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by anatoly 298 days ago
The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.

There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.

There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.

1 comments

Thanks, but we still need better data on births for this argument to hold any water. Additionally, if you want to include the segment of the population that has fled, you will also need data on the birth/death rates for that segment.

I would also like to note that you found a study looking at birth/death rates, but after realizing it suggested a shrinking population, decided to combine information from that study with information from a separate dataset so that the population could be argued to be growing.

And none of this actually takes nonviolent deaths into account, however small you believe that number may be.

This... is not good science.

According to Hamas, which is also the source of the data of deaths you previously quoted, the number of births "is equal" to the number of deaths.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-hamas-of...

https://www.memri.org/tv/sami-abu-zuhri-hamas-gaza-war-babie... (Around 00:40)

I don't think you are arguing in good faith.
+1. Ignores the central points; doesn't provide alternative data; extreme skepticism in one direction, complete dogmatic faith in the other.
You’re posting data that doesn’t support what was said. Asking for better sources of info to back up your claims isn’t bad faith.