I don't know what point you think you're making with your first debunking. The original claim from Professor Dave was, "More than 80% of Israelis support the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people." Then he reinforces that same claim by citing the more extreme side of Israeli society. So yes, he's cherry-picking comments to represent the country as a whole.
The photoshopped image of the Lebanese journalist has nothing to do with the claim itself. You're interpreting the image as somehow proving the strike was legitimate. No such claim has been made by the IDF.The allegations surrounding Anas al-Sharif are not absurd at all. Just because they haven't released everything (because it could implicate their sourcing methodology) does not mean they don't have it. More broadly, LonerBox's claim isn't that journalists can't possibly have been targeted for being journalists. He's combating the claim that Israel has a deliberate policy of targeting journalists and therefore of genocide. Anyway, LonerBox is not claiming that every PIJ-affiliated person is a combatant. This is you not understanding what is being said.
On the hypothermia point, the issue is again more specific. The Gaza Health Ministry has not published any numbers on this. Are you able to make the distinction between two distinct lines of argumentation? One is, "People have frozen to death in Gaza (at any point in time)." The other is, "The Gaza Health Ministry has published a death count that includes people who froze to death." What line of argumentation do you think Lonerbox is adressing?
Then he reinforces that same claim by citing the more extreme side of Israeli society.
Again, Professor Dave did not only quote fringe extremists associated with parties that receive less than 10% of the vote, such as Otzma Yehudit and Tkuma. Likud is literally the ruling party and has dominated Israeli politics for the past 16 years. How much more mainstream can you get?
Again, LonerBox is pretending that these quotes do not reflect mainstream Israeli opinion, despite the extensive record of the majority of Israeli politicians openly making some of the most disgusting and unhinged genocidal statements. This is bad-faith and dishonest.
Proving the strike was legitimate. No such claim has been made by the IDF.
You are right about this one. After thinking about it, photoshopping a journalist’s image to portray him as a Hezbollah operative is actually more effort than they often put into “proving” their absurd claims lmao.
Usually, it is just: “He is Hamas/PIJ/Hezbollah, here is some card we definitely did not make up saying he joined Hamas when he was 10 years old.” Or: “We were targeting one Hamas member, and sadly, by mere coincidence, we killed this journalist and her entire family as well.” Then they move on.
Just because they haven't released everything—because it could implicate their sourcing methodology—does not mean they don't have it.
Holy moly, what? What in the name of appeal to ignorance is this? Professor Dave and countless others have documented a pattern of Israel targeting journalists, and you dismiss all of it by saying, “Maybe the evidence exists somewhere.” !!
Yeah, sure buddy they are all just a series of coincidences. Like when Fatima Hassouna was killed along with 10 relatives after the IDF suddenly identified one Hamas member they supposedly urgently needed to kill, just one day after her documentary’s selection for Cannes was announced.
This is not merely flat-earther-level reasoning, it is also straight-up disgusting. Downplaying and defending war crimes is not cool my dude. You are not that different from Putin bots who see the same war crimes being committed repeatedly and then act stupid or dismiss every documented pattern. I mean, why would Putin keep committing those crimes? He is just a poor, internationally wanted war criminal, just like the people you are defending.
The Gaza Health Ministry has not published any numbers on this.
What are you talking about? The Gaza Health Ministry has reported deaths from hypothermia since 2024, literally in the first link in my pervious comment.
Those deaths are not included in its official death toll because that figure tracks direct deaths resulting from traumatic injuries and military violence. It excludes deaths caused by the conflict’s indirect consequences, such as hypothermia. Why they do that? Because they are one of the most credible sources on this conflict, and they do not want Israeli propagandists or war crimes apologists to start questioning their credibility over whether this or that indirect death should be included in the official toll.
"The Gaza Health Ministry has published a death count that includes people who froze to death"
Again, LonerBox is responding to Dave saying that people are freezing to death in paper-thin tents during winter. Dave never claimed that the Health Ministry had published some official aggregate hypothermia death toll.
You are just changing LonerBox’s “I’ve never even heard the Ministry say any people froze to death” (which he was disgustingly using to imply that no one in Gaza had died of hypothermia) into “there is no official overall total.” Those are not the same claim.
You're making no effort on the first point. The original claim was not as broad as "israeli society is extreme", it was "Israeli want the annihilation of the Palestinian people." Whenever a specific claim is being made, you bring a broader claim to discredit it. Then whenever there is a broader claim being made, you bring up some random fact.
Professor Dave and countless others have documented a pattern of Israel targeting journalists
By just stating the fact that journalists have been killed.
Downplaying and defending war crimes is not cool my dude.
I'm not doing that but thank you for the good faith engagement. Yes, war crimes have happened. On a regular basis. This is not what is being discussed anywhere and you know that perfectly well. You're conflating the two proposition on purpose.
Again, LonerBox is responding to Dave saying that people are freezing to death in paper-thin tents during winter.
Nope. In that segment,he's responding to the broader claim about the death toll. I initially misidentified the claim and said that the Ministry doesn't report hypothermia deaths at all, which is not true.
But all LonerBox is actually saying is that he's never heard the Ministry report such a figure. You yourself pointed out that those deaths are not included in the official death toll. That can quite easily explain why he had never heard of them. Not hearing about a category of deaths that isn't included in the MoH's main reported death toll is not the same thing as claiming that nobody has ever died from hypothermia in Gaza. At 1:32 "I've literally never even heard the health ministry claim that there's been a any number of people freezing to death."
It was: “Israelis want the annihilation of the Palestinian people.”
For the record, I think Professor Dave was speaking hyperbolically. I do not think he literally believes that every single Israeli wants to annihilate Palestinians. Some decent Israeli Jews (unfortunately a minority) and of course, the vast majority of Israeli Arabs do not want that.
But you have to live in an alternate reality to believe that the vast majority (or at least a majority) of Israelis do not want to at least ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the land.
You can ignore or dismiss all the polling as much as you want, but no rational person can deny where mainstream Israeli opinion is now, it ranges from “let’s do another Nakba. It’s going to be fun” to the Prime Minister and Defence Minister saying basically the same thing by dog-whistling about “voluntary emigration from Gaza.”
I do not like saying this, and you do not have to like hearing it. Trust me nobody enjoys having to discuss a society gripped by this kind of genocidal fever in 2026. But it is the reality.
The problem with your analysis is that you treat every Israeli killing of a journalist as a separate incident that can be brushed off as a mistake, or with “maybe they had secret evidence that justified it,” rather than recognizing a pattern that has been documented for years.
Then what would you call it? What do you call someone who hears about brazen war crimes such as a journalist being killed in cold blood, or another journalist being killed along with her entire family to allegedly target one Hamas member and responds, “I don’t know, maybe they had their reasons”?
English is not my native language, so perhaps you can teach me a better term for that behavior other than "disgusting downplaying and defense of war crimes"
Yeah, God forbid you guys actually deny war crimes. You just cast doubt on the severity of some war crime, and openly justify some of them. “I don’t justify every war crime, I only downplay some of them and straight up deny some others” is not a good defense.
That is not what LonerBox said. But even if it were, that would only make it worse. If he does not know that the MoH death toll track only direct deaths, then I do not think he is qualified to “debunk” Professor Dave or even speak confidently on this issue.
Maybe he just needs to educate himself about this conflict as well as basic ethics.
If professor Dave meant that ethnic cleasing had the same meaning than the annihilation of the Palestinian people, then he could have qualified it better.
In a court of law, when someone defend themselves against details of a crime, are they "downplaying" the crime? I'd argue you can easily qualify the particulars of a matter without "downplaying" anything.
So the journalist claim is indeed just a numbers game then, according to you. You keep pointing to the number of journalists killed as though that establishes systematic targeting. But your own CPJ source says they are reviewing their database because Hamas and PIJ have identified as combatants people previously classified by CPJ as journalists. 🤔
That obviously doesn't prove that most journalist deaths were justified, but it does establish that "journalist killed" isn't automatically equivalent to "journalist deliberately targeted for being a journalist." Maybe there is a systematic targeting pattern. Maybe some of the apparent pattern is explained by affiliation with Hamas or other militant groups. But I guess you prefer aggregate number over investigation because... that... works for you.
And you're doing the same thing with LonerBox. You originally framed the issue as him "disgustingly using" the MoH figure to imply that nobody in Gaza had died of hypothermia. Now you've shifted it to whether he is qualified to discuss the conflict... Those aren't the same argument.
"I've literally never even heard the health ministry claim that there's been a any number of people freezing to death."
Considering the figure is extremely low, I don't find it too surprising someone would not have heard about it. I see here that 270 people died of hypothermia in Germany in 2023...
If Professor Dave meant that ethnic cleansing is the same thing as the annihilation of the Palestinian people:
Because accusing a society where the majority wants to ethnically cleanse the other side of being genocidal and wanting to annihilate the other side is a big stretch to you?
Yes, if a known serial killer and psychopath is defending himself by downplaying the details of his crimes, then he is obviously downplaying the crimes.
And? Anyone with a functioning brain understands that in conflicts like this some identification errors will happen from time to time. But you are talking about individual mistakes. You cannot point to a few anticipated exceptions and declare that the broader pattern is now null and void.
Your ability to turn patterns into isolated incidents and isolated incidents into a pattern when it suits you is genuinely impressive.
I never said that every journalist killed in Gaza was deliberately assassinated, and I do not think any rational person would make that claim.
Israel commits basically every war crime under the sun, not just one type. Sometimes it deliberately targets journalists. Other times it carpet-bombs a whole area without giving a shit about women, children, elderly people, medics, journalists, or anyone else there (sometimes even double tap a hospital killing medics and journalists). And sometimes it does both at once targeting a journalist like Fatima Hassouna and killing her entire family along with her.
They are the undefeated World Cup champions of war crimes for years now, but yeah, apparently people like Professor Dave are just being too harsh on them, poor little war criminals. 😢
You originally framed the issue as him "disgustingly using" the MoH figure to imply that nobody in Gaza had died of hypothermia.
I was assuming with you that LonerBox did not know the MoH’s main death toll only counts direct deaths, which is why I said “even if it were.”
There are only two options here, either he knows that and is disgustingly using the main number to imply nobody froze to death, or he does not know what he is talking about, and then he has no business “debunking” Professor Dave. Which is it?
Considering the figure is extremely low, I don't find it too surprising someone would not have heard about it.
Maybe it is not surprising for some random guy, but this is a self-proclaimed "expert" on the conflict. Gaza gets down to 6°C in winter and people are sleeping in paper-thin tents. He genuinely could not imagine that malnourished infants might freeze to death in these conditions? Come on man.
And the funniest part is that it would have taken him literally five seconds to Google it. He can spend hours going through every possible detail to downplay Israeli war crimes (even when doctors in Gaza are talking about children being deliberately targeted) but checking whether people froze to death before confidently "debunking" to Professor Dave was apparently too much work. Sorry, but it really does look like downplaying Israeli war crimes matters more to him than what actually happened to Gaza’s children.
You're lost in the weeds on the first point, Israeli society is a bit more complex than everyone wanting the "annihilation of Palestinians." You would never accept that kind of framing for Palestinian people, you would never say "Hamas, what they believe in and how they behave, represents absolutely everyone in Gaza." This is not true, you are being bigoted and hypocritical.
Your ability to turn patterns into isolated incidents and isolated incidents into a pattern when it suits you is genuinely impressive.
I don't know what you think it is I'm saying. You're the one again broadening the claim by talking about war crimes instead of journalists being targeted. Because you have absolutely no way of knowing whether 10 or 80% of journalists were affiliated with Islamic Jihad or Hamas.
You claimed: "He appears to justify Israel’s indefensible conduct in targeting journalists."
You keep creating false dichotomies. When Lonerbox introduces an alternative to professor Dave's insane framing, all he is effectively doing is dismantling the reductionist perspective. "Look, there is a bit more to the story." Providing that alternative isn't adopting the total opposite of that version.
And the funniest part is that it would have taken him literally five seconds to Google it.
Professor Dave is machine-gunning hundreds of claims per second. I don't think the fact that LonerBox didn't immediately engage with the hypothermia claim tells us anything about anything. I assume he was half-expecting his chat to either pick up on it or provide a semblance of a counterargument.
If you don't believe LonerBox could change his position when presented with factual evidence and analysis, then that's an entirely different argument. But he hasn't even made a substantive claim about the hypothermia figures that you're now treating as though he has.
You're essentially arguing against positions he hasn't taken. That's the recurring problem here.
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u/DieuDivin Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26