Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
That's not true at all.
Hamas officials actually have a pretty good historical record of reporting civilian casualties fairly accurately inside Gaza over a pretty long time (of course in part depending on which specific part of Hamas we're talking about), while IDF has been caught lying a huge number of times both historically and recently.
The reason is simply because Hamas doesn't really need to lie. All they need to do is point the camera at the countless civilian casualties and release the footage. The exact number of civilian casualties isn't actually that important to them. "250 die in a hospital attack" isn't really getting more of a public reaction from the outside than "500 die in a hospital attack", but it does make a difference to IDF that probably has to keep and publish these numbers as parts of statistics.
Debating the details of on individual attack is also generally much more in the interest of IDF, because that debate is going to focus the attention on whether or not THAT attack was justified, not whether or not the overall bombing campaign is justified.
It's also worth noting that as the local government, the Hamas try to keep both themselves and their population informed on who exactly died, which makes it a lot harder and more complicated for them to lie about the number of people who die.
Hamas will of course lie by omitting truths about any strikes that did hit something like a Hamas command center or a rocket storage, because it's not in their interest to talk about those things at all.
Both sides are being "transparent" exactly up to the point where they feel it makes them look good, plus IDF will publish things they are legally obligated to publish.
|
Hamas doesn't lie? Like when they said that Israel blew up a hospital with "thousands" killed? Which soon turned, that it was Palestinians rocket, and it didn't hit the hospital at all?