Quote (darksoho @ Oct 18 2023 04:00am)
yes and no, several sources from last night and more sources that are already been on the site.
All the ones I dig up seem to be the Hamas sources, ie 'Gaza health ministry' or Hamas-adjacent sources like 'WHO Representative for the West Bank and Gaza.'
I don't need to reflexively dismiss information coming from one side or the other, I just reflexively dismiss information coming from sources who either are caught lying about the story or lending their support to a lie about the story. And absent further evidence to give them credibility again, I have to go with what evidence we do have available, which sure as hell makes it look very unlikely "hundreds" died in this attack since anyone inside those buildings should have survived.
Its still just an issue of scale and crowd size and buildings. If you dropped a bunker buster in the middle of Times Square when its packed with people, that's one thing. If you have a large explosion take place in a parking lot where many people are parked while waiting for their chance at medical treatment or in a belief its a safe space, that's another. Or if a bomb goes off in empty street. But to get to the point of 500 people killed you'd basically need the first scenario. The Las Vegas gunman raining bullets on a crowd for 20 minutes killed 50 people. The Oklahoma City bombings killed 168 people and that reduced most of a building to rubble. But most terrorist bombings over the past few decades that targeted
dense crowds wound up killing 50-100 people, sometimes as many as 200. There's no reason to think a dense crowd was in that parking lot like any of the many mosque attacks / easter church attacks / etc car bombings / suicide bombings. We can visually see it was not a dense mob, or else there would be quite a mess on the ground even after they hauled away bodies.