The comment throws around impossible numbers and unverified claims as if they were facts. “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically, and nothing backs it up. There is no public evidence the BBC “banned” the documentary, so that looks like hearsay.
Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.
Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.
While I appreciate the attempt to remove some of the parent's exaggeration, the conclusion is not wrong. I work in relatively well-regulated industry and I more often than I would like, I read about things that suggest people are, at best, not really following the rules.
Now, and this is the part that annoys people like me, the problem of a graph and anecdotes. The reason we are discussing anecdotes has some of its source in the nature of the effort, which by default secretive. In other words, we do not find until years after the fact ( if we do ever officially do ). Add to this normal politics, some sad human tendencies and most can reach a rather quick decision why we only seem to have anecdotes.
More to the point, I would like you to invite you to a thought experiment.
If you had the responsibility of running IC in US, what would you do?
You don't need to answer, but the answer should be clear.
> “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically
I assumed they meant relative to militant casualties. So 10:1 ratio civilian:militant. You could also say 91% , if you use total casualties as the denominator. You could even prefer it. But “nonsense” is uncharitable.
Even worst case sources not claiming anywhere near 10:1.
As of early–mid August 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports around 61,600 total deaths in Gaza since the war began, without distinguishing between civilians and militants. The Israeli military’s most recent on-record statement (January 2025) claims it has killed about 20,000 Hamas operatives. Subtracting that claim from the total suggests roughly 41,600 civilians have died, an estimated civilian-to-militant ratio of about 2 to 1, though if lower militant-death estimates from independent analysts (10,000–15,000) are used, the ratio could be closer to 3–4 to 1. Both sides’ figures are contested, and humanitarian agencies such as the UN caution that these numbers are unverified and incomplete due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data in the conflict.
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US defined insurgents as any male of fighting age. And that wasn't even 18. Most people being dropped very much were not soldiers and it became incredible apparent when several weddings were bombed because maybe one person in attendance might've once talked to a person who knew a guy who was familiar with a guy who might've known a guy who was a guy who said he supported the war against America. "Hamas operatives" is very much the same thing, unless evidence of their membership with Hamas is provided. And I'll change my mind if a list of 21000 verified hamas fighters is provided.
Anything Hamas says must be judged against the track record of its past falsehoods and distortions, this is their norm, not the exception. If someone still takes their words at face value, no fact or evidence will change how they see them.
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry has a very good track record of providing verifiable death counts.
It works on the basis of reports from hospitals, and keeps information (like name, ID number, age and gender) for every deceased person. A lot of that information can actually be verified by Israel, since Israel controls the Gaza population Registry. If these people later showed up alive, that would easily prove the Health Ministry is lying. Yet that hasn't happened.
After past conflicts, outside organizations have reviewed the Health Ministry's numbers, and have determined them to be accurate, which is why major news organizations consider it reliable.[0] Even the Israeli government privately considers the numbers to be reliable and uses them in internal discussions, though it publicly claims them to be unreliable (the reader can guess why). Israeli intelligence has surveilled the Health Ministry, and came to the conclusion that it was working in good faith.[1] Again, this is completely different from what the Israeli government says in public.
The Gaza Health Ministry has periodically released its entire list of verified deaths. You can read every person's name, age, etc.[2]
The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.
This is exactly the sort of brain-dead take that my comment was meant to correct.
The Gaza Health Ministry is a professional organization that has been found again and again to work reliably. Even Israeli intelligence has determined that the Gaza Health Ministry is reliable. Look, I don't like the fact that a far-right political party (founded by a literal terrorist, Menachem Begin) that wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza runs the Israeli government, but I still trust morgue data that comes out of Israel. The same goes for Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry was also completely destroyed in March 2024, because the increasing death toll was inconvenient. Since then, the most cited death toll ("more than 50,000") has been the one that was current in March 2024.
You'll have to explain that to the Israeli intelligence services, which surveiled Gaza Health Ministry staff (e.g., listening to their phone calls) and determined that they were working in good faith.
Just because the governing political party carries out terrorist attacks against Israel, that does not mean that literally every institution in Gaza is unreliable. The IDF carries out war crimes all the time and is known to be extremely unreliable,[0] but there are still many institutions inside Israel that are reliable.
0. There are way, way too many examples of this to list here, but I'll just highlight one. The IDF attacked a convoy of Palestinian ambulances in Rafah, killing almost all of the paramedics. When this came out, the IDF put out a statement claiming that the ambulances were actually being used as a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had approached an IDF position with their lights off. Then, a video surfaced of the incident, showing that the ambulances were flashing their emergency lights, and that the paramedics were unarmed and had been gunned down by the IDF. It also came out that the IDF had subsequently buried the ambulances, in order to try to hide the evidence. In other words, the IDF committed a war crime, tried to cover it up, and then concocted an elaborate series of lies that they put out for public consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre.
It's very convenient to assert that literally nothing that goes on within Gaza is knowable, in exclusion of any other facts, "because Hamas", but you're not actually engaging with the reality that external validation and corroboration can still exist.
So you say IDF is so inept it can't stop this after year and half? How much longer and what kind of escalation will it take? They are basically letting Hamas win this way. As if it was some unfathomable mysterious adversary that had not lived next door for decades.
This makes no sense. Israel calls everyone killed a Hamas operative. If GP's 10:1 ratio were true, it would be within the 20,000 Israel said they've killed.
That shifts the argument from evidence to speculation. The original claim was about current operations, not hypothetical futures. If there is no proof that everyone on such a graph is now targeted, then the central accusation falls apart. Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
Suggesting “who knows what the future may bring” is not an argument about present facts. Policy and oversight should be debated on actual documented use, not on imagined scenarios.
> Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
From Wikipedia on Lavender:
> The Guardian quoted one source: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time."
If the BBC didn't ban the documentary, why do you think there are journalists now protesting in front of the building? What is the reason for those ongoing protests if that didn't happen?
Maybe read some world news outside Fox News once in a while, man.
The name of the documentary (obfuscated to avoid auto flags, because this is HN after all): Gaza: D0ctors under attack (2025).
I agree that the 1000% were hyperbole on my part, but you have to admit that destroying clearly labelled-on-the-outside buildings that are hospitals and houses of international organizations like doctors without borders were all destroyed. Not once, but actually more than 13 hospitals alone (just in case you play the it was a mistake part).
People literally died while the IDF/IOF was "checking" their passports, refusing critical treatment, with people literally bleeding out outside the hospital because they were not allowed to enter.
Nurses and hospital doctors were stripped naked and beaten to death, in mass interrogation camps.
This is not some misidentification issue.
This is post-Desert Storm trying to manufacture evidence, at all cost. These types of actions are absolutely disproportionate.
I’m not downvoting you, that would be someone else.
Protests outside a broadcaster do not prove that a ban occurred. People protest over editorial decisions, framing, or lack of coverage without there being an actual prohibition. Without a formal statement from the BBC or credible reporting confirming a ban, the claim remains unsubstantiated.
The rest of the comment mixes admitted hyperbole with serious accusations that are either unverified or based on partisan sources. The destruction of “clearly labelled” hospitals and aid facilities has been reported, but such claims require independent investigation to determine context — including whether the sites were being used for military purposes, which changes their legal status under the laws of armed conflict. The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
Allegations of executions, beatings, or denial of treatment are grave, but they must be supported by verifiable evidence from credible investigators, not presented as conclusive fact. Calling such events “not misidentification” assumes intent without proof. Assertions about “manufacturing evidence” are also speculation unless backed by concrete documentation.
Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
> The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
They are utterly destroyed, aka blown the fvck up. There is no degree of "maybe they can work again", the buildings are now rubble and lose bricks.
> Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
You can also just google once in a while, you know. That's how you keep an open mind for discussion. You didn't do that, you criticized my claims without even bothering to google it. You've made up your mind already, therefore this discussion is kinda pointless.
If you don't believe me because you hold a personal grudge against me for whatever reason, check the sibling comments from other people.
> Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster.
> The production company's founder, Ben de Pear, said earlier this week the BBC had "utterly failed" and that journalists were "being stymied and silenced".
> Responding to De Pear's comments, a BBC spokesperson said the BBC "totally reject[s] this characterisation of our coverage".
> An open letter, which was also signed by cultural figures such as Dame Harriet Walter, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peake, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh, said: "This is not editorial caution. It's political suppression."
Plenty of other UK news agencies have covered the story, too: it's really not hard to substantiate this one. Consider how many people read each HN comment, and then please put a bit of time into researching the things you say.
Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.
Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.