them what they are - the hard minimum that can be independently verified. "at least" 10,000 dead civilians, as opposed to "only" 10,000 dead civilians. That is a significant distinction. "everyone" uses those numbers to make Israel look worse at the expense of whitewashing Russia, which is appalling to me. An actual estimate is extremely hard to find. It appears that Ukraine estimated in February 2023 that the number of civilians killed was around 100,000. The UN themselves won't say what they think the number is other than that it's "likely far higher" than the confirmed number in one statement, "tip of the iceberg" in another, etc. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-war-... Mark Milley estimated around 40k civilian casualties in November 2022 https://www.euronews.com/2022/11/10/ukraine-war-100000-russi... https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/civilian-deaths-ukraine-acc... In any case, the highest the UN was ever able to count in Mariupol was around 2000, whereas there's more than 10,000 fresh graves, many of which are big enough for several bodies, alongside some mass graves. And that was over a year ago, in one city. Dunno what more to tell you. If you want to compare apples to apples, then Hamas' claims of ~25,000 dead civilians should be compared against the Ukrainian government's claims of tens of thousands of civilian dead. Otherwise don't compare claims against numbers that have been independently verified to be correct (minimums). And also, oh my god, don't say > civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer. or >To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally. Because that's such utter horseshit. Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine. Don't claim otherwise just because those pictures / videos don't get as much traction on TikTok |
This is demonstrably false in trivially obvious ways. How many Ukrainians have left the country? How many Gazans have been permitted to leave? And the question you keep muddying the waters around: What's the military to civilian casualty ratio? It's much worse in Gaza, no matter how you slice it.
Even if we run your apples-to-apples comparison: 25k civilians dead in Gaza, "tens of thousands" (let's say 40k?) dead in Ukraine. (I am not sure how credible this is). The Ukrainians also claim that 180k Russian soldiers have died. Israel hasn't killed more than 12k Hamas members; Hamas claims 6k dead. In the one war, far more military than civilian casualties; in the other, the reverse. There's really no way to spin this.