You keep calling death counts “irrelevant” because they don’t affect your strategy conclusions. But for everyone under the rubble, they are the only reality. Saying “it’s irrelevant” isn’t analysis – it’s moral disengagement repackaged as pragmatism.
I say they are irrelevant because even if you accept the Hamas numbers it doesn't prove what you think it proves. I believe reality lies somewhere between the Israeli combatant count of 20,000 and the Hamas count of 60,000. But no value in this range makes any difference in evaluating the war, so it doesn't matter.
I’m not blaming Israel for that misfire. I’m pointing out your tactic: one exposed lie becomes your license to dismiss every death report. You obsess over timestamps while ignoring the broader reality – civilians are dying daily, with or without that hospital strike. You use one fraudulent claim to wash your hands of every real corpse.
Your broader reality is standing on a house of illusionary cards.
I obsess over timestamps because they show a video that purports to be of an event, but does not show the time at which the event happened. That's clear evidence they didn't care about the truth. And they should have somebody who knows a little bit about war doing the coverage for war--they would have known that there's no weapon in existence that could have done it.
So every local medic, fixer, morgue worker, and NGO staffer is lying out of fear? That’s convenient. You erase every single source as tainted so nothing can ever challenge your narrative. That isn’t realism. It’s selective blindness.
Yes, they are lying out of fear. What's so hard to understand about that? To go on record telling the truth would get you killed.
No, I think you’re redefining them out of civilian status to justify anything. Birth registrars, sewage workers, teachers – these aren’t valid targets under any law. Calling them “underlings” doesn’t erase their humanity.
And nobody's going to be shooting at them, either.
And when cutting Hamas control means children starve with no replacement in place, what do you call that outcome? Strategic brilliance? Because from the outside, it just looks like collective punishment dressed as policy.
So the evil can prevail by killing kids.
You treat proportionality as a death ratio when it also weighs alternatives and foreseeability – tests you ignore. On intent, you claim civilians are hit by accident every time, as if near-total aerial surveillance produces permanent accidents. You dismiss alternatives because they’d require giving up total control. That isn’t rigor. It’s moral laziness.
Magic words with no relevance.
And it's not by accident, it by Hamas intent.
No, satellites identify burial activity which field teams then corroborate. You dismiss all triangulated evidence because partial proof is still proof – and your worldview can’t tolerate even that crack in certainty.
And you think there are field teams? What are you smoking?!
10/7 was catastrophic. Nothing I’ve said denies that. But your logic stops there: Hamas committed an atrocity, therefore any scale of civilian death in response is justified. That’s not strategy. That’s moral vengeance. Both can be true: Hamas is guilty, and Israel is choosing mass suffering. You refuse to hold both truths.
You fail to understand war.
Israel is free to continue the war against Hamas so long as Hamas does not surrender. And Israel is expected to do as good a job as possible at avoiding killing civilians. But there is no bag limit. The total dead proves nothing.
You say casualty numbers “don’t matter” because they don’t change your view of the war. That’s not strategy — it’s moral insulation. When your framework tells you tens of thousands of corpses, whether 20,000 or 60,000, change nothing about how you judge a war, that’s not clarity. That’s numbness repackaged as reason.
You obsess over the hospital video timestamp as proof of fraud, but never ask why your outrage over one misreported blast lets you sidestep every other one. One lie, in your logic, justifies total blindness — even when the rubble keeps piling up. You want coverage to be perfect in a siege zone, yet accept military justification on press release alone. That’s not skepticism. It’s asymmetric doubt.
You say yes, everyone is lying out of fear. That includes doctors, drivers, translators, NGO workers. All of them. What a convenient way to filter out all ground truth. You don’t even question the moral cost of making fear your standard for dismissal. Instead of asking why people fear Hamas, or how they work around it, you flatten the entire info landscape to preserve your comfort.
You say no one is targeting birth registrars or teachers — but when their offices are bombed, when schools are reduced to ash, you shrug. You refuse to see the people in these jobs as civilians in a civic infrastructure because once you do, it disrupts your clean “valid target” calculus. This is why the law matters — because it draws a line your narrative keeps trying to erase.
You say “so the evil can prevail by killing kids,” as if killing the kids yourself is the answer. That’s the moral endgame of your argument: Hamas is evil, therefore anything Israel does in pursuit of stopping them is fine, even if children are starved in the process. You’re so focused on blocking Hamas’s leverage, you’ve forgotten children aren’t leverage. They’re people.
You call proportionality “magic words” while defending a strategy that flattens cities. You treat foreseeability and alternatives as fluff, even though they’re foundational legal tests. You say Hamas is the one causing the deaths — but then why is the military with the drones, surveillance, and air power the one doing the bombing? “Hamas bad” doesn’t erase your side’s choices.
You laugh off the idea that field teams exist. Do you think every satellite photo is analyzed in a vacuum? Who do you think compiles casualty lists, logs burial records, cross-references witness accounts? It’s not magic — it’s how wartime documentation happens. And yes, people still risk their lives to do it. You dismiss all that with a sneer, because any source of data threatens your certainty.
And finally, your logic on 10/7 is the purest example of what’s wrong with this posture. Yes, Hamas committed a horrific atrocity. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But you act like that license never expires, never hits a red line, never requires recalibration. You say “there’s no bag limit,” as if this is sport. As if there’s no point where the cost outweighs the pursuit.
That’s not the logic of war. That’s the logic of vengeance.
This is the reality: Hamas’s crimes don’t disappear because you condemn them. Israel’s don’t disappear because you believe they’re fighting the “right enemy.” And the bodies under the rubble don’t vanish because you’ve convinced yourself they’re not worth counting.
You say I don’t understand war. I understand it’s ugly, it’s cruel, and it’s easy to excuse — which is why we created laws to stop that slope. You’ve chosen to slide all the way down it, waving a legal banner while closing your eyes to what it’s protecting you from seeing.
NHC
