I really is ridiculous, and somehow the number only gets bigger as the stories are told! Last I saw was "40,000 protestors murdered in just 24 hours!", or something very close to it.
The US and Israel have been carpet bombing Iran for weeks now, blowing up hospitals, schools, power plants and residential buildings, yet the Iranian death toll is "only" around 1,500 so far. Yet we are to believe that Iran killed 40k of its own people in a day - you would literally be able to see piles of corpses from space!
Israel has also claimed that they've hacked every traffic camera in Tehran, yet are mysteriously unable to provide any actual evidence of the supposed massacre - meanwhile, Iran released several videos showing foreign agitators distributing weapons, people attacking civilians etc.
No they haven't. The US started phasing out carpet bombing[0] half a century ago. You discredit yourself by making such trivially falsifiable assertions.
The US and Israel use precision strikes. It is why the ratio of targets per sortie is by far the highest ever recorded in a major conflict.
While I somewhat agree, you should also look at the results of those precision strikes. Usually, when they kill a senior Iranian officer sleeping in his appartment, they level the building or at lest blow up several adjacent units, probably killing at last 10 innocent people.
That's an inherent limitation of precision strikes. The objective is minimizing the collateral damage required to achieve the objective, not avoiding it entirely. Even the various explosive-free precision-guided munitions the US uses have a non-zero damage radius.
One can argue whether or not it is a good idea for the bombs to be flying around in the first place, but there is no version of physics that allows anyone to avoid collateral damage as a practical matter.
I know. I'm just saying that the way we talk about 'precision strikes' in the west, make one feel like only the target is eliminated, while in reality we usually blow half of the building the target was in, along with all the people. I would actually be interested by a poll on what people in the US think about how many innocent people are killed in a precision or elimination strike on average - I bet it would be something like less than 1.
I agree that targeted strikes which miss or take out adjacent areas is not carpet bombing.
However, the above commenter suggested the U.S. has phased out carpet bombing, and while I'm suspect of that, we know with certainty that Israel will happily "carpet bomb" an area if it can string together a few words justifying it.
Even if it's true that what they've done isn't technically carpet bombing in the sense that they may not just dropping bombs out of planes indiscriminately, the same effect can be achieved with nominally "targeted" strikes now, especially with many of these being conducted by automated "targeting" systems.
Seriously, it's unlikely in this age of advanced weaponry that we'd see carpet bombing like we did in Vietnam, when the U.S. and Israel are capable of creating the same effect, but with thousands of supposedly tactical strikes over the entirety of some densely populated area.
Look at the videos coming out of Iran - civilian infrastructure and residences are clearly being targeted. Some unexploded bombs have been found that lack a JDAM guidance package.
And regardless of the USA, Israel is most certainly not above carpet bombing civilians.
Again, that's not "carpet bombing". Carpet bombing requires a type of aircraft that Israel doesn't have (though the US does).
Why would you expect a precision bomb to have a JDAM package? That is not the only type of guidance package. In fact, most of the footage I've seen (largely Israeli) has clearly been laser-guided bombs. They aren't the same thing, and the latter is more precise than JDAM in any case.
Use of precision-guided bombs in a city is not "carpet bombing".
Even if their actions might not precisely meet some dictionary definition of "carpet bombing", you know well what I meant - civilians and civilian infrastructure are being deliberately targeted with complete disregard for loss of life and environmental consequences.
You’re parroting IRGC propaganda, which is why people are arguing with you.
“We are innocent civilians and the Israelis are carpet bombing us”… said by the people that funded October 7th and killed more of their own people than the Israeli bombs did.
Iran’s government has been violently belligerent for decades, and continues to this day to bomb its Arab neighbours including hitting their civilians! They don’t get to whine about the morality of civilian versus military deaths.
Iran has absolutely not been violent for decades. And they don't "continue" to bomb their Arab neighbours - they are only bombing them now because they allowed their land to be used to attack Iran.
What exactly are Iran supposed to do here? Just give up, allow their country to be infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda, allow their country balkanised, their citizens massacred indiscriminatly?
You meant to lie, and you did lie, and you continue to lie. Standard TikTok rage where words no longer have meaning, reality must be rejected, and any headline is true even if the article directly negates it or there's no source, so long as it makes Israel look bad.
I swear, it's almost as if the anti-Israel mob _wants_ it to be true.
I looked into that one, because it was so outlandish but repeated by multiple sources and reported by reputable journalists.
The original reporting was carefully phrased to make it sound like IDF soldiers were "sniping" little children, taking careful aim and deliberately shooting them in the head, which is... monstrous.
Where this narrative starts to breaks down is that snipers don't aim for the head, because it's too small a target. Additionally, most of the reports mentioned that the children were shot "in the street" in scuffles with ordinary army grunts, so where were these mysterious "child-murdering snipers"? How were they so reliably hitting small moving targets in the head?
It turns out that this phenomenon was a product of Gaza's demographics combined with survivorship bias.
Half of Gaza's population is under 18! Teenagers are technically "children", but they're out in the streets throwing rocks or whatever at IDF troops, and get shot at in return. The ones that get hit by half a dozen rounds to the chest die on the spot and aren't taken to hospital because obviously, hospitals are for people that can be saved, not the dead. All of the reports of "children getting shot in the head" were coming from surgeons in hospitals, but they were seeing a biased sample: victims that only got hit once had a chance to survive. Similarly, a minor head-wound isn't instantly lethal, whereas a single round centre-mass typically is. So they were seeing victims with single shots to the head instead of multiple to the chest. They then cooked up a narrative that would explain what they were seeing, not realising that the cause wasn't "evil child murdering snipers", but simply a statistically biased view of a war that is not especially more unethical than any other armed conflict.
Here's a video of IDF in the West Bank head-shotting an unarmed elderly man who posed no threat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham In this one, the man had converted to Judaism after feeling an affinity to the religion due to his grandfather saving the lives of more than 10 Jews during the 1929 Hebron massacre. His Aliyah request was denied, and he was executed while attempting to visit a settlement (by invitation) for Torah study
These are just ones that come to mind as some of the most brutal ones, but there are many, many more videos of the IDF executing unarmed Palestinians who are posing no threat by head-shot. And for every one we see there are likely 4 or 5 more which we don't see because they weren't independently recorded.
War makes people angry, and angry people are trivially swayed by propaganda.
For example, there's thousands of people still screeching online that the US deliberately bombed little girls in Iran. No, they hit a girls school by accident, it used to be an IRGC military base building and is surrounded by IRGC buildings!
I don't condone Israel's actions in Gaza, nor do I condone the US/Israeli attacks on Iran.
Having said that, it's important in a war -- irrespective of what side one is supporting or opposing -- not to believe exaggerations or outright lies.
War is bad enough, we don't have to sprinkle imaginary horrors on top of the real ones!
In the worst case, if too many people spout transparently obvious propaganda, then that discounts the believability of the true horrors. This is most obvious today with the "that's just a fake AI video" retorts, but before it was "fake news", or whatever.
“ The bombing, combined with other simultaneous Israeli military actions in Gaza, killed at least 68,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians), which is between 3% and 4% of the total population of the territory, and damaged or destroyed Palestinian schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and other civilian infrastructure including refugee camps.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_bombing_of_the_Gaza_St...
In October 7th 2023, about 11% of the residents of Kibbutz Be'eri - 130 out of 1200 - were murdered, raped, tortures and/or kidnapped into Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%27eri_massacre
translation: Uh oh, he has irrefutable evidence everything I just argued for 5 replies was a lie. Quick! Change the subject to “two wrongs make a right” I know, I’ll equate 120 people with tens of thousands of murdered children.
I argue that anyone saying this is watching too many TikTok videos and not really familiar with what's going on.
Without going into too much detail, my position and line of work means that I have to keep very informed on the middle east and so far I've seen a lot of hatred, and very little factual basis. In fact every single person I personally talked to was very uninformed on these matters which is fine, as long as you accept it and don't form extreme opinions on entire countries.
I consume no TikTok, no Facebook, no cable news, none of any of that.
If Israel doesn't want people to form "extreme opinions" about them then maybe they should stop oppressing and murdering poeple with a compete disregard for human life.
I'd appreciate if you didn't spam the same link all over my comments, once is enough. And as for "forensic architecture", please visit their website and go over who these people are - especially the Palestinians from Ramallah and self proclaimed "activists". This is by no means an unbiased organization.
Then don't go asking for a report in all of your comments on this page where you have, once is enough.
Forensic Architecture is one of the most reputed organizations for this line of work.
Their reports are read with great deal of respect here on HN and they cover more than this conflict. If they don't count as credible and competent, nothing will satisfy you -- the moral equivalent of covering one's eyes and ears.
So I will appreciate if you stop this sham of yours of asking for a citation.
While you are at it, do better than ad hominem. I am still waiting to hear an argument about the content of the extensive and methodical report.
For HN audience, the report was discussed on HN here
"Can't say too much, but I'm one of the world's biggest experts on the Middle East, and basically everyone accusing Israel of genocide (so all the NGOs, the journalists, all these other people with their lying eyes) is wrong. And Forensic Architecture are basically shills (one of their team members comes from Muslamistan, need I say more)."
Do you guys hear yourselves? Your posts being flagged all over should give you an indication of how it sounds.
> Then don't go asking for a report in all of your comments
Your link that you posted everywhere was to a single comment before you edited it (on all comments!) to point to something else. So not only did I not ask for a report, but you can't even be consistent with your own spam.
7 thousand confirmed death, 9 thousand unconfirmed death. Among that 1200 confirmed death from the regime forces, and 400 to be confirmed bystanders. The nurse burned to death by protesters is among those 400.
