Talk:Israel–Hamas war

Mention of apartheid RfC

In the historical background of the war, is it necessary to include references to apartheid claims? Dovidroth (talk) 11:01, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

@Dovidroth Yes it is Abo Yemen✉ 16:39, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Survey

• No. Most mainstream sources do not mention apartheid in the context of the war or as its background. Dovidroth (talk) 11:01, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

@Dovidroth Define "mainstream"? Where are these sources from? How many are not from the USA or UK? Are any African? Irtapil (talk) 09:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• WP:RFCBEFORE???? nableezy - 11:48, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  Here??? I know the discussion was 2 weeks ago, but I simply didn't have time to sit on formulating the question. Dovidroth (talk) 12:01, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  Where is the discussion that showed a lack of consensus on this topic? Not having time isn’t a reason to make everybody else waste theirs. nableezy - 12:12, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  I just sent you the link. Dovidroth (talk) 12:22, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

• No per Davidroth, and I note that the references to apartheid in the article (such as the one with footnotes 181 and 182) fail to reflect that the sources concern denial of the apartheid claim. Coretheapple (talk) 15:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  so? they wouldn't be denying a claim that wasn't made? Irtapil (talk) 01:07, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• No per Dovidorth, I think it was rather unfitting and rather disconnected per the time. Furthermore, there is a truth to Dovidorth's statement that most mainstream sources do not mention Apartheid in the context of the war.Homerethegreat (talk) 16:02, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Homerethegreat

  1. Can you give an example of a "mainstream" source from a country that has not fired a shot in this war? i.e. Not Israel, UK, or USA?

  2. Can you give an example of a "mainstream" source that is left wing? (further left than liberalism)

  But, as @VR pointed out below, even MSNBC and the BBC mention it, I can't think of anything more mainstream than they are?

  Irtapil (talk) 09:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  Reliable sources do mention the apartheid in the context of reporting on the war(The Guardian[1], Times of Israel[2], Human Rights Watch[3], Vox, Professor John Mearsheimer[4], The Jakarta Post[5], MSNBC[6], Amnesty International[7], BBC News[8] etc). Even pro-Israeli news reporting mentioned (and argued against) the apartheid analogy([9][10]).The question is not whether it should be mentioned, but how we can mention it in a neutral way, giving WP:DUE weight to all opinions. VR _talk 17:13, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  If you search for that term in your query, you can find articles that mention it, but that is WP:CHERRYPICKING, and invalidates your conclusion. Because there is now such a vast number of articles about this war, you can find a lot of terms if you search for them, but that is a biased search and doesn't prove anything. Here are a dozen articles that mention "New Jersey" somewhere in the article: (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12). This list of articles doesn't prove anything, except that there are now lots and lots of articles about the war. Mathglot (talk) 18:16, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Mathglot when you do your search, how far down is the first source from Africa, and does it mention apartheid? Irtapil (talk) 09:13, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  Did you read the articles I mentioned? They mention apartheid in some meaningful and relevant way. The stuff about New Jersey could very well be relevant - one of your articles says one of the victims of the Hamas attack was from New Jersey, and that is covered in the part on foreign casualties (whether in this article or the subarticle on casualties). VR _talk 18:21, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Like this article (which I found in a, slightly deranged at 3:00am, search for "apartheid New Jersey") looks general from the headline…

But contains President Cyril Ramaphosa saying, "… they (the Palestinian people) have been under occupation for almost 75 years … waging a struggle against an oppressive government that has occupied their land, but also a government that has in recent times been dubbed an apartheid state."

It also contains the wrong Jersey, "Mandela famously wore the Springbok rugby jersey – for many, a symbol of apartheid – to present Francois Pienaar with the Rugby World Cup trophy."

Irtapil (talk) 07:31, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

@VR searching apartheid + war + new Jersey also got me a Jerusalem Post article about protesters in New Jersey calling Israel an apartheid state. Irtapil (talk) 09:13, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• No. The majority of sources on the 2023 Israel–Hamas war do not mention apartheid, therefore per WP:UNDUE neither should we. I did an unbiased news search for 2023 Israel–Hamas war. Looking at the titles of the first 100 results, the number of articles with apartheid in the title was zero; the number with apartheid in the search result abstract was zero. I opened the top ten and checked the entire article with search-in-page, and the number of articles with apartheid in the body of the article was zero. My conclusion is that apartheid is hardly ever mentioned in current news articles about the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. Mathglot (talk) 17:52, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  News sources seldom contain in-depth background information about events. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 17:59, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  You may well be right about that. This article documents a current news event; some day, there will be books written about it, and I can well imagine that they might discuss the background going back to British Mandatory Palestine and possibly use the term apartheid, and if and when they do, those would be great WP:SECONDARY sources to use to include the background information you wish to include. But lacking that information now, under what policy or guideline do you propose that we should mention it at this point, if the sources do not? Wikipedia follows, it does not lead. Mathglot (talk) 18:39, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Mathglot The concept appears frequently in the news I listen to, without seeking it out. Most recently, the first speaker of the South African deligation to the ICJ mentioned it at least twice. (I was watching the full proceedings on the SABC News YouTube channel.)

  I would guess news your news diet skews centre right (AKA liberal) and is mostly from the USA? Mostly because you seem to think "Israel-Hamas war" is an "unbiased" search? The term is very common, but it still gives a biased subset of sources.

  Irtapil (talk) 09:13, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  @IOHANNVSVERVS The other problem is searching "Israel-Hamas war" gives you sources that skew somewhat right wing and severely towards Israel and the USA.

  e.g. When I search "2023 Israel-Hamas war" in "news" on Google (exactly following @Mathglot's suggestion above of an allegedly "unbiased" search I tried about 4 times at different times of day, over the past few days) the pro Israel lobby group UN Watch is always in the top ~6 results, this doesn't normally rank very highly.

  The search Israel-Hamas war also misses a lot of things like MSF that show up if I search Gaza or Palestine instead of Hamas. The medical aid charities don't tend to mention apartheid, but it is more evidence of how much you are missing with your "unbiased" search.

  irtapil 2024-01-13 07:54 (UTC) (fixed the mess the mobile website made) Irtapil (talk) 09:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Mathglot: if being mentioned in the first 100 articles in an unbiased news search was the threshold for inclusion, there's a LOT that can be removed from this article! Also, kinda curious how you determined that none of the articles mentioned apartheid. Did you read through every single one of them or use some tool? VR _talk 18:08, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  Reread my comment; I was completely transparent about my methodology. It's possible that another search method will demonstrate that apartheid does belong in the article, and if someone does that, I will change my vote. I'm just saying no one has done that so far. Wikipedia needs to follow the sources, not start with what we want to include, and then search for sources that validate it; that's backwards; we need to start from the best sources available, and summarize the majority opinion we find there, wherever that takes us. Mathglot (talk) 18:29, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Mathglot please try just "Israel" or "war" without the rest? Set the time frame as October 2023 till today to get more relevant results. Then ctrl+F for apartheid to look past headlines. Irtapil (talk) 09:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  The "first 100 results" is not a methodology specified in our editorial policies. Please cite at least one paragraph from our policy which could back you up. First of all, as IOHANNVSVERVS have already said "news sources seldom contain in-depth background information about events". This is even more relevant for an ongoing military conflict started few months ago. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 04:51, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  Sure, I can do that. But it's too long for the Survey section, so I'll add it to the Discussion below. Thanks for asking. Mathglot (talk) 21:30, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  If you're searching for "Israel Hamas war" that's what the majority say, but sources calling it that are giving one side of the story. A few sources I've seen from South Africa (relevant to apartheid) call it "operation Toofan Al-Aqsa" or things like "Resistance against the colonial occupation" etc. those are probably too biased to include, but "war in Gaza" or "Israel Palestine war" etc. might find some more moderate views from the middle. We shouldn't be basing this article too heavily on USA sources. Irtapil (talk) 01:01, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: This RfC is similar to a previous discussion on this talk page here [11]. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 17:57, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, VR provided many sources referencing apartheid as relevant to the background of the current war in Gaza. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 18:07, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
• YesI seems perfectly valid to include at least a reference to this. In my brief search I have turned up several RS that support this. Lukewarmbeer (talk) 18:40, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
• unrelevant RFC. What matters is what the sources say. The criterias for naming apartheid rely on several strict points established by International Court of Justice; Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and denials of facts recognized as such by many Human Watch un-gouvernmental organisations would be wp:censorship. Reading pro-israel comments with biaised opinions in this previous talk Talk:2023_Israel–Hamas_war/Archive_29#Large_removal, rightfully raises questions. Iennes (talk) 19:02, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @IennesPlease strike your comment falsely accusing people with a different opinion of lobbying. If I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, please correct me. Drsmoo (talk) 23:46, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Iennes - You are entitled to disagree with me and many others here, but you are not entitled to cast personal attacks and accusations without evidence. If you do not strike this, I will consider reporting you. Dovidroth (talk) 06:53, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  What exactly would you like Iennes to strike from their comments?

  "Denials of facts recognized as such by many Human Watch un-gouvernmental organisations would be wp:censorship" and "Reading pro-israel comments with biaised opinions in this previous talk Talk:2023_Israel–Hamas_war/Archive_29#Large_removal, rightfully raises questions" are both reasonable statements which do not include personal attacks. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 07:12, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  “Reading pro-israel comments with biaised opinions in this previous talk Talk:2023_Israel–Hamas_war/Archive_29#Large_removal, rightfully raises questions.” I see this as a personal attack against pro-Israel editors. If it is not, please clarify. Dovidroth (talk) 07:21, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  WP:WIAPA — "Note that it is not a personal attack to question an editor about their possible conflict of interest on a specific article or topic"

  WP:NPOV — "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view(NPOV) [...] without editorial bias."

  IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 07:34, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

• Malformed RfC, but yes. In addition to the sources raised by VR, two more from Vox discussing apartheid in the context of the war: 1 2; from Reuters: 3; another from Amnesty (UK) discussing apartheid at some length: 4; from Jacobin (possibly an opinion piece but not labelled as such): 5; from Newsweek: 6; from HuffPo: 7. Not only is it relevant background to the war as a whole, it also contextualizes other details such as South Africa suspending relations with Israel and the rhetoric used in ongoing ceasefire protests. Outright exclusion is not justifiable, the issue is NPOV and WP:DUE. WillowCity^(talk) 19:53, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with this. It's NPOV and DUE. Jikybebna (talk) 11:14, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

• Yes, Absolutely. Just because the Israeli government denies it doesn't make the mountain of academia on Israeli apartheid any less valid. To not mention it would be purposefully ignoring the context and causes of the war. You might as well try to rewrite Rhodesian Bush War without mentioning apartheid. ArthropodLover (talk) 01:58, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
• No, Absolutely per Dovidroth. With regards, Oleg Y. (talk) 03:06, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
• No per Dovidroth and Mathglot. Zanahary (talk) 03:08, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes. OP (Dovidroth)'s claim that apartheid isn't mentioned in mainstream media is false, as the apartheid issue of Israel against Palestinians has been being consistently mentioned in reliable sources since the Oct 7 terror attack. Presenting apartheid as a background of this conflict is in line with our WP:DUE weight policy. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 04:56, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. Israel and apartheid. Ghazaalch (talk) 05:36, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

• No. while it is very relevant to mention that "Palestinians are in despair over a never-ending occupation in the West Bank and suffocating blockade of Gaza" as a part of the context (and it is indeed mentioned), the use of the term "apartheid" is inconsistent with the low-key spirit of Wikipedia , being factual and non-judgmental. Mentioning that some non-profits "have likened the Israeli occupation to apartheid, although this characterization is disputed" just emphasizes the fact that the point about the despair is factual and sufficient in the background. By the way, similarly, the phrase "viewed from Gaza, things were only going to get worse, considering that Netanyahu's coalition partners opposed a two-state solution for the conflict. He suggested they would prefer to annex the entirety of the West Bank" is relevant, while the speculative non-factual addition "even at the expense of turning Israel into an apartheid state" is biased, judgmental and not with the spirit of Wikipedia. Agmonsnir (talk) 06:49, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  Please quote our policy or guideline which specifically requires Wikipedia to be "low-key spirit". If anything, Wikipedia actually encourages editor to be bold, as long as the edit is consistent with our editorial policies. If multiple reliable sources agree on a point of view, whether it is disagreed by other entity, we present that POV in our articles without unnecessary compromise. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 07:45, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes: per the sources provided by VR. If the sources say it, we can say it, duh. Doesn't need an RFC to state what is obvious from basic policy. If RS mention it, it is relevant for inclusion. If they say it is related, we sat it is related. If they say it is unrelated, we say it is unrelated. Etc. Also WP:TROUT the filer for inadequate WP:RFCBEFORE and source hunting, i.e. simply not looking hard enough for the relevant sources that were so readily discovered. Iskandar323 (talk) 22:07, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  There was a large discussion here. How do you think that this is lacking WP:RFCBEFORE? Dovidroth (talk) 10:04, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes? Even if the apartheid is debatable, adding information on it to help people come to their own conclusions is better than obscuring history. Salmoonlight (talk) 09:51, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, it should have a brief, carefully-worded and attributed mention in the article body (likely just a single sentence, part of a sentence, or even as little as just one word in a prose list of some sort, such as the list motivations claimed by Hamas.) There's sufficient coverage to support the idea that it is something enough sources consider relevant that it ought to be briefly mentioned; the sources that do exist support the idea that it's a small but significant flashpoint in the underlying background. I don't think the arguments against it above are sufficient to exclude a mere single-sentence mention in the body - they would make perfect sense if we were discussing adding it to the lead or creating an entire section or paragraph for it or somesuch; but we're discussing a bare mention, which has a much lower standard. We don't need to have the majority of sources mentioning something just to include a single sentence noting somewhere in the body; we just need enough sources to demonstrate that significant mainstream / non-fringe discussion exists, which it certainly does. --Aquillion (talk) 08:17, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• No per Dovidroth and Mathglot. TaBaZzz (talk) 14:01, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• No per Dovidroth and Mathglot. Ilenart626 (talk) 16:07, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes This is extremely important context, and is well-sourced from many reliable sources. The idea that it is irrelevant because breaking news stories don't always include it is absurd on its face- news articles updating on a war do not need to include a history of the conflict. An encyclopedia entry, however, should. Zellfire999 (talk) 17:13, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• No This is undue in an article about the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. The vast majority of reliable sources do not mention this concept in the context of the war. Even most of those making the accusation rarely refer to the Gaza Strip, where there are no Israeli settlements. Marokwitz (talk) 18:42, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

  Categorically untrue that most of those making the accusation rarely refer to the Gaza Strip. The very first sentence of B'Tselem's page on apartheid: "The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime." In the main Human Rights Watch report on Israeli apartheid, "Gaza" is mentioned over 250 times; HRW has very recently, in the context of the war, discussed Israeli apartheid in relation to Gaza. And from Amnesty International, just this June: "Israel/OPT: latest Gaza offensive highlights human toll of apartheid; and in another article published in October: "[independent investigation] is vital as ending the longstanding impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity and securing justice and reparation for victims are essential to prevent recurrence of these atrocities and to address the root causes of the conflict, such as Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians." These are three of the most prominent sources alleging apartheid, and all of them refer to Gaza; HRW and Amnesty refer to it in the context of the war. So should we, with adequate attribution. WillowCity^(talk) 18:55, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• No, per Agmonsnir. פעמי-עליון (talk) 20:20, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• No. The notion of apartheid is totally irrelevant here - per Dovidroth, Agmonsnir and Marokwitz. GidiD (talk) 08:58, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, per VR and others. —Trilletrollet [ Talk | Contribs ] 10:42, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yes per VR and WillowCity Parham wiki (talk) 15:16, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yes - discussing Palestine, in an article this long, without mentioning apartheid in the background information is nonsense. The amount of source material available that discusses apartheid in this context is humongous. If you just Google the word "apartheid", you don't have to scroll for long before encountering mentions of the Zionist entity. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 06:54, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
• No. It's not relevant to this article. Apartheid has to do with the West Bank Palestinians first and foremost, since they are the ones who generally commute to and from Jerusalem to work and stuff like that. Gaza was actually given back to Hamas for complete self-determination. Andre🚐 20:00, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  So it's like a Bantustan then. —Trilletrollet [ Talk | Contribs ] 20:57, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  Regarding the Bantustan analogy, it doesn't work in several respects. The Bantustans were nominally independent, but lacked any actual autonomy. Whereas in Israel, there are Arab members of the Knesset. There are also political parties that represent both the West Bank and Gaza. Unlike the Bantustans, neither Israel nor the West Bank nor Gaza are ethnically homogeneous or enforced for particular ethnic groups. Israel has Christian, Jewish, Arab, Druze etc citizens who all have political and civil rights. In the Palestinian territories, each one has chosen their own leaders; while they haven't held elections for a while, they aren't following a system imposed upon them by Israel. If they were, one assumes, they'd have little Knessets. The Bantustans consisted of black citizens of South Africa who were deported or forced into "independent" places, some of which were not, even in name. You can certainly claim that because of the blockade, Gaza is de facto occupied, but politically, they are not subject to Israel. Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian citizens of Israel exist, there were no black citizens of South Africa when they were forced into the Bantustans. Andre🚐 06:07, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  No part of that last sentence is true. nableezy - 21:00, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  See Israeli disengagement from Gaza Andre🚐 21:14, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  "Despite the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza,[15] the United Nations, international human rights organisations, and the majority of governments and legal commentators consider the territory to be still occupied by Israel" - Gaza Strip. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 21:22, 22 December 2023 (UTC) IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 21:22, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  Due to the blockade yes, but there's no apartheid in Gaza was my point. It's a separate walled off place where Hamas is in charge. Andre🚐 21:23, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  So say you. Plenty of RS disagree. And as for "walled off", well... that says it all, doesn't it? WillowCity^(talk) 21:25, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, apartheid refers to a working underclass, and I'd accept it may apply to the West Bank, but Gaza is walled off, the settlements there were dismantled, and it's administered by Hamas who haven't held an election since 2006. Andre🚐 21:27, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  I have never seen this definition of apartheid before, including under the Rome Statute and the ICSPCA, but even if such a definition existed, would it include a working underclass like this? WillowCity^(talk) 21:31, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, like that. But that ended in 2007 due to Hamas taking over, that's my point exactly. Andre🚐 00:22, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  That is not correct at all, there were approximately 19,000 Gazan men working permitted to work in Israel (predominantly in construction and agricultural jobs) when the war broke out on October 7. The Israeli government avenged itself on them by stripping them of their legal status, rounding them up, forcing them into cages for several weeks, and ultimately deporting them back to Gaza (with many still wearing plastic ID tags around their wrists and ankles). Edited for accuracy. WillowCity^(talk) 01:05, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  I stand corrected; Hamas's takeover greatly curtailed but did not entirely end the practice.[12] Before the Hamas takeover in 2007, some 120,000 Gazans worked inside Israel. Nearly all lost their permits when Israel tightened the blockade that year. Andre🚐 01:08, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  “Occupied by Israel” does not mean “apartheid”. The accusation is a fringe view to begin with and is undue in this context. Dovidroth (talk) 17:13, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  It's factually incorrect that it's a fringe view. See Israel and Apartheid. JDiala (talk) 12:42, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  Im well aware. Your statement is entirely false on all angles. Not Hamas, not self-determination, not complete. nableezy - 21:24, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

this is because you are defining "mainstream" as "USA" - the world is not the USA. Irtapil (talk) 01:05, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Bickering among editors addressing each other's behavior and unrelated to the Rfc question.

@Andrevan: Much of your discussion above is WP:OR. It is important to note that your own views on whether or not it is apartheid are not particularly relevant. We go by what the WP:RS say, and there are myriad independent reliable sources alleging apartheid. Furthermore, whether or not the designation applies to Gaza or just the West Bank is likewise not relevant. Hamas has clearly indicated (and which we have also included in the article) that provocations in the West Bank were deemed by it a casus belli. JDiala (talk) 12:49, 25 December 2023 (UTC) It's not OR, this is a talk page an an RFC. Don't WP:BLUDGEON the proceedings. I really don't care what Hamas thinks or indicates or deems. There's no justification that should be added about apartheid as that itself would be WP:SYNTH. Andre🚐 21:25, 25 December 2023 (UTC) You are using your personal unsourced opinion on what apartheid constitutes as a rationale for excluding the accusation. This is clearly WP:OR. The article clearly does care what Hamas thinks, given that Hamas' justifications for the events figure predominately in the background sections. Several of those justifications discuss events in the West Bank, so the distinction between apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza is immaterial. It's not WP:SYNTH as several sources explicitly mention apartheid in relation to the war. JDiala (talk) 00:17, 26 December 2023 (UTC) I don't need to provide sources for all of my sentences on talk pages, JDiala, nor does OR apply to talk pages. I did not say the article should omit Hamas' POV, I said I do not care. Leave me alone, you're not going to convince me to change my view with these spurious wikilawyering arguments. Andre🚐 00:21, 26 December 2023 (UTC) With respect to your last allegation of "wikilawyering", I would refer you to WP:GF and WP:CIVIL. Deciding to exclude well-sourced material purely on the basis of personal disagreements with said material is clearly WP:OR. JDiala (talk) 00:27, 26 December 2023 (UTC) You're once again misusing that policy, thus my statement of wikilawyering, which is not incivil when the appropriate in-context description of what you're doing; you don't understand how that OR policy applies, you can't charge me with OR when I haven't even edited anything. I explained why I think apartheid applies to the West Bank, and not to Gaza, due to Hamas taking over Gaza in 2006 and therefore, it's no longer apartheid, but now something different. Still bad, but different. That's throwing you a bone, but the point is that if you want to convince me to change my view, you need multiple high quality sources that say Gaza is an example of apartheid and that precipitated the war. Continuing to bludgeon the discussion after I asked you to leave me alone isn't going to do anything. If you have those sources, you are welcome to present them. Andre🚐 00:31, 26 December 2023 (UTC) I will once again refer you to WP:GF and WP:CIVIL. It is strange to me that an editor with such substantial experience believes it appropriate to resort to personal attacks on RfCs. The term "wikilawyering" is clearly an ad hominem attack, regardless of the spin you provide to defend its use. It is likewise bizarre to ask to be "left alone" on a talk page where the point is precisely to engage with others on these issues. With respect to OR: if you argue on the talk page to make an edit X such that if edit X is made it would constitute an instance of WP:OR, that is ipso facto an OR violation. The irony here is that your legalistic rendition of the OR policy is more akin to wikilawyering than anything I have said. Most sensible editors realize it is inappropriate to make personal assessments on what technical legal jargon like "apartheid" means without reference to WP:RS. Finally, with regard to sources, and with regard to the Gaza/West Bank distinction, this has been discussed extensively elsewhere in the RfC. JDiala (talk) 00:57, 26 December 2023 (UTC) You are now the one personalizing the dispute, by bringing my experience into it, or questioning whether I am "sensible." Again, wikilawyering refers to your misuse of a policy and not to you as an ad hominem. It is not an OR violation for me to use logic to discuss what I presume to be background information on this topic, and if I am challenged on a specific statement that I make, I may then provide support for it with sources, but what I've stated above I believe to have not received any specific such challenge. Other users may then dispute that logic or interpretation if they wish, but it's not ok to say that it's OR, because that's not what we're dealing with. Your comments are a bit out of touch with the norms of a Wikipedia discussion. WP:BLUDGEON, I've referenced it a few times. There's nothing strange about me asking you to leave me alone and stop badgering me. Andre🚐 01:04, 26 December 2023 (UTC) The statement "[leave] me alone, you're not going to convince me to change my view with these spurious wikilawyering arguments" in response to a criticism of your argument is clearly a violation of WP:CIVIL and WP:GF, regardless of how you want to spin it. It is a matter of tone. You have clearly demonstrated yourself to lack the ability to communicate with other editors in a professional way, as indicated by your talk page where several other editors have criticized this. As I've already noted, the irony is that your accusation of wikilawyering would be a more apt description of your conduct. You are engaging in obvious original research, mouthing your own opinions which are not sourced and in fact flatly incorrect when compared with the actual international law, as a rationale for excluding sourced material from the article. You're justifying this by claiming that you hadn't made an edit yet and you're on a talk page. You are attempting to skirt the spirit of the WP:OR rule (whose entire point is to ensure that the encyclopedia's content is based on well-sourced WP:RS material) by litigiously hiding behind the fact that this is an RfC on a talk page. In fact, this doesn't really matter, for the reason I mentioned. Promoting decisions based on WP:OR on the talk page is in effect engaging in original research, even if you haven't made an edit proper. Lastly, re: bludgeoning, this is a silly point. I have made far fewer comments on this RfC than many others. The root of the problem here is that you are making incorrect, false, and unsourced claims regarding the definition of apartheid (e.g., that it somehow requires an "underclass"), and personally attacking others when called out on this. JDiala (talk) 04:02, 26 December 2023 (UTC) I'm going to ignore most of your circular and repetitive comment and charitably interpret it as a request for a source for the term "underclass" in apartheid. Myanmar authorities’ system of discriminatory laws and policies that make the Rohingya in Rakhine State a permanent underclass[13] (HRW) this isn't SYNTH, because I'm not adding to the article. I'm using it to illustrate the use of the term which I am interpreting your comment to be challenging due to the use of scare quotes around it. Andre🚐 04:09, 26 December 2023 (UTC) You mentioned a "working underclass" (my emphasis). I should have included this adjective in the above comment, but in any case it was the adjective that you used. The implication here is that that apartheid specifically requires some form of economic subjugation or economic exploitation. This claim is (1) not true, and (2) even if it were true, would not prove the point here, since Israel does in fact exploit Palestinian labour (e.g., Gazan and West Bank labourers). JDiala (talk) 05:27, 26 December 2023 (UTC) I was not implying that apartheid requires economic subjugation. It just so happens that the apartheid in the situation we were describing involves commuting through the border checkpoints. Yes, it is possible to have apartheid without it being a "working" class, but I believe that this is critical to the aspect of the West Bank, it involves labor power relations, and class is fundamentally an economic concept in my conception of it. Regardless, you're going a bit further in my comments than what I said. Apartheid is the existence of an underclass maintained by a policy of discrimination, essentially, in my conception of it, and seemingly described in the above source, and I think applicable to the subset of Palestinians who exist as a class in Israeli society, as opposed to being segregated into a separate walled city with its own institutions. Andre🚐 05:33, 26 December 2023 (UTC) Andrevan is right, you do not understand what WP:OR means. You also do not understand what ad hominem means. Ad hominem is an attack on the person, as opposed to an attack on the person's reasoning. An accusation of wikilawyering is an attack on your reasoning, so it is not ad hominem. Please stop it, you are wrong and off-topic. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:53, 26 December 2023 (UTC) This is a rather meaningless comment. You are just repeating what he himself said without engaging with my responses refuting his points or elaborating on his points. This contributes exactly nil to the debate. His conduct is clearly ad hominem and a violation of WP:GF when you consider the childish, adversarial tone of his prose ("leave me alone"). Furthermore, as I note, the "wikilawyering" accusation is more aptly applied to him, considering that his argument basically hinges on a tendentious interpretation of WP:OR, where he is somehow interpreting the talk-page exception for WP:OR as a carte blanche to use his own personal, unsourced and frankly incorrect opinions on the interpretation of legal terminology to take a stance in an RfC. Note that WP:WL explicitly disallows "[abiding] by the letter of a policy or guideline while violating its spirit or underlying principles." This is precisely what is going on here with respect to Andrevan and WP:OR, where he is trying to hide behind the fact that this is a talk page to justify him bringing up entirely unsourced content in an RfC. This is no different than an editor claiming in a talk page discussion in, say, Alchemy, that he personally turned granite into gold and so the page should be changed. Would it be so unreasonable to deem that situation a WP:OR violation? And if not, what rule would you suggest citing in that case to criticize said hypothetical editor? JDiala (talk) 10:07, 26 December 2023 (UTC) Collapse bickering. Mathglot (talk) 11:39, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

• No The mention of apartheid in the context of this war is undue and not mentioned in most mainstream sources. Eladkarmel (talk) 12:45, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  Then that still means there are mainstream sources that mention apartheid. Just not "most". Salmoonlight (talk) 12:48, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  I think what he is saying is clear - it’s not in most sources and thus undue in the context of the war. Dovidroth (talk) 14:32, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  Like Iskandar said, if a source says something, we can relay it. It doesn't matter if it's mainstream or not. Please stop dodging Wikipedia policy and being obtuse. Salmoonlight (talk) 14:47, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  That is contrary to our oath here. Please read WP:NPOV which will demonstrate that we do not present such content. SPECIFICO talk 15:45, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  Any individual claim X regarding the war which is included in this article will not be included in most published news sources about the war. This is true by definition since this article is by its very nature far more comprehensive than any individual published source. JDiala (talk) 12:40, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes. Rationales for excluding the allegation are bizarre. Multiple WP:RS sources (including all mainstream human rights organizations) allege Israel is engaged in apartheid. This allegation has been brought up following the start of the war and in relation to the war by innumerable sources [1]. There is no standard that "most" sources need to specifically mention apartheid in relation to the war for it to be included in the article. This is not a standard used for anything. The vast majority of individual sources will not constitute a comprehensive discussion of the war; it is precisely the job of an encyclopedia entry to synthesize all of these sources. JDiala (talk) 12:31, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
• No. We can by all means describe the nature of the occupation, the activities of the West Bank settlers, the Netanyahu government's enabling of the far right and deprecation of the two-state solution. But labels -- there are many proposed on many CT pages on this site -- always end up like an inkblot that each reader interprets in their own way. And that is the opposite of what good encyclopedic content should achieve. The relevant specific detail is informative. Labeling it apartheid is not. SPECIFICO talk 21:45, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  Apartheid is not a "label." It is a specific crime with a specific definition under international law which Israel has been accused of. Furthermore, it is not us who are "labelling" it apartheid. The statement is attributed to those making the allegation, not considered a statement of fact. Given the ubiquity of the allegation in WP:RS sources, it seems entirely reasonable to include, provided appropriate balance is given to those who deny the allegation. JDiala (talk) 00:22, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  @JDiala: i agree. Irtapil (talk) 00:49, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, definitely - Include at least some South African sources to support them. Given the current sentiment on the Palestine issue from many South African voices, I think the people who experienced the first named Apartheid would support the comparison. I don't have any specific citation links handy at the moment (and if i open one more tab my browser will collapse), but we definitely should include the South African perspective. Irtapil (talk) 00:49, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Also, Search just for "apartheid" and restrict to results since 7 October - Any name you give for this war, will be a name only one side uses to refer to this war. But just searching for recent writing about apartheid gives results that are mostly relevant and from a wider range of perspectives. collecting some sources below… Irtapil (talk) 01:21, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Your conclusion is not valid; see response at your discussion section below. Mathglot (talk) 09:56, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes. It is not an opinion that Israel practices apartheid in the Palestinian territories it occupies, of which Gaza is one. Whether this features frequently and as prominently in newspaper reportage as beheadings, rape, ovening of babies etc or not is neither here nor there. This is not about newspaper coverage but what the best independent, authoritative NGOs mention as background to the present conflict. They are the closest thing we have at the moment for the scholarly sources that in the future will form the basis for a detached, analytical account of this particular moment of the IP conflict. I.e.,

There can be no way to address or resolve the continuing crisis in Israel and Palestine, even after the current hostilities wane, without diagnosing it correctly. The discourse about the way forward needs to be based on the reality on the ground of decades of Israeli repressive rule of Palestinians. Major Israeli, Palestinian and other international human rights groups have found that Israeli authorities are committing apartheid against Palestinians, as has the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory and many others. Lama Fakih, Omar Shakir, Does Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians Rise to the Level of Apartheid? The Los Angeles Times 5 December 2023

The injustices and violations that are among the root causes of this violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. Civilians will continue to pay a heavy price until Israel dismantles its system of apartheid against Palestinians, including ending its illegal blockade on Gaza. Palestinian Armed Groups Must Be Held Accountable for Deliberate Civilian Killings, Abductions and Indiscriminate Attacks, Amnesty International 12 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:04, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, sufficient sources exist to support the idea that it's a significant flashpoint in the … background and we only need enough sources to demonstrate that significant mainstream / non-fringe discussion exists per Aquillion. We would not expect to find daily mention of this issue in news articles, since it is inherently a 'background' issue.Pincrete (talk) 12:42, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Yes As I made clear in the "RFCbefore", the original removal by the originator of this RFC was baseless and why I restored it in the first instance, idk why this is even a question, it is sourced and clearly relevant.Selfstudier (talk) 14:29, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
• Yes, absolutely, it's well sourced and it's an incredibly important part of the whole context in these hostilities. — kashmīrī ^TALK 22:49, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
• No. As above. Not for the level of detail in the scope of this article. It's mentioned elsewhere. Drsruli (talk) 08:53, 14 January 2024 (UTC),
• No per above. JM (talk) 03:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
• No, references to this type of ideological discussion are irrelevant on a page about a military conflict, and already receive excellent coverage on specific articles like Israel and the apartheid analogy. --Katangais (talk) 07:24, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  It's relevant background. I don't know what you mean by describing it as "ideological". IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 07:32, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  Apartheid is a specific brand of racial/ethnocentric ideology that emphasizes both racial segregation and baaskap (ie political domination of one group by another). Hence, discussion of apartheid as an institutionalized state system (whether in Israel or South Africa) is, by nature, an ideological discussion. --Katangais (talk) 10:40, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Katangais

  Ideology bring irrelevant to armed conflict is a strangely cynical position?

  I have been ranting at my friends lately that "all war is just nationalism!" as in all the other bits like Islam or "freedom and democracy" are just disingenuous spin? BUT…

  nationalism is an ideology.

  Irtapil (talk) 00:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

  Ideology is not irrelevant to armed conflict. I'm stating my opinion that a nuanced discussion of ideology (for example, delving into the Israeli apartheid analogy) is irrelevant on a Wikipedia article about an armed conflict, especially one that is already quite bloated with the tactical and strategic military details. --Katangais (talk) 05:14, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• No I wouldn't object to a mention if it was relevant but it genuinely doesn't seem relevant here, just my opinion, I appreciate this is extremely controversial. Alextejthompson (Ping me or leave a message on my talk page) 17:17, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  It is very relevant if you know some background in this conflict Abo Yemen✉ 17:19, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Alextejthompson

  Among other things, they're currently being prosecuted for genocide by South Africa. It's revant in lots of tangled ways. How is it not relevant? Irtapil (talk) 23:17, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

  Hi Abo Yemen I don't even disagree with the assertion I just don't think it's relevant to this article, I do research this conflict a lot currently (though unfortunately haven't been very active recently on here.) Alextejthompson (Ping me or leave a message on my talk page) 14:50, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• No: I genuinely just don't think that it belongs. I'm not opposed to changing my mind, that said, Israel has plenty Muslims and from my understanding aren't treated much differently in society and are legally equal. - AquilaFasciata (talk | contribs) 01:10, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• No: It is not directly connected and not more significant compared to other background information. CurryCity (talk) 11:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

less biased search strategy for apartheid views

Since so many people above are saying "most sources say" based on what Google shows them for what they call the war, I'm attempting a less biased search. Any name you give for this war, will be a name only one side uses to refer to this war.

logged in to Google on the profile I usually use for news etc.

Search just for "apartheid" and restrict to results since 7 October, then just skimming for what is relevant to the war, a bit haphazard, but only ruling out things that don't seem to mention Israel or the war at all. I've not read these in full.

• top relevant hit Israel and apartheid
• Al Jazeera English - "Apartheid South Africa reached a tipping point, Israel will, too" - Suren Pillay - Chair in African Studies at the University of Cape Town
• vox "The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained" (mostly background aimed at a USA audience)
• Richard Boyd Barrett interviewed by well known Turkish news site Anadolu.
• Al Jazeera English - "US political scientist John Mearsheimer: Israel is choosing ‘apartheid’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ - John Mearsheimer on Israel’s ‘punishment campaign’ against the civilian population in Palestine."

adding "war" to the search

• Al Jazeera English - "Harvard students blame ‘apartheid regime’ for Israel-Gaza war, alumni react"
• The Jakarta Post - "The flames of Hamas, Israel, apartheid, and Palestine"

Nothing I spotted in the top few really refuted it, except that "alumni react". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Irtapil (talk • contribs) 05:19, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Irtapil, thanks for your search attempt. Unfortunately, this is a textbook case of cherry-picking; that is, you searched for the term which you wish to prove as naturally occurring in articles about the topic. This completely invalidates your search, and your results are worthless for determining the outcome of the Rfc. The volume of articles about the 2023 Israel–Hamas war is so large, that you can find pretty much whatever term you want if you search for it, whether it's apartheid, or something else. By the same reasoning you gave here, someone might say that we should add '"New Jersey" to the lead, as I (falsely) "proved" in this comment above. Please redo your search using unbiased query terms without the term apartheid in it, and show your work so others may respond. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 09:51, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

There is no standard that a particular claim needs to be in a sizeable chunk of articles for it to be included, as I have discussed at ample length elsewhere. Any individual claim X about the war will not be in many articles about the war. This is simply the nature of current events. Individual news story are inherently not exhaustive. It is not WP:CHERRYPICKING as that specifically refers to the exclusion of contradictory information. However, the sentence we have on apartheid in this article in fact discusses the contradictory view. JDiala (talk) 00:16, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

There certainly is a standard that a particular claim needs to be in a sizeable chunk of articles for it to be included, and it is the policy called WP:DUEWEIGHT; merely claiming the contrary doesn't make the policy go away. Any search query that includes the term apartheid in an attempt to determine whether articles about the 2023 Israel–Hamas war tend to include content about apartheid or not is an extreme form of WP:CHERRYPICKING and completely invalidates any conclusion reached from such a query. If the "contradictory view" is only present in a "tiny minority" of sources then it must be excluded, per policy. In Jimbo's words:

• If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, it does not belong on Wikipedia, regardless of whether it is true, or you can prove it, except perhaps in some ancillary article.

That's quoted at WP:DUE, is part of WP:NPOV (which is policy) and exceptionally among policies, it cannot be overridden by consensus but must be followed. Mathglot (talk) 07:48, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot

Cherry picking for "relevant to the discussion" is a bizarre definition of cherry picking. Of course searching "apartheid" produces searches about the topic, that is what a search is for! It was in response to someone somewhere above (too long to read, and I wouldn't want to "cherry pick" with ctrl+F?) who seemed to have searched "Israel-Hamas war" (or similar). If I searched "Palestinian resistance against the colonial occupation" I would get a biased sample? But just "apartheid" - or adding just the word "war" - was the least biased possible.

And you give a good example of my point, "The volume of articles about the 2023 Israel–Hamas war is so large" and if you look in that body of work about the "Israel–Hamas war" you get "Israel are only at war with Hamas" and "Hamas are ISIS" etc. as the cause? You could read things about so called "the Israel–Hamas war" for years and not see "apartheid" mentioned.

But - before I even added "war" - about half of the things written about "apartheid" since 2023‑10‑07 were already about the current War in the Levant. I was surprised it was even that low, because I see "apartheid" mentioned quite frequently.

Irtapil (talk) 16:40, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

I suspect if I tried New Jersey I would get anti war protesters blaming it for the war? What did you fid? Your link doesn't work so i will have to resort to "cherry picking" for searches about new jersey with ctrl+F. Irtapil (talk) 16:40, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

Google is individualized. It shows you pages which, according to their algorithm, you are likely to click on. When I apply the same search, I get lots of Nelson Mandela stuff. With "war", Israel is mentioned in the 8th hit, without war, in the third (because it talks about South Africa supporting Palestinians and opposing Israel). Google apparently gives you more antisemitic different pages than me for some reason. Please consult WP:GOOGLE to find more reasons why your reasoning is invalid. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:56, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

That antisemitism line is very close to a PA; might want to strike it. AryKun (talk) 19:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

OK. I could not find a good euphemism without being dishonest, so I used "different". --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:21, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

@Hob Gadling "dishonest"? how can you be dishonest about insults and speculation? something like "anti-Israel bias" would have made a stronger point really, over extrapolating to a larger group just makes you sound biased yourself. Irtapil (talk) 17:04, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

@Hob Gadling

I got general stuff that too, but I didn't link it, because it was not relevant. I added "war" to make it a bit faster, but a fairly high proportion was already relating to this war.

• Did you actually restrict it to after 2023‑10‑07 like I did?
• Did you look past the 8th or 3rd result? If information needs to get past the 8th hit of a search designed not to find it, then we need to cut out most of this article.

And I know it personalizes results, that is why I specified I was logged in. But since AryKun already pointed out that your other remark was inappropriate, I'll resist speculating about your results.

Irtapil (talk) 16:56, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

I am not interested in comparing Google results, it does not help the article.

If you knew that Google searches are individualized and therefore biased towards what the googler likes, it was a really weird decision to call this section "less biased search strategy for apartheid views" and not "more biased search strategy for apartheid views". I will now stop responding to this thread, it does not belong here. --Hob Gadling (talk) 17:53, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

refs

References

Discussion (apartheid)

In response to Sameboat's question above about providing a policy basis for using top Google results as methodology: Policy generally does not specify methodology, it specifies goals, such as mentioned by WP:DUEWEIGHT (part of our WP:Neutral point of view policy, which is one of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, and cannot be overridden by consensus, such as by the result of an Rfc). NPOV says this:

Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. (emphasis added)

When a niche topic has only twenty-seven sources in total, you can go visit all of them, count them up, and figure out which ones are majority and minority views, and write your article content accordingly. When there are thousands of sources, you cannot do that, and you need some kind of proxy or methodology, that lets you figure out what the majority and minority views are. One such proxy is the results of the ranked search results of an unbiased query to a trusted search engine. If you believe my query was biased, or if you believe that Google is rigging the game and failing to fairly surface results about apartheid for that query for some reason, that would be a valid way to attack my argument. But attacking it based solely on the claims of some other Wikipedia editor unsupported by either policy or data, is unpersuasive. Note that the very next line at WP:DUEWEIGHT is this explanatory note:

The relative prominence of each viewpoint among Wikipedia editors or the general public is irrelevant and should not be considered.

So, you could start by attacking my query, my methodology, or Google search results if you wish to claim that a 100-result survey is not a valid indicator. Even better, would be to come up with a superior methodology yourself, showing that my method was inaccurate, and that your method demonstrates that apartheid is, in fact, part of the majority (or significant minority) content in articles about the topic. But merely claiming this or that without evidence will not affect the result of this Rfc. Mathglot (talk) 21:30, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

An obvious methodological issue with this is the risk of recency bias (see also: WP:RECENTISM). The current war has been ongoing for two months, so news outlets aren't necessarily going to be rehashing every relevant detail, they'll likely assume a level of baseline awareness on the part of readers. Whether you "sort by relevance" or "sort by date", the first 100 results are overwhelmingly, almost entirely from the last week (at least, they were for me when I followed the link); if that was our metric, the article would be dominated by the IDF's execution of three hostages, Lloyd Austin's visit to Israel, the upcoming UNSC vote, etc. Our content is qualitatively different than a news article; it has to be enduring in a way that news stories don't, necessarily.

Another methodological issue is the phrasing of your search. For example, by searching for the "2023 Israel-Hamas war" you may be excluding or lowering the ranking of news outlets that use other names, such as Israel-Gaza War.

A third question is geographic situation. Depending on your Google preferences, the result may be skewed toward outlets from a certain region (e.g. a noticeable proportion of my results were from Canadian outlets, even though I followed the link you posted). I also got a large amount of coverage from Israeli sources (particularly JPost and ToI), which raises its own issues.

A fourth issue is the fact that aggregated Google News results don't filter for reliability, which is a core policy. So I'm getting Fox News stories, blogs and opinion pieces, etc., which are irrelevant to this discussion.

A fifth issue is depth of review. You say that you reviewed the search abstract, which is (somewhat, but not really) equivalent to the lead of a wiki article; but we're not talking about putting apartheid in the lead of this article, we're talking about including it further down.

So there are a lot of methodological issues arising from this approach; I've never seen this method used to determine notability or due weight. WillowCity^(talk) 00:03, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

In essence, the approach of relying on the "top Google search result" lacks credibility in determining due weight. This is due to the inherent bias in Google's algorithm, influenced significantly by the user's IP or search history. It's regrettable that seeking clarity on your methodology is interpreted as an "attack." (But attacking it based solely on the claims of some other Wikipedia editor unsupported by either policy or data, is unpersuasive.) If you believe your methodology deserves recognition on Wikipedia, consider gaining consensus from the community, perhaps through avenues like WP:Village Pump/Policy. Currently, your approach seems to conflict with information from reliable sources, as highlighted by user:Vice regent. We shouldn't compromise our content based on Google's search results, but we can still use Google when specifically seeking information from reliable sources. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 00:35, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

As additional reading, please take a look at Wikipedia:Search engine test. While not a formal policy or guideline, it provides an in-depth guidance of the appropriate way to use search engines while maintaining neutrality when editing Wikipedia. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 03:35, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Show me the data that supports your view. I see a lot of pointing out *possible* issues (which I respond to individually below) but nothing concrete to really respond to. Regarding recency, WP:RECENTISM is an essay, but I'll respond anyway. There are issues with recency to be aware of, and WP:RSBREAKING (guideline) does warn about the dangers of breaking news:

Wikipedia is not a newspaper and it does not need to go into all details of a current event in real time. It is better to wait a day or two after an event before adding details to the encyclopedia

One way to deal with that is to use a custom time search to build in specific dates and avoid the "breaking" syndrome, so I redid the query restricting results to articles from 14 December or earlier; you can find the results of that search here. (These results shouldn't change too much, even if you click again a few days or a week or two later.) I didn't see a single reference to apartheid in the titles or abstracts of the first 100 web results (not just news results) prior to 14 December. The guideline section WP:AGEMATTERS says:

Sources of any age may be prone to recentism, and this needs to be balanced out by careful editing.

so that needs to be kept in mind, as well. There may be a recentism issue, but if there is, it hasn't been demonstrated.

The point about other wording such as Israel-Gaza War is a valid one, and that (and other phrasing) should definitely be looked at, to try to get a fuller picture of what the majority and minority views are. The pre-14 December web search results for Israel-Gaza War are here, and there are no occurrences of apartheid in the top 100 results. The top ten are: NYT, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Nation, CNN, CNBC, WSJ, CNN, RAND, AP, and checking the full text of those ten, apartheid is found in The Nation, and the BBC article. I looked at #11-20 (Brookings–CPJ) and it didn't occur in any of those. (#18 was a video, I only checked the text and did not listen to the audio.) I did not check the full text of the remaining 80 results, only the title/abstract, where it did not appear.

As far as geographic influence on results, you can mitigate that somewhat by stripping query params "search location" (&gl=) or the "search region" (&uule=) if it appears in the url in your address bar and my query urls are stripped to the bone. (WP:Search engine test is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far; in particular, it fails to mention any of Google's proprietary url query params, including either the search location or the search region; that's a pretty big gap for an article supposedly about searching Google.) Avoiding those params doesn't stop Google from using your IP to surmise your location, but there are web sites or browser extensions you can use that that alter your apparent location. I tried the same query from Doha, Qatar and just eyeballing the results, I didn't notice any major difference; I got the same mix of websites as I did without specifying a location, although I did not try to match them up one-to-one down the whole list of results, and if you felt like trying that to see if there are some subtle differences I didn't notice, I'd be interested to hear what you find out.

It's fine to challenge results and I appreciate your comments which inspired a new set of refined queries that appear to reinforce the same result as the earlier query, but if you merely criticize without offering your own data that support your vote, it all just seems very theoretical. Mathglot (talk) 06:00, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

I believe the crux of the matter is not the adjustment of search parameters to refine Google search results but the use of the "top 100 results" as a justification to exclude a point of view readily found in reliable sources within the subject's time frame. With all due respect, it appears you are introducing a new rule. The burden of proof lies on your side to persuade the greater community (beyond participants of this article) to accept such an evidently flawed method for determining what is due and what is not. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 06:28, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

I have no wish to exclude anything, and I am perfectly indifferent to how this Rfc turns out, either with, or without apartheid in it, as long as whichever way it goes follows Wikipedia policies and guidelines. I've presented evidence that the term appears to be sufficiently rare to meet the use of the phrase "tiny minority" at WP:DUE (policy), which says that

Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all,

and your conception of who has the onus of providing evidence is backwards: in fact, the WP:ONUS (policy) is on the person who wishes to include information, not the reverse. Nobody cares what you or I believe, our opinions are unimportant; it's about Wikipedia policy, and supporting evidence. I've presented the governing policy links and quotes, and shown to the best of my ability how the unbiased results of several queries pertain to them, especially WP:DUEWEIGHT. I have no wish to recycle previous comments or to comment further unless some actual evidence is brought to bear. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 08:50, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

To begin with, calling the apartheid argument as "undue" (or "minorities view") seems to be more of a personal opinion, supported only by a poorly formulated method. If you maintain that the sources presented by Vice Regent are inadequate, it's fine, and you're entitled to your own perspective. However, relying on search engine results is not a suitable method for determining due weight. If you find it repetitive, we can pause and await the judgment of a reputable, uninvolved editor to conclude this RFC. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 10:27, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

RfC on sexual violence in lead section

Should the lead section contain a few sentences concerning the sexual violence during the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023? ' If so, should the Hamas denial be included? Option A would be to include a few sentences with no denial. Option B include with a denial. Option C do not include. Coretheapple (talk) 04:48, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Can you give example sources for "the Hamas denial"? I saw one interview, but I am not sure if what I saw is what you have in mind. Irtapil (talk) 08:39, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree including it as it has been a contentious topic that has received notability. Linkin Prankster (talk) 04:42, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Warning for the closer re: canvassing: ArbCom has been presented with evidence that this RfC has been canvassed by those asking for proxy edits to promote a pro-Israel point of view. While I am not personally aware of the nature or extent of the evidence, or the scale of canvassing, the closer should apply WP:NOTAVOTE with particular care. WillowCity^(talk) 22:39, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Survey 2

• Option A, Failing to include the sexual violence in the lead would violate WP:LEADl and WP:NPOV as well as WP:NOTCENSORED.There are 45 million hits when you google "Hamas" and "rape" (without quotes), 15,300 in news. USA Today two days ago: Title: 'We know they were raped in Hamas captivity': Chilling details of what hostages faced"[14] It is very much in the forefront of news coverage in reliable sources, and the only question is whether to include the Hamas denial, which is cursory and which I believe is barred in the lead by WP:FALSEBALANCE While it is important to account for all significant viewpoints on any topic, Wikipedia policy does not state or imply that every minority view, fringe theory, or extraordinary claim needs to be presented along with commonly accepted mainstream scholarship as if they were of equal validity. Note that the denial is in the body of the article, in the relevant subsection.'

One point re the denial that needs to be stressed. Every single thing in the lead that is adverse to Israel, without exception, is not followed by a response or denial from Israel, even though Israel has indeed responded to or denied every single element of the lead. Putting in the perfunctory Hamas response to the rapes, and only that response out of everything else in the lead, would be unbalanced and not neutral. Coretheapple (talk) 04:47, 23 December 2023 (UTC) second paragraph added. Coretheapple (talk) 17:49, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Could you list a couple of these 'everything' please. NadVolum (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

There are 540,000,000 results for "flat earth" with no quotes. The claims are more credible than that, I'm just saying I don't think those figures prove much by themselves. Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A, will accept B. I do not think the denial is helpful, per WP:MANDY, but if it will help this pass I will accept that compromise. Andre🚐 04:52, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C would accept B as well, but A is a non-starter to me. The 45 million general google hits are completely irrelevant, as we arent going to start counting random blogs and twitter accounts as reliable sources all of a sudden. The USA Today article is relevant in that it reports The Israeli military official said that, just as authorities know that many women were sexually assaulted during the Supernova music festival and at their homes on Oct. 7, "we know they were raped in Hamas captivity.", somehow presented as though the USA Today is undersigning that claim from an Israeli military official in the opening comment here, but it does not. The USA Today article also includes Despite this evidence, Hamas has consistently denied accusations it used sexual violence on Oct. 7. It has claimed the allegations are part of an attempt by Israel to distract from its mass killings of civilians in Gaza. International human rights groups waited two months before finally condemning the sexual violence. Nearly all the sources that include any accusation of rape includes the denial by Hamas as well, if it is to be included it has to include the denial per NPOV. But why should it not be included? Because the rape charges are almost entirely focused on the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and the sourcing here in relation to the overall war does not show that it is a prominent controversy for this subject and not the child article on the attack. There are 16,400 news results for "sexual assault" "hamas", 14,800 for "rape" "hamas" (many overlapping), nearly all of them in the context of coverage of the 7 October attacks It pales in comparison to say coverage of the UN Security Council and the vetoes (114k news results for "security council" "hamas" "gaza" "israel" "2023"). Or to "starvation" "hamas" "gaza" "israel" with 78,400 news results. "genocide" "gaza" "israel" "2023" gets 25,900 news results. For the overall topic, this just does not have the weight in coverage to merit inclusion in the lead. For the 7 October attacks? Yes, of course it does. But for the war that is entering its 11th week and not limited to one day in October, this is not a prominent controversy to be included in the lead. nableezy - 05:14, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• C. The initial reports, endlessly recycled since, were extremely confused, internally contradictory, and endlessly touted despite numerous corrections, or dropping off the radar of serious reportage, over time. We still don't appear to know if the rape incidents reported reflect a Hamas strategy, are attributable to other militant groups, or the general flux of indiscriminate groups ranging over the landscape and wreaking violence. A large number of similar, specific reports about burning, decapitating, ovening babies etc., are now viewed sceptically, and until we have specific forensic evidence of the scale or scope of these reported crimes, any statement formulated to assert, as was done from the outset in Israeli news reports, that this was a systematic aspect of the 4 hour Hamas onslaught on the border communities, will reflect a partisan claim, not an ascertained fact. Nishidani (talk) 07:00, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  This dismissive rejection of overwhelming evidence and testimony comes disappointingly close to the kind of sexual violence denialism that has been deprecated and rejected worldwide over the past few decades. SPECIFICO talk 16:02, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  This skepticism is warranted. Israelis have already been caught lying about the details of October 7th. The most notable example is the 40 beheaded babies story. JDiala (talk) 11:36, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C: this war inside Gaza has been going on for 2 and a half months, the 7/10 attack last several hours. Iennes (talk) 07:12, 23 December 2023 (UTC

  The duration of these events is irrelevant to our content policy. It's also false that the sexual violence occurred only on the first day.

  The nature of the initial attack and the ongoing treatment of the hostages has received ongoing coverage in RS, and the coverage is increasing as new investigations reveal the extent of the conduct. It also has been cited as enabling Netanyahu's refusal to moderate the intensity of Israel's counterattack.

  Pearl Harbor/WW2, Archduke assassinationi/WW1, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Boston Tea Party, etc. were all discrete events the significance of which is not diminished by their brevity. We are continuing to see daily coverage, testimony and forensic evidence, and no credible information to the contrary. SPECIFICO talk 15:56, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  You dont need to badger people and make this an unreadable mess; if you want to discuss somebody's vote do it in the discussion section where they may ignore you at their leisure. nableezy - 16:12, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  Pearl Harbour and Archduke were precipitators of a large conflict; the sparks which ignited a fire. They are not really comparable to a handful of alleged excesses that occurred in a military invasion, but which otherwise had no further reaching consequences. JDiala (talk) 05:47, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C. This is a WP:BALASP issue and a matter of WP:DUE. Option A (including "a few sentences") is, in addition to violating NPOV and failing to follow reliable sources (by omitting the denial), totally excessive. The Israeli captives have been a larger story in relation to the war as a whole, and they have a single sentence, which is appropriate; an (as yet unconfirmed and strenuously denied) allegation of something that happened on a single day in the course of an eleven-week war should not be given more prominence. As well, as a matter of BALASP, highlighting these allegations skews the POV of the lead. I don’t want to speculate about anyone’s intent, but I get the feeling that highlighting the events of October 7 is a way to undercut the more prominent aspects of the war as a whole, namely, Israeli atrocities and the humanitarian situation in Gaza. In effect, “well, Hamas also did bad things”. But we have a litany of articles about that: War crimes in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war; Sexual and gender-based violence in the 7 October attack on Israel; 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel; articles on individual October 7 attacks. This article is about the entire war. It is not just about October 7. The bottom line is that when news stories about the October 7 attack refer to sexual violence, they include attribution of the claims, and they include Hamas denials. Overwhelmingly, if not exclusively. We can’t independently weigh the evidence, determine it’s credible, and then depart from RS by failing to include attributions and denials. WillowCity^(talk) 13:44, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A The nature and ferocity of the 10/7 attack was the predicate for the Netanyahu government's unprecedented response. The rapes and sexual mutilations have received broad ongoing coverage and increasing investigations and condemnation. No RS treats any denials as serious or credible, so MANDY applies. If mention is to be made of denials, as in option B, we would also need to convey that those denials are not taken seriously and are themselves widely condemned. But that would be excessive detail for the lead. Note that WP is not a newspaper and the fact that the press initially (but now much less frequently} mentions Hamas' denials does not tell us what we must convey as an encyclopedia. SPECIFICO talk 16:17, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  For Israeli atrocities, we generally mention Israeli denials even when they are not credible, eg lead of Shireen Abu Akleh.VR _talk 00:38, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  It is factually incorrect that the press currently less frequently mentions Hamas' denials. The recent NYT investigation regarding this explicitly noted Hamas' denials in the article. Furthermore, it is not unusual to include denials of crimes in the lead even when those crimes are generally accepted to be true, especially when said crimes are done by state or quasi-state actors like Hamas. The Armenian Genocide is an example of this. We explicitly discuss Turkish denial in the lead. JDiala (talk) 11:34, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C. Lacking weight for the topic of this article.Crampcomes (talk) 16:36, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. This is important to understanding how Hamas precipitated the war. Denials are not credible and not worth including. Far more important than the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was Hamas's desired outcome resulting from the atrocities committed to provoke the war. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:10, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• C. but B would be acceptable. The allegations are absolutely a huge flashpoint in coverage of the war, but every RS article I read includes the denials alongside the accusations. A just doesn't make sense from a WP:DUE standpoint. CarmenEsparzaAmoux (talk) 18:31, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. I don't think the denials should be mentioned, considering that they are given very brief treatment by RS. However I don't see much harm in mentioning them briefly (Option B). Alaexis_¿question? 18:48, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• C It can be treated a major part of the 7 October attack but it is a very minor part of the war and that's what this article is about. The lead is already a bit stuffed. NadVolum (talk) 20:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option B currently, but am fine changing to Option A if somebody shows that a plurality of reliable sources don't include the denial. It seems like enough do for it to warrant a brief mention. I am opposed to option C; I don't find the arguments in favor of it compelling. We have an article on the topic for a reason; there's an articles worth of sources about it. Enough to warrant a mention in the lede. Polite reminder as well to assume good faith and not to speculate about the intent of editors, don't think that's going to be helpful. Chuckstablers (talk) 04:23, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  I would like to note that while Hamas denies allegations of sexual assault or mutilation committed by members of its armed wing, it does not deny such acts performed by others who participated in the attack. Therefore, this is not an actual denial of the fact that sexual violence has indeed taken place during the attack. Marokwitz (talk) 09:03, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A. Including the denial by Hamas would be a form of WP:FALSEBALANCE. There is clear, dated, evidence of the sexual violence so mentioning the denials would create a false sense of ambiguity. If people do indeed think that there's enough uncertainty to include the denials then I would be in favor of Option C as that means that it's a he-says she-says situation that takes away from the main point of the conflict. Ergzay (talk) 05:12, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A per Hawkeye7. The war began with Hamas atrocities that shocked the world and traumatized Israel, and the Hamas denials lack credibility and inclusion would be WP:FALSEBALANCE. We don't include Israeli denials in the lead as also observed above. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 14:34, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. This has clearly received significant coverage in Western media. Recent articles in American, British and Australian reliable news outlets, for example. Sources tend to mention the Hamas denial briefly and only after the allegations have been made in full over several paragraphs, so I think we should keep the denial out of the lead. 𝕱𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖆 (talk) 15:59, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C. The October 7 attack and kidnapping are the events that triggered the current invasion in Gaza. However, the rape accusations have no bearing on Israel's decision for this specific military operation. Including them is more likely to serve Israel's propaganda purposes (false consciousness) than an encyclopedic one. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 01:36, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  (Supplementary comment after someone cited the New York Times article "Screams Without Words" in this discussion.) The NYT paywalled "Screams Without Words" article fails to provide justification for including the rape allegations in the article's lead. Typically, such details belong in an article about the terror attack article itself, not in the article covering the military retaliation that follows. Even for proven (not alleged) systemic sexual misconduct during war, these instances are rarely highlighted in the lead, at least I can't find any instance besides this article. Moreover, the October 7 rape allegations, which happened only in 1 day instead of during this war, only surfaced in November 2023, after northern Gaza had already been heavily bombarded by the IDF. Hence, it's unlikely that the rape allegation influenced Netanyahu's decision to attack Gaza, or "completely eradicate Hamas". While I hesitate to delve into the details of the NYT's "Screams Without Words" article, a brief review indicates a lack of concrete evidence. The article lacks testimonies from the allegedly sexually assaulted survivors, and all Israelis killed in the October 7 attack were hastily buried without autopsy. The allegations heavily rely on witnesses (e.g. "Sapir") testimonies and videos which don't show the actual process of sexual assault, but its "aftermath". All in all, supporters are trying to make a precedent over something lacking hard evidence but being politicized and weaponized. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 14:07, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Sameboat: Why would you separate the first attacks? Or do you just mean that's where the detail belongs instead of the mean page? Irtapil (talk) 19:01, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Irtapil: I believe my previous comment is quite clear: The rape allegations were not the basis for Israel initiating this full-scale invasion of Gaza; rather, it was the killing and kidnapping incidents. As far as I can see, no reliable sources directly connect the rape allegations to Israel's military retaliation, not even NYT's Screams Without Words.^[15] Instead, these sources primarily focus on the October 7 attack, including Hamas' denial and claim that the allegations serve as a distraction from Israel's war crimes,^Guardian and that wouldn't justify option A which rejects Hamas' denial in the lead. If the rape allegations were to be proven true, that would be very disturbing. However, even if one could demonstrate systemic sexual misconduct during Israel's invasion, it would still be extraordinary to include such details in the lead of a war article, regardless of the side implicated in the alleged crime. The exclusion of sexual misconduct (e.g. comfort woman in Second Sino-Japanese War) from the lead aligns with Wikipedia's standard format for war articles. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 02:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Sameboat

  I wrote this earlier but it didn't send.

  I think the rape narrative is central to this war because of the way it is being used to justify a genocide.

  As far a I know there is stronger evidence of more widespread rapes in Ukraine? But they are less relevant to that conflict, because it hasn't become the "We must destroy them because!"

  Arguably, we shouldn't amplify the Israeli propaganda narrative, but I don't think not mentioning it helps? We definitely shouldn't call the initial attacks article "Hamas Rape spree in Israel" or such, but it is a prominent issue.

  Though I have possibly just talked myself into "not in the lead" of the main article maybe.

  Irtapil (talk) 19:51, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Irtapil: I think the rape narrative is central to this war because of the way it is being used to justify a genocide. I would like you to cite at least one reliable source which directly use the rape narrative to justify anything related to Gaza's humanitarian crisis. If your goal is to ridicule Israel's petty excuses to collectively punish and expel Gazan Palestinians, mentioning the rape allegations in the lead doesn't help at all, but ruins the balance of the article. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 09:38, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option C as information that is currently both poorly verified and largely tangential to the narrative of the war as a whole, which is the topic. These claims are merely one subset of atrocity claim under investigation and do not require detailing in the lead. Much emphasis was placed by Israel on this material after the renewal of violence in Gaza, but this POV emphasis does not make it of overall due weight emphasis as lead detail: on the contrary, it might violate NPOV to do so. Option B would likewise be preferable to Option A in asserting a modicum of balance, but both are less preferable overall as undue in terms of overall weight considerations. Iskandar323 (talk) 01:52, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. Those people are Islamists and in favor of forcing women to wear hijabs, because they believe that men cannot be held responsible for their behaviour when they see unveiled women. It would be very inconsistent of them to abduct unveiled women and not rape them, so the accusations are obviously true. Given the coverage, it also belongs in the lead. --Hob Gadling (talk) 04:48, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  Fortunately, your personal analysis is entirely irrelevant here. Zero^talk 07:43, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A. Exceedingly well covered topic. And including Hamas's denial would be WP:FALSEBALANCE. As per Marokwitz below, we should try to use language similar to that of the Guardian. Dovidroth (talk) 07:51, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. Widely covered by WP:RS, Major controversies must be prominently featured in the lead section as per Wikipedia's guidelines (WP:LEDE). I oppose option B for the following reason: The denial of sexual violence in this context has become a fringe view, especially in light of substantial and reliable accounts that have surfaced. For example, according to The Guardian:

  Several incidents of sexual assault and rape from 7 October have been documented by Hamas body camera footage, CCTV, material uploaded to social media, and photographs and videos taken by civilians and first responders, according to several people involved in analysing the footage. Survivor and witness testimonies, many from the Supernova rave, describe seeing women being raped before they were shot.

The language used in the lead could be similar to the one used by the Guardian, that is, attributing the evidence to survivors, witness testimonies and forensic staff.

This evidence has resulted in UN Women's explicit condemnation of the sexual violence that occurred. Hamas may deny that its fighters carried out sexual violence, but it is a fact that not only Hamas fighters participated in the attack, therefore this denial is meaningless and misleading.

Furthermore, it is imperative to recognize that denying or downplaying these heinous acts is not only factually incorrect but also morally reprehensible. Such denial would be a profound insult to the female victims, akin to silencing their voices and negating their traumatic experiences. Applying a WP:FALSEBALANCE between the victims and perpetrators in this context not only undermines the veracity of the reported events but also perpetuates a harmful narrative that could further victimize the victims. Marokwitz (talk) 08:51, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C - Per Nableezy and Willowcity. TrangaBellam (talk) 11:23, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C Without commenting on the sourcing: we have a separate article for the October 7th attacks. Details about the October 7th attacks go in the lead of that article, not this one. Loki (talk) 15:42, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C as these are WP:UNDUE for the lead of this article, but option B for 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel as they are WP:DUE there. Many Israeli actions have received more RS coverage, as nableezy points out, but can't be given the space they deserve because of concerns surrounding length. For example, I find that gaza starvation has 95,000 results, or 8x more than hamas rape which is 12,000 results for me. Will we give 8x more sentences to the starvation of Gazans in the lead as we give to the sexual assault claims? Various other topics not mentioned in the lead all get more news hits than the rape allegations: shifa = 17,000, "indonesian hospital" gaza = 16,000, cancer gaza = 119,000 (the plight of cancer patients amidst the war) etc.VR _talk 00:35, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  I've got only 13,000 results for Gaza starvation, which would be about the same. Not sure why the discrepancy. If you switch over to plain google results, hamas rape has about 10m more results than Gaza starvation. [00:40, 26 December 2023 (UTC)] I also have different results for your other links. Same number for Shifa, but for Indonesian hospital Gaza, only 6800. For cancer Gaza I have the same high number, but I suspect that not all of those results are about this. Andre🚐 00:41, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A sexual violence by Hamas has been condemned by dozens of leaders, senators, figures etc. A bunch of international media outlets have reported on it, and gotten testimonies. Prosecution already has collected a substantial amount of evidence over the past several months. There is footage, some of it spread by Hamas itself of women bloodied in between their legs and other things. It would be a complete wp:falsebalance to give equal weight to Hamas denial of the actions.
  I do think the body should include a denial. However the lead should be option A. Homerethegreat (talk) 06:29, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. Mentioning the topic is especially important because the very extreme violence (not just sexual) of October 7 is what later on shaped the goals, length and the extent of the campaign in Gaza. It is also important in order to understand why the 2023 Gaza War was so different than the ones in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Option B might have sufficed but due to the sheer amount of WP:RS, I think this is just WP:FALSEBALANCE. FoodforLLMs (talk) 12:31, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  In other words, "mentioning the topic is especially important because we need the atrocity propaganda to justify an ongoing genocide." Unfortunately for you, Wikipedia is not the propaganda arm of the Israeli government. JDiala (talk) 00:33, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  WP:NOTAFORUM, WP:AGF please argue policy rather than making personal attacks. Drsmoo (talk) 02:17, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Please tone down your sarcasm and accusations, I think it's highly uncalled for. To address the substance, We are supposed to present the facts to the reader and let them formulate a narrative. For example, just as you need to see the Palestinian casualty figure to understand condemnations of Israeli actions, you need to see details of the Oct 7 attack to understand support for Israeli actions. And I think our job is to show these facts. --FoodforLLMs (talk) 16:56, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A absolutely. It would be such a gross violation of WP:NPOV to not include it in the lead. EytanMelech (talk) 19:37, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C as UNDUE and unreliably sourced. I would accept Option B. The Zionist entity has engaged in a huge information war, despite that many of their wild claims have been found to be fabrications. All reliable sources have chosen to couch reports of sexual violence by attributing it to Zionist and unreliable sources like the IOF. It would be a violation of all Wikipedia's policies and guidelines to include this likely false claim in wikivoice in the lead of this article, let alone without the denial from Palestinians. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 17:28, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  “All reliable sources have chosen to couch reports of sexual violence by attributing it to Zionist and unreliable sources like the IOF.”

  What does attributing it to Zionist mean? Are you referring to Israeli first responders? Could you rephrase?

  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181

  ”The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks.”

  https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20231213-evidence-mounts-of-sexual-crimes-perpetrated-by-hamas-during-oct-7-attack-in-israel

  “Two months after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, evidence is mounting of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas that day. Prosecutors have little doubt that women were raped, tortured and some of their dead bodies mutilated. Israeli police, who opened a probe in mid-November, say they have gathered more than 1,500 testimonies from witnesses and first responders.” Drsmoo (talk) 02:08, 28 December 2023 (UTC) Edit at 02:28, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  The BBC is at this stage the government mouthpiece of an at least partly involved global power running reconnaissance missions over Gaza from Cyprus. As in all cases, we should be seeking reliable, secondary sources that are as independent as possible. As for the France 24 piece, that says "prosecutors" (presumably Israeli prosecutors) are confident of X - now prosecutors are specifically in the business of making a strong case rather than neutrally and impartially reflecting the facts. Their counterpart would be the defense, which isn't reflected here (if this is in reference to the ICC filing, then we may be waiting some while). In the same breath, the same source notes that the UN investigation is evidently ongoing - so we are still awaiting impartial voices on proceedings. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:32, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Those are both reliable secondary independent sources, that’s why we use them. Please don’t misrepresent sources, France24 wrote “evidence is mounting of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas that day”. Along with the myriad of others that also report Hamas’ murderous rape spree.

  The argument by some editors that we should ignore reliable sources is ridiculous. The argument that we should ignore Israeli civilians and human rights organizations because they are Israeli is unacceptable on Wikipedia. Drsmoo (talk) 13:54, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Also, the way a reliable source like the BBC turns into a government mouthpiece of an at least partly involved global power because it does not toe a pro-Hamas party line is clearly motivated reasoning. No difference to Trump calling those outlets that contradict him "fake news". --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:09, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  They’re not misrepresenting anything. BBC (British state media) is saying it’s “seen evidence” which is not the same as saying that something occurred. If a source said they’d “seen evidence” that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians, would you want it included in the lead that Israel is targeting civilians? And would you agree that the statement of every Palestinian civilian or human rights organization is lead-worthy?

  I don’t think people are suggesting they be ignored outright, they belong in the body with appropriate attribution and context. But these accounts are generally filtered through Israeli government sources (prosecutors, police, the military) who have a vested interest in spin-doctoring evidence to fit the narrative of a belligerent to the conflict (one who famously lacks credibility). For example, who knows what kind of editing the video shown to BBC was subject to? How reliable was the witnesses’ perception, how much do they even remember, are they sincere? These are not issues the BBC opines on. The question is not “are Israeli civilians telling the truth”, the question is “are the reports sufficiently notable, credible and unequivocal to justify including in the lead?” The even more important question is, “do these allegations tell readers anything about the ongoing 12-week war, or would focusing extensively on a single day skew the narrative towards one POV?”

  (also, can we all try to keep the discussion to the discussion section) WillowCity^(talk) 15:27, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Using pejorative slurs like Zionist entity isn't an argument and railing against Zionist control of the sources (assuming they're saying all Western sources presented here are Zionist) in this discussion isn't one either. The closer should ignore this !vote since they were asked to elaborate on what a "Zionist source" is and didn't. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 21:35, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

  The repeated assertion by some that Israeli witnesses, first responders, and human rights organizations are not trustworthy due to their nationality is unacceptable.

Currently on the home page of The NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html “A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel” “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7”Drsmoo (talk) 17:26, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A, per SPECIFICO, Hawkeye7 and Marokwitz. The cruelty of the 7.10 attack, including the sexual violence, resulted the wide support in Israel to a harsh response. The credibility (or more accurately, the lack of credibility) of the denial should also be considered, as we describe the reality. The denial is indeed a fringe view. I think that option B, if it includes a clarification that the denials are not taken seriously and widely condemned, can also be good, and even give a better perspective, but it will be too long for the lead, so it's better not to write about the denials in the lead at all. פעמי-עליון (talk) 18:37, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A - (Brought here from WP:RFC/A) Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED and we should include this information (the weight in the media does give it proper DUE weight) and leave out the denial as I do also believe it is "fringe". MaximusEditor (talk) 21:06, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  You're making a strawman argument, as no one has argued for censoring this, and in fact, many of the Option C !votes specifically point to other places more suitable to mention this. VR _talk 04:03, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A as per Hawkeye7 and others. With regards, Oleg Y. (talk) 01:56, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A per Andre. 𝕸𝖗 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖉𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕿𝖚𝖗𝖙𝖑𝖊 🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱 ☎️ 📄 02:23, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option C Such details and denials about what happened on the first day of the attack belong to the lede of 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.Ghazaalch (talk) 05:28, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C I've been convinced by the argument brought up below by User:WillowCity and User:Sameboat would make Option B give undue weight to sexual violence in contrast to other conflicts. Option A is for me a nonstarter. To include it we would have to adjudicate that Israel's claims are valid, that any rebuttal is invalid, AND that including it is so factual and important that it doesn't even warrant including usual context. I think it would be a flagrant violation of NPOV. Acebulf ^{(talk | contribs)} 17:58, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

  After reading a few rather convincing arguments above from User:Marokwitz, the denial from Hamas referring only to their members, any form of option B would have to be very carefully worded. I'm not sure that option B would make much sense in that light. Acebulf ^{(talk | contribs)} 21:38, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A' or Option B per Associated Press. “Such accounts given to The Associated Press, along with first assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of an atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza militants who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.” Drsmoo (talk) 18:12, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Edit: From The NY Times today: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.” Drsmoo (talk) 17:40, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C It should absolutely not be discussed in the lead. The Zionist state has demonstrably produced false atrocity propaganda regarding the October 7th resistance operation, like the 40 beheaded babies lie, which incidentally the uncritical Western media has parroted. We thus have reasonable suspicion that these sexual assault allegations are likewise fabricated. The lack of forensic evidence (e.g., semen) or pregnant Israeli women is also eyebrow-raising. I understand that Wikipedia does regard Western media as WP:RS, which I accept and do not contest, so it is reasonable to include the sexual violence claims somewhere in the article. However, I think it is fair for us to exclude it from the lead, given the very real reservations regarding this. JDiala (talk) 00:28, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Could you articulate a policy-based reason why we should ignore widespread attestation in the most reliable sources, and why we should ignore eyewitness testimony from Israelis. Your allegation that the evidence of sexual assault is fabricated because it comes from Israelis is not acceptable. Drsmoo (talk) 01:58, 28 December 2023 (UTC) Edit at 02:17, 28 December 2023 (UTC) and 02:28, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  I never stated we should "ignore" it. I simply asserted it shouldn't be in the lead. Something being reported by a widespread number of sources is a necessary but insufficient reason to be included in a lead. It is also important to note that this legalistic focus on "policies" is contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia see e.g., WP:5P5. It is completely sensible for us, as an encyclopedia, to have a greater degree of scrutiny for an entity known for regularly producing bald-faced lies regarding the events of this war. This doesn't mean eschewing such claims altogether, but merely relegating them to the body of the article rather than the lead. JDiala (talk) 02:44, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-08/ty-article/israeli-police-collect-eyewitness-testimony-of-gang-rape-during-hamas-attack/0000018b-b025-d3c1-a39b-bee5ef400000 Which entity are you referring to, the testimony of eyewitnesses? I don't like putting words into peoples mouths, but your argument seems to be that not only should we ignore the wide array of highly reliable sources, but we should also ignore all Israeli eyewitness accounts, and first-responder accounts, because you think they're untrustworthy. That position would not be valid. Drsmoo (talk) 03:06, 28 December 2023 (UTC) Edit 19 November 2024

• Option C. Came to that decision having read the arguments of those who have already answered. A is out of the question as it's a breach of NPOV in showing bias towards one side when neither side has any credibility as regards truth. B is a "he said she said" option, which in an article based on a broader issue (where a multitude of more widely covered events that have transpired throughout the war do not make the lede) seems excessive/undue to mention. Therefore C seems the most appropriate option as it keeps to substantiated facts without giving undue weight/balance. It's the most dispassionate option. As a side issue (given it has been used as an argument), media outlets (otherwise reputable on other issues) without verified, independent information can't be used to validate claims either, as western ones have historically had a bias one way, while middle eastern ones have had an opposing slant; what's been new about this current episode of the conflict is more of the masses are not being taken in either way, thus have a more independent/unhindered view of what is happening. Messi R9 R10 CR7 Thiago LFC (talk) 01:12, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option B I think it is pretty clear that sexual assault and rape occurred during the initial attack, which is unsurprising since that's how most wars seem to go. What is unclear is the extent of the assaults, which is why most RS still include the Hamas denial; until this is clearer, the Hamas denial of its armed forces not being responsible should also be mentioned.
• Option A. A denial is undue weight for the lede; reliable sources, such as thus extensive NYT report only mention the denials in passing and afford no credulity to them or detailed coverage. Similarly, it would be undue to exclude the tapes from the lede; they are very widely covered and the extent of said coverage is only increasing. BilledMammal (talk) 23:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Option A Yes as the October 7 attack was the core event starting the war, and the brutality of it has been very widely reported so we should report what reliable sources state. The Hamas denial isn't relevant per the aforementioned WP:MANDY. It's also very important to state the course of events as a fact in wiki-voice- often in these articles editors have been adding wording such as "Israel reports that Hamas carried out sexual assaults occurred on October 7" rather than the direct factual wording of "Hamas carried out sexual assaults on October 7". Reliable sources are very clear that the mass sexual assaults did unfortunately happen and the wording needs to reflect this. Chessrat ^{(talk, contributions)} 14:20, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C. The lead is overdetailed in many places. The article does not explain whether or how the scale of the sexual violence during the October 7 attack factors into Israel's decision-making. Senorangel (talk) 03:57, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option C or B, I wholly endorse arguments of Messi R9 R10 CR7 Thiago LFC and WillowCity. Sexual violence - and particularly organised, weaponised, sexual violence - was a notable feature of the Bosnian war, particularly against Bosniak women, but it isn't mentioned in the lead, nor was the scale of its occurence reliably established at the time. At the present moment, the scale and extent of sexual violence on October 7th is unknown - and largely unknowable - and information about it has been highly weaponised, despite little coming from competent forensic authorities. Editors here are tending to argue that because some 'horror stories' are probably true, then all must be true. Two sad facts are that sexual violence is a normal feature of most wars and that weaponising of atrocity stories is nearly as common. Pincrete (talk) 13:41, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Option A So many words here for the obvious thing: the evidence is very precise. Legitimizing the denial of the claims of sexual violence of women in this context is against any liberal and feminist thought. The only way to include claims of denial can be in the context of bashing those who deny - similar to mentioning Holocaust denial. Agmonsnir (talk) 18:09, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

See, WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. Wikipedia is not here to uphold liberal and feminist thought. (For the record, I hold both liberalism and feminism as noble causes). VR _talk 04:05, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A this best represents the current reliable sources about the brutal attacks. Nemov (talk) 18:57, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• Option A per Marokwitz. The topic is widely covered by mainstream media, including the thorough examination of The New York Times published lately. It is one of the major controversies related to the attack, and as such it should be mentioned in the lead per WP:LEDE. Hamas denial, as suggested in Option B, is not helpful here, and may be considered fringe view regarding the vast coverage of the sexual violence by so many reliable sources. Noon (talk) 22:23, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
• Option A. It would be a gross failure of WP:NPOV not to include the sexual violence in. Based on the WP:RS it is very clear that the sexual violence isn't some isolated actions but it's clear that it's very related to the conflict at hand. If the RFC is made in October, there are no clear references about rapes, but at this moment we have seen multiple references about the sexual violence - and we can't ignore it. The fact that Hamas saying that "it didn't happen" shouldn't stop us from taking the information from the reliable sources - where all sources agree that it happened. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 12:50, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A Drsruli (talk) 13:33, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A with great obviousness. We do not need the plaintive, WP:MANDYish denials of Hamas, a terrorist organization, over what they did or did not do. A terrorist organization is not a reliable source even for itself. We go by what actual sources say about them. Zaathras (talk) 14:40, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Zaathras very good point. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 20:20, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

• Leaning option C, oppose option B: This article is about the whole war, and there is a different article for the events of 7 October. It is proper that the lead of the latter should include sexual violence (it does currently). It is also proper that the section of this article on 7 October includes it (it does currently). But I don't think it needs to be in the lead. If it is in the lead, however, there's no reason to create false balance by including a denial by the perpetrators (per WP:MANDY). Although I don't think it should go in the lead, many of the option C arguments above proceed from the conviction that sexual violence didn't happen, which is a deeply problematic assumption given the clear weight of evidence, and I would hope that arguments for C based on that logic be discounted by any closer. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:58, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A with a caveat. The lead has a serious problem: it omits even mentioning the atrocities by Hamas in Israel, which were the reason and the casus belli for the war. It was not merely a "surprise attack" as framed in the lead. That should be mentioned in one-two phrases, which would also include the mentioning of sexual crimes by Hamas as the key element of the atrocities. Option "B" is not viable because the denial by Hamas belongs to WP:FRINGE. My very best wishes (talk) 16:12, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option A. This is the reason the war started. Calling it a "surprise attack" is whitewashing. It was one event but without it, the war wouldn't have happened. More specifically, most news articles cover the violent rapes as one of the causative factors. The reliable sources presented here overwhelmingly consider the rapes to a) be important and b) have happened. Denying this would be like including Holocaust denial in the lede to the article on World War 2, like "millions allegedly died in genocides". Comments like Nishidani's boil down to "well reliable sources say that there were mass rapes but I don't think their standard of evidence was high enough". That's not how Wikipedia operates, we are supposed to summarize the consensus of reliable sources and not inject our own burdens of evidence to say the New York Times/BBC/The Guardian didn't do a good enough job. This argument that there's not enough evidence to make these claims would only hold if reliable sources agree that there is not enough evidence. Nableezy touches upon this by citing a single USA Today article that doesn't endorse the Israeli claims (but doesn't deny them either), but Drsmoo, Marokwitz, and Ficaia provide several other sources that do agree that Israelis were raped by Palestinians/Hamas. Nableezy also brings up various counts of news articles to try to rank the importance of various issues. This is the Wikipedia:Search engine test. We don't know how many of those news sources are reliable, the engine miscounts a lot, etc etc. It's not as useful evidence as searching reliable sources such as the NY Times or the BBC which heavily cover the rapes. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 21:12, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C: This is primarily an Israel claim with no evidence (admitted by Israeli press) like many other extraordinary claims they routinely make. It is due in the article, but it is hardly a notable enough aspect of the conflict to be included in the lede. MarioGom (talk) 13:10, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

  Hmm, no. [16] [17] Marokwitz (talk) 19:40, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: I don't have a view on the best option, partly because the lead will hopefully evolve organically overtime per MOS:LEAD, so I'm not sure an RfC matters much in practice at this stage. But I wanted to say something about the various arguments being used to exclude a Hamas denial. I don't find them very compelling. Setting aside the obligation to follow RS and the fact that many include the denial, because that is what RS do, I wonder whether the MANDY, FALSEBALANCE, UNDUE, NPOV etc arguments might be missing the point a bit. This is just an encyclopedia after all and the lead is meant to summarize and inform. If there is reporting by RS that X's actions likely included instances of Y, and we say that, the fact that X denies it rather than says nothing is in itself informative. Including it tells the reader something about X. Is this case substantially different from something like the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal lead? Sean.hoyland - talk 07:13, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option A per above, particularly the first reply. JM (talk) 03:03, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C As pointed out by other edtiors, it was much smaller than the other atrocities and grievances. It was not fully discovered until Israeli retaliation had already started, so it cannot be a reason for the retaliation. A few sentences would be completely UNDUE for the lead. If we must mention it, at most only add the words "sexual violence" to an existing sentence. CurryCity (talk) 11:11, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussion 2

Regarding the completely made up claim that the denials are not taken seriously and are themselves widely condemned and the press initially (but now much less frequently} mentions Hamas' denials, sources to this day include that Hamas denies the accusations of rape, the overwhelming majority of sources that refer to any claims of rape or sexual assault include the denial. The most recent one I am aware of is USA Today writing about the Israeli military saying they know hostages were raped includes the denial. Such a series of unsubstantiated assertions as made in that comment should have evidence provided for it or it should not be taken seriously at all. nableezy - 16:46, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes and the denial is in the body of the article. No one is arguing that the denial should not be in the body of the article, only not in the lead. Every single thing in the lead that is adverse to Israel, without exception, has drawn a response from Israel or a denial. But such denials are not mentioned. Putting in the Hamas denial, and only the Hamas denial, would be unbalanced and not neutral. Coretheapple (talk) 17:54, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

What accusation by Hamas against Israel is included without a response? nableezy - 17:56, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Nableezy, you keep acting like Hamas and Israel deserve to be treated as 50 50 equal players on every question, and what we do for one hand we must do equally for others. It's not a good model for NPOV or life or justice. Sometimes, one side does something completely out of proportion to what ever happened before. Hamas is a small group with a small quasi-territory that launched an attack against significant odds, alone, with no support, and is basically an international pariah due to the atrocities during that attack, and we don't need to act like it's possible that they didn't happen or that they weren't terrible, or that whatever denials issued by Hamas are credible, unless some credible academic or journalistic source does so. We also shouldn't act like those events didn't precipitate this entire war.

Israel is a large, well-armed, wealthy and powerful state backed by the US, UK, France, Australia, and basically every Western and English speaking powerful country, under quite a bit of scrutiny and being accused of all manner of things from apartheid to genocide, and we should absolutely treat those as complex both-sides type issues inasmuch as there are people debating them who are reliable (though, in my view, the genocide allegation goes too far and is inaccurate). On some issues yes, there's a complex narrative and we must balance the views of Palestinians versus Israelis, each group has separate factions, such as Fatah, or the different Israeli groups that range from Meretz and Labour to Likud to Blue&White to Shas and Yisrael Beteinu. And no, there are not credible allegations that Israelis are raping Palestinians, not like there are of Hamas. So we don't need to act like these things are the same. The victims in the Hamas attack were not soldiers, they were peaceful civilians and in many cases left peace activists. So not every atrocity needs a response. We should simply cover them as the majority of sources do, and not try to both-sides every issue.

The point is to describe in the lead what the majority of yes, Western, yes, English-speaking, sources think are the most pertinent issues. Yes, there have been widespread calls for a ceasefire and widespread reports of indiscriminate civilian deaths in Gaza. We do not try to include Israeli denials of that or whatever weak PR Israeli spokespeople put out about it trying to spin or downplay those massive civilian deaths. Because that wouldn't be credible, and it's not edifying. Andre🚐 09:18, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

As much Hamas is a small group with limited international support, Israel is also a small country with international pariah status by some metrics. What else would one call UN general assembly votes where all but three other countries agree with their position? Both entities have credibility that is in the dirt on the global stage due to the unacceptable aspects of their conduct, and the relative weight and/or credibility of either in any conflict scenario is of equally little weight relative to impartial and independent secondary, reliable sources. Iskandar323 (talk) 02:02, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

You're mostly right except for matters of perspective and a few important aspects that are distorting. Israel is a small country geographically, worldwide. But relative to Gaza, it's quite large. About 60 times as large by land area, a little under 5x as large by population. More importantly, their relative power dynamics. And the 3 other countries are pretty large in terms of that. As far as the UN votes, you're right. Most vote for a ceasefire or to condemn Israeli settlements. My point was about the relative power dynamics at play. Israel is a state and it has to abide by things that states have. Hamas, not so much. Andre🚐 02:11, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

NPOV requires that we feature all significant views; scaling said significance is a trickier matter. My point was that within the context of their globally parochial conflict, the relative weight of Israel/Hamas pales alongside their equal partiality as combatants, and the primary views of either are little more than POV commentary short of validation by independent, secondary analysis. Iskandar323 (talk) 02:23, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

'The victims in the Hamas attack were not soldiers, they were peaceful civilians and in many cases left peace activists.' Sure, so Hamas went and raped peace activists all along the border.

To repeat, we are caught up in the furor of reports from 7-8 Oct of rape, mutilation, beheadings, burning babies. rare later reports tell us forensic doctors and police are sifting through these reports meticulously and exhaustively, but that so far we have no statistical evidence other than an indication from interviews with hostages who have been returned that slightly under 10% reported experiencing some form of sexual molestation.

This is what Hadas Ziv, policy and ethics director for Physicians for Human Rights–Israel stated 10 days ago, guardedly>-

“What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times. . .What we don’t know and what the police are investigating is whether it was ordered to be done and whether it was systematic.” Sam Mednick New signs emerge of ‘widespread’ sexual crimes by Hamas, as Netanyahu alleges global indifference Associated Press 15 December 2023

That means that we have some sparse facts of sexual violence befalling a number of the several hundred civilians, and extensive allegations that this was systematic and specific to Hamas policy. Not enough for the lead, as yet.Nishidani (talk) 11:54, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes, one side does something completely out of proportion to what ever happened before. you mean like displace 2 million people, kill 20,000 in 10 weeks, starve a civilian population? And when you think something goes to far and is innaccurate that means we shouldn’t include it? Genocide accusations have a ton more coverage than rape accusations, but you think one of those should be included unanswered and the other just brushed aside? Oh, thanks for that bit of wisdom then. nableezy - 12:27, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, no. That's happened before, and worse things have happened before. In fact actual genocide has happened before, with 6 million Jews exterminated by Nazis, many LGBT and Romani, etc., or other documented genocides such as the Armenians. As far as the genocide accusations they certainly don't have more coverage or at least not by much, and I haven't seen that source survey. There's also a legal definition of genocide not to mention it's a crime, and we have special treatment for crimes of living people. So, no, it's not the same, it's a false equivalency. The rapes have documentary and photographic evidence. Andre🚐 18:41, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

That happened in Gaza? Was it Hamas? As far as source survey: 25k results for "genocide" "gaza" "israel" "2023" vs 14,800 for "rape" "hamas". Do you hear yourself on not to mention it's a crime, and we have special treatment for crimes of living people. You are saying we cannot accuse Israel of a crime (genocide) because of living people and special rules, but we can accuse Hamas of a crime (rape) because reasons? nableezy - 19:52, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Because that event has been proven shown more likely true than not"[added as "proven" was inexact/incorrect legallyAndre🚐] by eyewitnesses, documentary evidence, video footage, photographs, and testimony from the witnesses, showing that the event occurred. So to act like it's still in doubt or deny it happened or downplay it is problematic. Whereas genocide has a number of legal elements that haven't been shown. Apartheid, as I said, is defensible, and arguable, and I might agree that it exists in Israel. The West Bank settlers are also violating international law and have been guilty of several illegal and atrocious things. We don't need to dance around them. If there's clear evidence and nobody can really dispute it except for a basic denial, it should be treated as more likely than not if that's what the sources support. Of course, WP:BLPCRIME and WP:NPOV demand balance, but balance isn't, "include the denial of everything that someone/group is accused of." Balance means reading all the sources, balance them out, and distill the mainstream positions in a proportionately accurate way. If 75% or 95% of sources agree and you discount the remaining 5 or 25% for some reason (such as WP:MANDY or a contradiction or the fact that the claimant is a terrorist group with poor credibility on that particular point), that's how I balance it out. WP:FRINGE and WP:BALASP exist to avoid giving too much platforming to ideas that are not mainstream. The idea that the rapes didn't occur is exactly that kind of flat-eartherism in my view. Whether genocide is occurring is debatable at best, but I'd say that the elements aren't there. We don't need to debate that though, because it's a larger topic and doesn't belong on this page. Andre🚐 20:35, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Im sorry, but youre just making things upexaggerating the evidence and the certainty of the sources. There is no video footage or photographs or documentary evidence, there are eyewitness accounts and there are denials. You can believe the same organizations that made up a baby in the oven or 40 beheaded babies if you want, but please dont misrepresent what the evidence is here. There are no videos, that is not true. And 75-95% of sources do not agree that this happened. Because they dont say it in their own words that it happened, they say who has said it happened and what evidence they have presented for it. They also say who has said it did not happen. You can and others can misrepresent what the sources actually say, but Ive read them and I dont need to just pretend that this misrepresentation is accurate at all. You can say Hamas is a terrorist group with poor credibility, and my response is Israel as a state is an established liar, over decades and in this conflict, and if you want to believe everything they say you can do that, but I dont think that is appropriate for a serious source to accept as fact the claims of a party engaged in active armed conflict and who has provably lied over and over again. And neither do the sources who relay Israeli accusations as Israeli accusations. nableezy - 23:02, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

I've not misrepresented sources. In one photo, a burned body appears to project anguish. In another, a woman lies naked from the waist down, her underwear hanging from her leg. In interviews, first responders haltingly describe finding naked female corpses tied to beds and survivors recount witnessing a gang rape at the music festival...Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre.[18] Andre🚐 23:06, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, ZAKA, an organization that has been repeatedly found to have manufactured acts of barbarism like burning a baby to death in an oven, has made these reports. Yes, there are eyewitnesses saying they saw rapes. There are no videos of sexual assault or rape, and no photographs of sexual assault or rape. Your own source repeatedly attributes the accusations to Israeli military and government sources. nableezy - 23:10, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

They're photos which are evidence of rape. They're videos of young women being kidnapped, and videos showing the aftermath of rape. Arabic documents telling Hamas how to say "take off my pants." You can argue whether this evidence was "made up" or "manufactured" but the fact remains that you claimed the evidence didn't exist, and that I made it up, which is incivil. No, I read it in NBC News, an apparently reliable source that is not reliable enough for you. Andre🚐 23:12, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, Im going to believe the military that presented a calendar as a terrorist schedule on what they found. Yes you absolutely made up that there has been proven by eyewitnesses, documentary evidence, video footage, photographs, and testimony from the witnesses, showing that the event occurred. and despite your asking an admin to chastise me for it I have no problem repeating that. There is no video or photographic evidence that has proven rape occured. And no reliable source makes such a claim. They have said that there is a body of evidence that increasingly suggests that it did happen. You are the one claiming that this has been proven by video, and that is false. nableezy - 23:16, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Fine, substitute the word proven with "substantiated to show it is more likely than not," it's still incivil to say I made it up. You can quibble on the semantics but that's not going to take away the civility violation. You can believe it was all made up. That's your prerogative. But you can't tell me that I am making it up. Andre🚐 23:19, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

If you have to substitute something that completely transforms your statement to resemble the truth then your original statement was not true. If you feel I’ve been uncivil you can discuss that on my talk page or report it. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the article so why don’t we focus on the article here? nableezy - 23:30, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

"There is no video or photographic evidence that has proven rape occured. And no reliable source makes such a claim" - Nableezy

Andre provided you a reliable source saying that they directly saw and reviewed photographic evidence that rape occurred. NBC News is on the reliable source list, so it's a reliable source. They said they saw photographs of naked bodies strongly implying sexual violence happened. They did in fact make such a claim. Unless you're going to try to say that NBC is not a reliable source then what you've said here is obviously false.

"Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre." - NBC news.

I'd just like to hear some type of policy based justification as to why we should ignore this. Do you have an argument from WP:RS or WP:NPOV? If you're going to say that 75-90% of sources conclude that rape did not occur (or more weakly, that they don't conclude that it did occur), then where is your list of sources that you looked at to come to that conclusion? I'm just kind of hesitant to take that at face value given the quote I started this post with. Chuckstablers (talk) 23:55, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

What they say is that this suggests rapes occured, not that it proved it. And there is no video. And no, I have not said sources conclude rapes did not occur, I say they have not yet concluded rapes did occur. And the sources are those like NBC who are still reporting it as an accusation, not a proven fact. nableezy - 23:57, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

There is video evidence; to be clear there is not video evidence of an in-action rape. There is video of young women being kidnapped, such as kidnapping of Noa Argamani. There is video of the interviews as well. See the BBC[19] Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim. Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers. Videos filmed by Hamas include footage of one woman, handcuffed and taken hostage with cuts to her arms and a large patch of blood staining the seat of her trousers. In others, women carried away by the fighters appear to be naked or semi-clothed. Multiple photographs from the sites after the attack show the bodies of women naked from the waist down, or with their underwear ripped to one side, legs splayed, with signs of trauma to their genitals and legs. Andre🚐 00:02, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Sure, there are videos of violence against women, and there are videos of testimonies. That is not video proving rape. This is getting in to the weeds a bit, suffice it to say I do not think there is no evidence, I objected to the claim that the sources say the evidence proves anything, or that there are videos proving it. As far as the interrogations, what NBC says is NBC News could not independently verify the authenticity of the interrogation videos released by Israeli officials. Officials declined to provide unedited versions of the interrogations. nableezy - 00:09, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

"There is no video or photographic evidence that has proven rape occured" is what you said, not "There is no video evidence that has proven rape occured". Do you consider photos of naked bodies of Israeli's killed by Hamas militants proof that they were raped? I'm not sure why Hamas would be undressing women them after killing them without sexually assaulting them, but if you have some theory on that I'd be happy to hear it.

If you could, just let me know what your standard of proof for inclusion here would be. What exactly would you need to see, specifically, from a reliable source before you'd be fine including a brief mention in the lede of what seems to be a prominent topic in the reliable sources about this war? Chuckstablers (talk) 00:40, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Reliable sources saying such and such video proves rape occurred. The same standard for all statements of fact on Wikipedia. nableezy - 01:15, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

If it's enough evidence to convict somebody in most Western countries, we can mention it in the lead. Of course Hamas's denial should be mentioned in the body of the article, but it is undue in the lead. Dovidroth (talk) 08:32, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Reliable sources concluding something occurred is the bare minimum requirement for saying something occurred. If you think that it's enough evidence to convict somebody in most Western countries removes that requirement then you should re-read WP:V. nableezy - 14:35, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

There are conflicting reports of videos existing. The one report that I personally somewhat trust (wouldn't count for wiki, just someone who claims they saw the early videos) describes "a German woman" at the music event. It described something disrespectful, but not a rape. A lot of videos have been described but never surfaced, and the stories have been distorted in repeated retellings, because most people do not want to watch that stuff. If Israel know of any video evidence they need to give it to an expert third party who investigates war crimes, not just describe it in the media. Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

As has been mentioned, there are reliable sources stating that these rapes occurred. 14:37, 25 December 2023 (UTC) Dovidroth (talk) 14:37, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Can you give them as specific citations please, ping me? Like is being being said below I've mostly heard it as "Israel says". The day became a violent mess, so all types of violence seem possible, but all the specific evidence I've seen is weak or biased. Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

No, they report that Israel has said this and that eyewitness accounts have said this. They have not concluded that they have occurred. Attributing accusations and denials is not concluding the veracity of either. nableezy - 14:50, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

And to add to the above, weighing the evidence for yourself and then engaging in independent fact-finding is WP:SYNTH. WillowCity^(talk) 15:39, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

@WillowCity: That is not what is meant by WP:SYNTH. Please review the policy detail at that link. Also, as stated on WP:TPG, There is reasonable allowance for speculation, suggestion, and personal knowledge on talk pages, with a view to prompting further investigation P.S. I love your user name. SPECIFICO talk 16:19, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

I have reviewed the policy on several occasions, and I would refer to the second sentence: do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. In this case, combining summaries of Israel's evidence from The Guardian (and/or other sources) to reach the definitive conclusion, and state in wikivoice, that sexual violence occurred. According to Dovidroth, RS are stating that these rapes occurred; but the sources, to my knowledge, have not said so definitively; they attribute the evidence to sources within Israel and note that the claim is denied by Hamas.

As well, I certainly do not dispute that users are allowed to state their belief regarding what occurred, but our individual beliefs (as legitimately expressed on a talk page) do not satisfy WP:V and WP:RS such that they should be included in a given article. (Also: thank you for the compliment!!) WillowCity^(talk) 16:32, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

That is absolutely not what SYNTH is. First of all, it doesn't apply to talk page arguments. Secondly, see WP:SYNTHNOT. Synth is not any synthesis, it's only an original novel synthesis that doesn't appear explicitly. Andre🚐 22:02, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

(1) SYNTHNOT is an essay, not a core policy; (2) I’m saying that it would be SYNTH if it appeared in the article, which is the issue here and why it’s being discussed on a talk page at all; (3) see above, using an article’s discussion of the evidence to state, in wikivoice, that sexual assault did occur is absolutely synth, because it’s an original novel synthesis that doesn’t appear explicitly. It would be like if I cited a source that said “experts allege that Israel’s prosecution of the war satisfies the legal definition of genocide” based on XYZ evidence, to state, in wikivoice, that Israel is committing genocide. That would be taking the source’s content a step further than the source itself is willing to go, i.e., original research/synthesis. WillowCity^(talk) 23:01, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

That's not the topic of the RFC. The RFC is should there be a few sentences, with or without denial, explaining the sexual violence. The exact language should hew closely to the sources, not synthetically, but exactly as framed in the reliable sources, with attribution as attribute. Andre🚐 23:04, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

If we're hewing closely to RS, and discussing the issue exactly as framed by them, then Option A should be written off, because RS overwhelmingly if not exclusively refer to the denial. It is also unclear from the wording of the RfC whether Option A would mean stating the allegations as fact; some !voters seem to be suggesting we should, and I am explaining why that would be synthesis. WillowCity^(talk) 23:25, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

The RFC doesn't prescribe a specific wording. No RFC can obviate the need to abide by V, RS, SYNTH, etc., so regardless of what comes out, we'll need to make sure that the wording in the article is properly couched and qualified to be accurate to the sources - the RFC doesn't touch on that. If Option A succeeds, the statements will be included without denials, but they will still need to hew closely to the original source. Option B will include the denial, Option C will exclude altogether. Sounds like you might be leaning Option B, which to me isn't a bad outcome, but I can't make your !votes for you. Andre🚐 23:29, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing that up. Just for the avoidance of any doubt, my !vote remains Option C, as a matter of WP:DUE and WP:BALASP. WillowCity^(talk) 23:37, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

"Reliable sources saying such and such video proves rape occurred. The same standard for all statements of fact on Wikipedia" - @Nableezy

I get where you're coming from, and I can understand where some your frustration here after fully reading a lot of the talk page.

I might be misreading the room here (chime in if you think I am), but I don't think anybody is arguing for including a "statement of fact"? I'm reading the options as adding something the allegations of rape by Hamas militants, as it is a prominently discussed topic in the sources currently. If we're going to make a statement of fact that "sexual violence was committed by members of Hamas", then we'd need reliable sources saying definitively that sexual violence was committed, on that I 100% agree with you.

If you'd argue that we need sources definitively saying that rape occurred to include something like "evidence/allegations of sexual violence by hamas militants, which hamas denies" (except not so poorly worded), then you'd also have to argue that we need RS's definitively saying that "Israel committed X war crime" everytime we say "Israel has been accused of *INSERT WAR CRIME HERE*". I don't think you'd argue for that right?

Just one final thing; I also don't think that to make a statement of fact we would require video evidence, or any evidence in particular from the sources. If a plurality of major reliable sources say that rape occurred definitively, then we could say that as a statement of fact. That seems to be the position clearly endorsed by WP:NPOV; we "represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources". If an overwhelming majority of sources said that rape occurred, then it'd be fine per NPOV to just say that rape occurred as a factual statement. We wouldn't start analyzing the validity of their conclusions; given how divided editors are here on their views doing that would kind of just invite us to throw out each other's sources everytime and just start nitpicking them. Those are basically my thoughts here; I think I've said all that I really have to say and am going to step back from this conversation. It's getting unreadable as is. Chuckstablers (talk) 19:01, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes if most sources agree rapes occurred then yes our article should say that too. I don’t think most sources have concluded that though, they still say things like evidence suggests. And yes, the same is true for war crimes. I dont think I, or anybody else, has inserted "Israel indiscriminately bombed civilians" or "Israel performed summary executions" or "Israel is actively starving a civilian population" as a fact either. nableezy - 21:57, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

"I dont think I, or anybody else, has inserted "Israel indiscriminately bombed civilians" or "Israel performed summary executions" or "Israel is actively starving a civilian population" as a fact either."

I think you missed my point there. I'm referring to this in the lede: "leading to accusations that Israel was using starvation as a weapon and forcing Gazans to drink contaminated, salty water." We don't require the majority of sources saying that "We've proved that Israel used starvation as a weapon" to include that. We just need sources discussing the accusations. Similarily, we wouldn't need a source saying "We've proved that Hamas militants raped Israeli women during the attack" to say "There have been accusations of rape by Israel, denied by Hamas" or something to that effect.

"Yes if most sources agree rapes occurred then yes our article should say that too. I don’t think most sources have concluded that though, they still say things like evidence suggests."

My final paragraph was more just trying to make my position clear that we wouldn't need the sources to provide or discuss any evidence in particular, as long as they say it occurred we can say it occurred. If an RS said it occurred solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony that they reviewed, then we could say it occurred. I took issue with your statement that you'd need a source saying there was video that proved it, as that isn't really needed per NPOV. Just explaining what my last paragraph was actually a response to. Chuckstablers (talk) 23:30, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree with most of that, the issues I have here are twofold. A, I dont think rapes are discussed as a topic of this war to such an extent that it merits being included in the lead. It does absolutely merit inclusion in our article on the 7 October attacks, as that has been a prominent and noteworthy controversy about those attacks and per NPOV and LEAD it belongs in the lead of that article. But here, I dont think it has the weight. Second, I think when sources attribute an accusation and include a denial we have to follow both parts of that. Your beef with my comment was about my responding to a claim that video has proven rapes occurred. I was challenging that here, because that is not true. I was not saying that was required to reach a conclusion in our article if anything happened, only for the conclusion that rapes have proven it. Because that is what was being offered as justification for including it without a denial. And that remains untrue. nableezy - 23:39, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

"I dont think rapes are discussed as a topic of this war to such an extent that it merits being included in the lead. It does absolutely merit inclusion in our article on the 7 October attacks, as that has been a prominent and noteworthy controversy about those attacks and per NPOV and LEAD it belongs in the lead of that article."

I get where you're coming from there Nableezy, I'm kind of leaning towards the side of it being a prominent enough controversy in the war in general for it to merit a very brief inclusion (with the denial) not exceeding a sentence in the second paragraph? The one that starts with "The war began"? I certainly don't think it deserves several sentences on it, that would be undue.

The main reason that I currently think it deserves a sentence is that we mention the water topic in the third paragraph ("leading to accusations that Israel was using starvation as a weapon and forcing Gazans to drink contaminated, salty water."), and that controversy has been discussed less in the RS's than the rape allegations (just doing a google search I see far less RS's discussing it than I do the rape allegations).

So if the articles "prominence of a controversy" threshold allows that controversy (about accusations of Israel using hunger/water as a weapon) in the lede (per the MOS, lede should summarize prominent controversies), then shouldn't it also allow a more prominent (in terms of how often it comes up in the RS's) controversy in the lede?

That's kinda where my heads at right now.

"I think when sources attribute an accusation and include a denial we have to follow both parts of that. "

Strongly agree.

"I was not saying that was required to reach a conclusion in our article if anything happened, only for the conclusion that rapes have proven it."

Thanks for the clarification, glad we can agree on that. Chuckstablers (talk) 00:37, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Also, FWIW, someone has tried to insert those statements about the summary executions into the article several times. Andre🚐 23:39, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

No, they inserted that Israel was said to have done such things and eyewitness accounts said such things, and even that was removed despite the OHCHR also documenting the killings. They did not include that it happened as a fact in our narrative voice. nableezy - 23:44, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, to be clear, you are correct, and my prior message should have explained it uses the word "allegedly," (MOS:ALLEGED), and "reportedly," and ascribes it to both a confirmation on an official Twitter account, and to witness accounts circulated by media. It was removed with a rationale stated of NOTNEWS, as it's quite thinly sourced to a recent AJ piece and a Democracy Now piece, aside from the SELFPUB/PRIMARY tweet. So, I personally agree with the removal, and you are correct it was not as a fact in wikivoice, and I wasn't trying to lazily imply that it was. But does it have WEIGHT - I say no. Andre🚐 23:54, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Fortunately, since we’re not a court of law, we don’t have to weigh circumstantial evidence and determine whether it definitively supports the inference Israel wants us to draw. I’ve said above, the opinions of individual editors do not matter, it matters what sources are reporting, which is that (1) Israel and Israeli sources have made allegations (2) Hamas denies the allegations and (3) Israel has produced evidence that they view as supportive of their position. I’m not aware of any independent, external investigation confirming Israel’s view of events as fact. More importantly, I'm not aware of a preponderance of independent RS treating them as fact or omitting the denials. And whether or not it happened (which is not the subject of this RfC) none of this addresses what is really the core question: whether the sexual violence claims are necessary to understand (and specifically, to summarize) the entire war. This issue didn’t come to international attention until earlier this month, and RS prevailingly discuss it in relation to the October 7 attacks, not in relation to the war as a whole. WillowCity^(talk) 01:43, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• To address the argument that we should include these claims because the October 7 invasion was “ferocious” or “shocking” or “traumatic”: our purpose here is not to validate trauma. We’re here to discuss a war. The argument that sexual violence is necessary to understand Israel’s response is, frankly, bizarre, because (1) Israel was absolutely pummeling Gaza weeks before they investigated these allegations; and (2) sexual violence does not justify unlawful collective punishment. This story is not necessary to understand the war as a whole, it may be necessary to understand October 7 and the ex post facto justifications of Israeli atrocities, but this article is about neither of those things. If we devote a few sentences of the lead to events that have not yet been verified by independent, external sources, we are effectively saying that Israeli allegations are as or more important than the deaths of 8,000 Palestinian children. Child mortality has received vastly more coverage (i.e., 180,000 search results on Google News, if that's a worthwhile metric, compared to the numbers identified by nableezy above for sexual violence), but it receives only a single clause in a single sentence in the fourth paragraph of the lead. This is the very definition of a BALASP issue and the reason BALASP is part of the NPOV policy. WillowCity^(talk) 17:46, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
• "B or C (but)" - If included in the lead (undecided on that) we should probably include the denial, it is a "they said", not a fact, but that's sufficiently communicated by describing it as a "denial". (Out of interest, but I doubt are sources? 3 other groups also claimed the attacks as a whole, did they deny the sexual violence? Were they asked?) The overall level of evidence should also be discussed - I have avoided reading too much graphic detail, but there does seem to be debate - but that belongs in the body. Alternatively, instead of the denial, we could put a general these claims were disputed in the lead with refs citing Hamas and any notable third parties. The body should also contain a fairly strong statement about how (depressingly) this is ubiquitous in war because that points to the plausibility of the claims (verges on synth, but very important context for someone who might be unfamiliar with how horrible war is). Irtapil (talk) 05:42, 26 December 2023 (UTC) edited Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

  If anything, the tragic ubiquity of wartime sexual violence weighs against inclusion in the lead of this article. I would note, to the extent this matters, that including sexual violence so prominently in the lead would depart markedly from most other wiki articles on wars. Sexual violence is not mentioned in the leads of the articles on World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Soviet–Afghan War, the Insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, the First and Second Chechen Wars, the Iraq War, the Libyan civil war (2011), the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the Myanmar civil war (2021–present). Wartime sexual violence is either notably alleged or extensively documented in all of these conflicts. It is tragic in every case, not just when the victims are Israeli or the alleged perpetrators are Palestinian. WillowCity^(talk) 16:13, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

  To reinforce your argument, Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) doesn't mention comfort woman (aka "forced female sex slaves for foreign army", a hotly discussed topic in China and Korea even in 2023) in the lede either. Searching its talk page and archives, no one debated over its inclusion in the lede at all. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 11:26, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Bombing and shooting are ubiquitous, we don't leave those out of the lead? And the comment about ubiquitous hours in the body. Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Because bombing and shooting are fundamental aspects of any military operation. Rape is not. Excesses unfortunately occur in wartime, and rape is one such excess. This does not mean it's significant enough to include in the lead. I also feel that the highly charged, emotive nature of a rape allegation in the lead will undermine WP:NPOV. JDiala (talk) 04:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• B but specify who denied it - Reflecting on my previous answer. Specify which individual(s) denied it, not just "Hamas". The guy who denied it (if we are thinking of the same denial?) was in Qatar when it happened. We shouldn't be talking about Hamas as if it is a single individual or a hive-mind. If more than one person denied it then specify as succinctly as possible "Hamas leaders" or "spokespersons outside Gaza", etc. The denial is relevant to whether it was part of the plan, but says very little about whether it happened. (For the sake of declaring my bias, my personal opinion is that it was not part of any faction's plan, there's negligible evidence of anything systematic, but they created a chaotic situation where some sexual violence, and other horrible things, were almost inevitable. If there's a last minute open-invite for "let's invade Israel" a city of 2 million will have at least one Ted Bundy / Richard Ramirez / Ivan Milat who will join in.) Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
• As I sort of said before, to me there is a lot of ambiguity in WHO did it. There were 4 factions who claimed the attacks, and one of the small secular factions is arguably more violent than Hamas, but no reliable sources say which faction ended up where. There are also controversial reports that some non-militant criminals showed up opportunistically. (Which obscenely are being spun as "it was civilians, so kill all civilians!" would you bomb Milwaukee just because Jeffrey Dahmer was there?) Irtapil (talk) 00:31, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

We get it, you don't agree. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:21, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
It'd be like writing a story about the Iraq and Afghanistan war without mentioning 9/11 or bin Laden. Andre🚐 18:39, 24 December 2023 (UTC) It would be like writing an article about the war in Afghanistan and not including box cutters on one of the planes in the lead of the article on the war. nableezy - 19:50, 24 December 2023 (UTC) That comment, unconstructive for this page, is also deeply offensive to every volunteer editor on this site who cares about gender issues of denial and entitlement. SPECIFICO talk 21:18, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

What is going on above? I used the reply button but my comment has appeared in a boy that is dated for the day before yesterday??? Irtapil (talk) 06:09, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

It's an admin's hat for offtopicking comments. I'll move it. Andre🚐 06:13, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

New investigation and independent confirmation from The NY Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drsmoo (talk • contribs) Revision as of 17:33, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

On the other hand, much of the initial reportage, univeresally circulated for weeks, came from ZAKA. For which see The Short String, ZAKA is not a trustworthy source for allegations of sexual violence on October 7 Mondoweiss 30 December 2023 Nishidani (talk) 05:35, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

That’s an opinion piece in a source considered at RSP as biased and with no consensus on reliability. Plus, I don’t see the relevance to the article from the NYT? BilledMammal (talk) 06:23, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

Mondoweiss is a far-left publication that publishes op-eds saying the attacks were justified. [20] It should not be relied upon for facts. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 05:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

@Chess I must say I was surprised to see the NYT prominently feature ZAKA's Yossi Landau in their piece. To my mind he's completely discredited as a reliable source. He is the "ZAKA volunteer" referred to here in Haaretz (he is mentioned by name in one of the embedded videos) who was responsible for numerous lurid, false reports. See also article by France 24 and others. Andreas JN466 10:03, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

RfC on genocide accusation in lead

Should allegations of genocide be mentioned in the lead? There are four options in my mind.

1. Mention that Israel is accused of genocide.
2. Mention that Hamas is accused of genocide.
3. Mention that Israel and Hamas are both accused of genocide.
4. Make no mention of genocide at all.

JDiala (talk) 08:57, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Survey (genocide accusation in lead)

• Option D - Wiki is supposed to be low key and not a propaganda tool. The claims about genocide are important, but definitely not in the lead of the article. It is about the war, not about political claims. Agmonsnir (talk) 09:16, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C In the case of Israel, accusations of genocide have been serious enough for south Africa to formally accuse Israel of committing genocide by taking the claim to the International Court of Justice.
  1. https://www.reuters.com/world/south-africa-seeks-international-court-justice-genocide-order-against-israel-2023-12-29/
  2. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-01/ty-article/.premium/state-officials-fear-hauge-could-charge-israel-with-genocide-in-gaza/0000018c-c1a9-d3e0-abac-d9a9acd80000

  At the same time, only talking about Israel could spark talks of neutrality. But since there have been just as many people ready to accuse Hamas of genocide, there are rs that talk about this too. One eample is: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-actions-are-war-crimes-could-constitute-genocide-international-law-experts/ Genabab (talk) 10:07, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

  Times of Israel is not a neutral source in this matter (especially that the paper, and its owner, have an overtly right-wing agenda – see the article). — kashmīrī ^TALK 20:04, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option C A significant number of legal scholars and professionals have indicated that what is taking place is genocidal in nature (both for Israel and Hamas). Further, there is an ICJ case brought forth by South Africa against Israel. Lastly, as a point of comparison, note that the term "genocide" is used in the lead to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine article as well. The Israel-Hamas war is significantly worse with respect to genocidal rhetoric used by leaders and the magnitude of the civilian suffering. JDiala (talk) 10:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C: As well as being shown by their actions reliable sources clearly document enough statements of genocidal intent on the part of the Israeli government and call it that. Hamas has shown genocidal intent so it can be included as a counter even if there's no way for it to carry any such intention out, certainly not in the current war. The issue has become widespread and important enough for inclusion in the lead. NadVolum (talk) 10:18, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C per above. Whether or not genocide occurs is a salient feature of war. Parham wiki (talk) 10:49, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C per above. The most sensible option at this stage. Aszx5000 (talk) 12:21, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D - As above; this is not the place for it. Drsruli (talk) 17:02, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D - It's standard for partisans in a totalizing ethnic conflict to hurl the term "genocide" at each other. Doesn't automatically merit inclusion in the lede without e.g. actual criminal prosecutions.

PrimaPrime (talk) 21:25, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Comment: This is incorrect. There is an ongoing case in the ICJ, as the article itself states (in the body). In general, I recommend doing the most basic amount of research on the topic before hurling accusations at others, especially for topics as sensitive as this. JDiala (talk) 06:24, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option D Far from significant enough at this stage to include these dueling charges in the lead. Coretheapple (talk) 22:05, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C people undoubtedly come to Wikipedia looking for clarity/information, and we're well equipped/trusted to provide an accurate summary of the political discussions happening with detailed wikilinks where necessary. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:07, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D I don't think the accusations have been sufficiently noteworthy to justify inclusion in the lede. The accusations would need to feature far more prominently in the reliable sources for me to support adding it to the lede. Especially since we're not including things like the accusations of sexual violence by Hamas against Israeli civilians, which has been discussed far more in the reliable sources than these genocide accusations have (my point being that if that doesn't meet the prominence threshold for inclusion in the lede, then the genocide accusations shouldn't if we're applying the same threshold). Chuckstablers (talk) 19:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Comment This comparison is not quite accurate in my view. The Hamas sexual assault allegation is to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel article what the genocide allegation is to the 2023 Israel-Hamas War article. The sexual assault allegations pertain to only a single day in the conflict (October 7th), and indeed they are mentioned in the lead to the article for that single day in the conflict. The relevance of the sexual assault allegation to the war in general (which has lasted for 3 months now) is less clear. However, the genocide allegation does in fact pertain to the entire war. JDiala (talk) 06:37, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A. Extremely well sourced, including legal positions of South Africa and a number of respected international organisations. On the other hand, genocide accusations against Hamas are not widely circulated outside of Israeli government mouthpieces – unlike with regard to Israeli policies, no expert international sources describe Hamas as carrying out a genocide of Jews. — kashmīrī ^TALK 20:00, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option A. Not only is there the recent legal application by South Africa, but so have UN experts, legal experts, Palestinian human rights organizations, prominent Israelis, scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies, and genocide scholars, to name a few. I'd say that's enough for inclusion. In fact, some information could be copied over from the Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza into this page and placed in the lead. It would be relatively easy to do.Historyday01 (talk) 14:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D is my personal preference. There are accusations against both Israel and Hamas [21]. My personal preference is not to mention it in the lede. Hamas might have had a genocidal intent but killing one thousand people out of several million is not a genocide. Likewise, Israel might have considered an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, but it doesn't seem to be likely to happen atm and it's not the same as genocide anyway. I suggest waiting at least a few months until we have something more definite. Alaexis_¿question? 14:29, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option Wikipedia is not a democracy: Lede serves as a summary of the body, including any prominent controversies, per guideline Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section. A vote, or survey, or any other phrasing will not get around this guideline; what is mentioned in body must be mentioned in lede. However, the 7 October genocide section suffers from extreme examples of synth and sources closely related to the subject, in which information is combined to make an argument not necessarily related to the war. While the Israeli campaign genocide section is well-sourced and has an ongoing ICJ court case. The latter claim clearly has more merit and it should not be made equivalent with the former one when these sections are summarized in the lede. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:01, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C or D. A and B are obvious non-starters - read the articles Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza. Both articles have good sources, and both accusations need to be treated the same (although Hamas has explicitly announced their intended genocide beforehand many times and Israel has done no such thing). --Hob Gadling (talk) 16:25, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  Disagree in strongest terms. Israel has been accused of carrying out genocide. Per the linked article, Hamas has been accused of having "genocidal intentions" (John Kirby), "genocidal ideology" (Israeli diplomat), and similar, however no serious source has stated that the 7th October attack was tantamount to genocide. No, the two sides cannot and should not be treated on a par. — kashmīrī ^TALK 20:02, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  Reality check: They have not been accused of having "genocidal intentions", they actually said themselves that they have those intentions. You know, like that Hitler guy of whom people said he did not actually intend to do it? Hamas has little attacking power, of course they cannot actually achieve it - at the moment. But there should be a consensus among non-denialists that the intention is there. --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:37, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

  Read the linked articles first. The survey is about genocide, not about Palestinian politicians chanting "Death to Israel", etc. You'll need extremely strong sourcing to claim that Hamas's policy was to kill every single Israeli. Unlike in case of Israel, which has been accused of indiscriminate killings of Palestinians over years. — kashmīrī ^TALK 00:16, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  kill every single Israeli - somebody just recommended I suggest you first read the legal definition of genocide. Maybe you should apply definitions consistently to both sides. But actually, you are going on the path to extinction [22] , even with context, is not very different from dann würde das Ergebnis nicht die Bolschewisierung der Erde und damit der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa. But all this is off-topic. The point is that both genocide accusations are important enough for the lede. So one of them has a bigger megaphone than the other? So what? --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:27, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Sorry, I don't speak German nor do I intend to learn it. However, politicians can say whatever they want (Israeli politicians have also sometimes called for the extermination of Palestinians). What matters is whether policies leading to this have been developed/enacted. We need evidence of intent beyond political speeches. As far as we know, there have been no policies enacted by Hamas that would aim at the extermination of the Jews; while there's ample evidence that the Israeli policies, over years, have been made with an intention to destroy the Palestinian nation. You will find ample sources in the two articles you linked above. — kashmīrī ^TALK 14:55, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  I !voted, and you disagreed. I said that Hamas actually has genocidal intentions instead of just being accused of them, you disagreed at first, but then, when it became clear that you were wrong, moved the goalposts from intentions to actions. I could point out that "destroying a nation" is what defines anti-Zionism, but this leads nowhere, and I suggest we stop. This is moving towards WP:FORUM, so EOD. --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:29, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A. Israel has been accused of genocide in a damning 84-page filing at the UN's highest court; these types of ICJ proceedings have been instituted quite rarely since the 1948 Convention. This is an extremely notable development in the context of the larger war. In contrast, the October 7 genocide claims have been trotted out by Israel and its ally, the US, as a form of mirror politics which should not be lent any further credence. The disparity in coverage, the disparity in legitimacy, and the WP:FALSEBALANCE issues of this approach should be obvious. WillowCity^(talk) 22:10, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
• it is genocide - I think it would be wrong to say "accusation" because that implies a lack of credibility, but I cannot think of a better word. Possibly just "credible accusation". Irtapil (talk) 20:27, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

  Are you saying that you have sources saying that every Palestinian in the Northern part of Gaza, which is controlled by Israel, is either dead or in extermination camps? Or are you saying that the article should be based on your opinion, in violation of WP:OR? --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:35, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

  I suggest you first read the legal definition of genocide before posting such dumb comments. Obviously, Irtapil did not say so, it's just you using a straw man argument, which amounts to manipulation in a discussion. — kashmīrī ^TALK 00:10, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Be civil Zanahary (talk) 12:43, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Strongly against this proposal. Whether or not an accusation is credible is wholly subjective, and it is not Wikipedia’s place to make that judgment. And if that judgment had been uncontroversially made (lol) by secondary sources, we would have to report that the accusation has been interpreted [by …] to be credible, or something similar: Zanahary (talk) 08:03, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  That is what I meant with my Are you saying comment above - "it is genocide" is classic POV pushing. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:27, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  I think said or stated should be used instead of "accused". So "x, y, and z stated that ..." FunLater (talk) 00:52, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option A Israel is being taken to the International Court of Justice over this and there is the Palestinian genocide accusation documenting these accusations over time (as opposed to the half baked accusations against Hamas which have only appeared as a result of recent events). Selfstudier (talk) 13:16, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Not half-baked at all. We have whole articles on Wikipedia documenting the indiscriminate slaughter and torture-murder of Israeli civilians including children, as well as the numerous statements of genocidal intent, advocacy, and celebration from Hamas. People seem to have forgotten Oct 7 already. JM (talk) 03:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• Option C or D. I agree with Hob Gadling that A and B obviously against the body of the article. A and B would violate WP:LEADFOLLOWSBODY. Nemov (talk) 15:11, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C Notable accusations against both sides. --Andreas JN466 19:18, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
• option D preferred as these accusations are secondary to the conflict and come from others. I would compromise on option C. Any other options (A or B) are showing serious bias. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:53, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D, per Chuckstablers, Hob Gadling, and Graeme Bartlett. BilledMammal (talk) 07:30, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option D for now Too early at the current time. Option C might be worth later, but for now best to wait.3Kingdoms (talk) 14:31, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

But the accusations themselves, credible or not, both already have an impact on the war.

• Option A. With South Africa garnering sufficient support from various countries to file a genocide claim at the ICJ, specifically targeting Israel's conduct during this war, there is simply no reason not to mention the genocide accusation against Israel in the article lead. I also want to address some users here for supporting the rape accusations against Hamas while avoiding the genocide claim against Israel. The latter is evidently more relevant than the former for this article, which focuses on a war spanning more than three months, not the single-day incident which sparked this war. Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 00:37, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C but if is essential to have some sense of scale - a neutrally worded clear comparison - such as total number of deaths in the same sentence, or a prominent mention that only one case was brought to the ICJ. If that doesn't work, then A. Irtapil (talk) 11:37, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• A Mention that Israel is accused of genocide. Abo Yemen✉ 12:00, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• A, with attribution. As in the organizations "X, Y, and Z stated that Israel is commiting a genocide against the Palestinian people. FunLater (talk) 13:51, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Option C Seems to me that A and B are non-starters for Wikipedia, especially given the content of the article. D would be an alternative. Nigej (talk) 12:09, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• C or D for now. Things can change and evolve. Maybe Israel will take Hamas to the ICJ. CurryCity (talk) 11:15, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Blue areas in map do not represent Israeli-controlled areas

Greetings, fellow editors. I'm hoping to open a discussion on whether or not the legend in the map is actually supported by RS. For those who are unaware, the only source for the blue and red areas denoting "control" within the Gaza Strip has been the daily-updated map of Institute for the Study of War since the first days of the Israeli invasion.

The problem lies in the legend on ISW's own map. Rather than "Gaza Strip under Israeli control," its blue areas represent "Reported Israeli Clearing Operations," a term which is explained by this footnote:

ISW-CTP's "Reported Israeli Clearing Operations" layer uses the US military's doctrinal definition of clearing which is an operation that "requires the commander to remove all enemy forces and eliminate organized resistance within an assigned area." Clearing operations frequently take weeks and sometimes months to complete.

My argument is that clearing operations, as defined above, do not equate control, a term which is not used in the source to begin with.

SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 08:12, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@SaintPaulOfTarsus

Good point. Israeli control doesn't make sense for blue given that blue extended way into Southern Israel during the initial attacks and doesn't now.

But does anyone else have a map? Or do you just mean we need to clarify the key? (I'd figured it's an over simplified "one side says" and not pair much attention to it.) Irtapil (talk) 09:09, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Irtapil

All I'm looking for right now are alternative labels to "Gaza Strip under Israeli control," but the question of whether or not we continue using the ISW map as the only source is something that should also be open to discussion. Editors have raised valid concerns here and on the file's talk page at Commons about how ISW's map doesn't seem to account for reported IDF withdrawals from places like Beit Hanoun and areas deep in the heart of Gaza City.

SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 09:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@SaintPaulOfTarsus We should probably remove the map pending more accurate labels. Irtapil (talk) 08:34, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@Irtapil Maybe this calls for an RfC to get input from more editors. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 09:21, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Add United States and United Kingdom with Israel.

Recently the US and UK launched a military operation against the Houthis. What more would it need? They are clearly a part of this war now. Tamjeed Ahmed (talk) 12:59, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/1/12/us-and-uk-launch-strikes-against-houthi-rebels-in-yemen Tamjeed Ahmed (talk) 13:04, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes they should be included, this is direct military involvement supported by the sources. Makeandtoss (talk) 13:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Include, as well as Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.[23] I was against including the US until yesterday. Now the situation has changed. — kashmīrī ^TALK 15:17, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Tamjeed Ahmed @Kashmiri

UK and USA yeah, but the whole list s

seems excessive, there's about 20, most aren't even sending a ship, some aren't even sending men. Threshold for main page should be at least a ship? Iran isn't even on it.

(But maybe I'm biased, I'm Aussie and I want those 11 blokes to come home and stay out of it. Shame us in a tiny footnote at least?)

Irtapil (talk) 08:40, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

IMO, only those countries should appear whose military is actively taking part in the ongoing hostilities. — kashmīrī ^TALK 09:19, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Oppose Much longer discussions than this opposed any third party inclusion. This change cannot be made so early into a new discussion. It is also false to say that U.S. and U.K. are belligerents alongside Israel since they conducted an operation to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. Seems like synthesis to me. Ecrusized (talk) 17:14, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

When you revert next time, please make sure you revert what you are objecting to (the addition of the US and UK), and not indiscriminate reversions of everything.

The infobox clearly separates the US and UK from Israel by saying in Yemen, which Israel hasn't engaged with so far. There is no synthesis. Makeandtoss (talk) 17:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

It's not easy for an editor to check which of your subsequent edits are regarding the dispute when you make 18 changes in an hour. Maybe save the page less often instead of accusing me of indiscriminate reversions. Ecrusized (talk) 17:26, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

The U(K/S) were disrupting a blockade that was explicitly aimed at Israel, and explicitly in support of Palestine. Also, near the start of the war the Houthis boarded the Galaxy Leader flying flags of Yemen and Palestine (a vast improvement on their usual banner). In that hijacking and the current attacks they are not asking for cash like most Red Sea pirates and hijackers, their demand is that Israel stop attacking Gaza and stop blockading Gaza. Irtapil (talk) 10:05, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

@Ecrusized @Makeandtoss

Third column for indirect support? In Yemen is a place not an alliance. Hezbolah are clearly on the same side as Hamas et al. despite location.

The Houthis are explicitly doing it for Palestine.

The effect of the USA thwarting them is to let Israel keep doing what they're doing, but the motive is speculation. Their priorities are broken (protecting economy vs protecting humans in Gaza), but i kind of agree direct support for Israel is ambiguous.

I don't want to set a precedent for "enemy of my enemy" grouping, incase real non-imaginary ISIS show up. (They are everybody's enemy, so … everybody's ally? That will obviously go wrong?)

So, third column for indirect involvement? I think there's a way to add horizontal lines within columns too?

Irtapil (talk) 09:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

This whole argument seems like synthesis to me. Operation Prosperity Guardian has clearly stated that it's goal is to keep maritime traffic open in the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. It has nothing to with those countries militarily supporting Israel in its conflict against Hamas, or the Axis of Resistance. Ecrusized (talk) 09:45, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

the question is becoming trickier. Are the UK and the US neutral? If we take The Law dictionary definition of belligerent "A term used to designate either of two nations which are actually in a state of war with each other, as well as their allies actively cooperating; as distinguished from a nation which takes no part in the war and maintains a strict indifference as between the contending parties, called a “neutral." it is a bit up in the air what "actively cooperating" means, I have to say that I am coming round to the view that the US is doing that.Selfstudier (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

If this literal definition was to be used, then the US has been a belligerent from the moment it brought its warships to the region which was right after the hostilities began. — kashmīrī ^TALK 19:44, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, that seems passive rather than active. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when Blinken sits in at the Israeli war meetings. Selfstudier (talk) 19:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Here's Ralph Nader in late October "Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza".Selfstudier (talk) 20:02, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

...and we should care about his opinion being anything but his personal opinion because? --OuroborosCobra (talk) 04:14, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

@Selfstudier

I agree we should stick to explicit active collaboration.

I think the USA motive is clear, they constantly do farsical games "for freedom of navigation" that are clearly aimed to show antagonism to a rival or support an ally. Usually it's aimed at antagonising China.

BUT', that's still speculation, like I was saying above, I don't want to start a trend of implied support by "enemy of my enemy".

Or when things go comletely to hell we'll end up with an ISIS + Al Qaeda + Palestinian nationalists + who knows side all "on the same side" because they're all attacking Israel.

so at least add another column, or at least a line to show clear separation.

Irtapil (talk) 09:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Include The United States and the United Kingdom are clearly belligerents in the Red Sea Theater of the war. They have engaged in open hosilities with the Houthis. The Houthis have stated the objective of their campaign is to disrupt israeli trade, and that their attacks are directly in support of Hamas as part of the war. Israel has already taken part in combat operations by shooting down Houthi drones and missiles and has deployed a Saar 6 class corvette to oppose the Houthis in the Red Sea.XavierGreen (talk) 18:47, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree there is a larger regional effect here, and it should be added to #Other_confrontations however I would strongly oppose adding it to the Infobox at risk if being WP:UNDUE and cluttering it further. I already see it's a sea (no pun intended) of belligerents when Israel, Hamas and maybe PIJ are the most relevant.

Economically and indirectly militarily course Iran, US, UK are vital.. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 19:09, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@XavierGreen

The Houthis are team Hamas, but the USA are only directly team Israel by supplying bombs to them and lurking in their doom sub. Israel vs Houthis vs USA is three sides. Irtapil (talk) 09:37, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

To avoid confusion, I think it's better that this discussion is moved to the infobox template talk page. Makeandtoss (talk) 19:39, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose for the reasons stated above. The US and UK and specifically acting to protect shipping, not to deal witht the Hamas-Israel issues. Coretheapple (talk) 20:45, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose They are definitely involved, but beligerents in these type article means actually fighting in the action. For instance in Russian invasion of Ukraine we don't have the |US and the UK or China and North Korea or Iran. NadVolum (talk) 21:44, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

The US and the UK are "actually fighting", the US fought a battle against Houthi naval forces on December 31st and then today have directly bombed Houthi forces twice. If shooting and bombing people isn't "actual fighting", then what is? The US, North Koreans, etc. have not directly attacked anyone in Ukraine, that is the major difference.XavierGreen (talk) 02:31, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

The Houthi aren't beligerents in this either any more than Egypt is when it stops arms reaching Hamas. NadVolum (talk) 09:28, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Egypt hasn't engaged in any actual combat, the Houthis have, that is the difference there.XavierGreen (talk) 16:09, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Against ships. One can eiher take the view the ships have nothing to do with the war, or else that they are doing a blockade stopping the means of war. Something I'm sure the UN would approve of if some great power wasn't involved and something Egypt actually does to Hamas. Either way they're not belligerents in the war. NadVolum (talk) 00:06, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose for the reasons stated above. The US and UK and specifically acting to protect shipping, not to deal with the Hamas-Israel issues. Drsruli (talk) 09:12, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose US and UK are not involved in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.  // Timothy :: talk  11:42, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  Why, are the ships attacked by Houthis part of the fighting between Israel and Hamas? This argument makes no sense. @Ecrusized: Makeandtoss (talk) 11:51, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  They are not. Houthi missile and drone launches against Israel are. Ecrusized (talk) 12:05, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Ecrusized: That's not true, the article clearly includes them as part of the war, as seen by this summarization in the body: "Iranian-backed militias attacked American bases in Iraq and Syria, while the United States and United Kingdom engaged in conflict with the Houthi movement in Yemen over its attacks on ships in the Red Sea it claimed were linked to Israel." If Iranian-backed militias attacked American bases and international ships in Red Sea as part of the war, then certainly the "response" is also part of that very same war, or at least connected enough to it to be included together. Makeandtoss (talk) 13:22, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  I don’t know why you are telling me this. I am not responsible for what someone else might have added to Wikipedia. Ecrusized (talk) 13:33, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Not sure why Iran is relevant. Those supplying weapons are not counted as belligerents. If those Iran backed militants have attacked American bases how does that make any of them belligerents in this war? NadVolum (talk) 21:46, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

By the way I'm not saying the US and UK are not dinvolved in the war. They definitely are. Biden in particular has given Israel carte blanche to use the aordinance it has supplied in any way it wants. I'm just saying I don't think they have become active belligerents yet so they can't be put in the infobox. At most they are proxy belligerents like Iran. NadVolum (talk) 10:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose Freedom of navigation actions are routine and the connection to the Israel-Gaza War is tenuous. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:14, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose not seeing any mainstream news talking about the American War or the British war in the Levant. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 07:47, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose seems obvious that US and UK action to protect international trade in the Red Sea has nothing to do with support for Israel and everything to do with simply protecting international trade in the Red Sea. JM (talk) 03:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

NO! Then we'll end up with forked discussions. Irtapil (talk) 09:39, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Requested move 12 January 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved to Israel–Hamas war. There's a clear consensus that moving is needed to fix the year in the title. I see a consensus in favor of Israel–Hamas war over Israel–Hamas war (2023–present). Galobtter (talk) 02:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC) Galobtter (talk) 02:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

---

2023 Israel–Hamas war → Israel–Hamas war (2023–present) – The war has now extended into 2024 for two weeks, so the current article title using only "2023" is contrary to standard naming practice on Wikipedia: we would only use "2023" as the year disambiguation if the war had ended in 2023. The standard policy for disambiguation of multi-year wars is to include the years in parentheses after the war name. Compare with War in Sudan (2023–present), Yemeni civil war (2014–present), etc. For context, there was a recent RM which ended up very complicated thanks to discussing three separate issues at once (whether to change "Israel–Hamas war" to something else, what to change the year disamguator to, and whether year disambiguation is needed at all). It was closed with the result being to retain the "Israel–Hamas war" form of the title but with no consensus as to the other topics, and there is an ongoing unofficial discussion about the title following on from that RM. This RM is intended specifically to fix the incorrect year disambiguation as soon as possible: a clearly incorrect title shouldn't be left in effect long-term on a heavily viewed page. It is intended without prejudice against any other discussions or requested moves such as regarding changing the "Israel–Hamas war" wording. Chessrat ^{(talk, contributions)} 20:33, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Survey (move)

• Support A logical and reasonable proposal. Second choice: Israel–Hamas war (2023–2024). Coretheapple (talk) 20:41, 12 January 2024 (UTC) added second choiceCoretheapple (talk) 15:54, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support For the reasons stated above. I would also support simply naming the article as "Israel-Hamas war" with no year as a description as a second choice. JohnAdams1800 (talk) 02:01, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  @JohnAdams1800

  When I search for sources using "Israel-Hamas war" I get things like the pro Israel lobby group UN Watch, and only a bizarre little assortment of any other resources. Irtapil (talk) 04:48, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• Israel–Hamas war (Without disambiguation): Only name. The article Siege of Mariupol is not called Siege of Mariupol (2022) because of the Battle of Mariupol (1919). Per WP:TITLEDAB, disambiguation is only necessary when there is otherwise an actual conflict in article titles. No such conflict in titles exists. Per WP:CONCISE, concision is preferred over unnecessary precision. not only is there still no other article titled Israel–Hamas war, but even if there was, this article is unequivocally still the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC (Such as Invasion of Poland, Soviet–Afghan War and Russian invasion of Ukraine). Also Israel–Hamas war redirects to this article. Parham wiki (talk) 20:46, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

  but there have been previous wars between Israel and Hamas. Coretheapple (talk) 21:01, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

  It is true, but Poland has been invaded several times, Russia has invaded Ukraine several times, and the Soviet Union has had other military conflicts in Afghanistan, but it did not disambiguate the three articles I gave as an example. Parham wiki (talk) 21:11, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Parham wiki but that is an Israeli propaganda slogan that is not used in most unbiased sources. (Though al Jazeera, who tend to have a pro Palestine stance, seem to be doing some targeted Search engine optimisation aimed at it, because when I search using "Israel-Hamas war" I get 60% Al Jazeera. ) Irtapil (talk) 04:52, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Irtapil The discussion is about disambiguation, not the generic name. Parham wiki (talk) 09:52, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support Parham proposal Israel–Hamas war without disambiguation per the above comment, about the invasion of Poland, Russian invasion of Ukraine and Soviet-Afghan war. Lukt64 (talk) 21:20, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support Israel–Hamas war without disambiguation per WP:COMMONNAME, and particularly because of Parham's comment that Poland has been invaded several times, Russia has invaded Ukraine several times, and the Soviet Union has had other military conflicts in Afghanistan, yet those respective articles do not have a year in front of their article's title. DecafPotato (talk) 21:43, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support - I am becoming more sympathetic to the argument for excluding the year entirely, but in any event we have to deal with the current title becoming factually incorrect. PrimaPrime (talk) 22:20, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

  Agreed. I don’t think including the year is necessary, but at a minimum it should not just be titled 2023. Svenskbygderna (talk) 20:02, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose - The "Israel-Hamas" designation is grossly inappropriate and we should not move the page without fixing that. People looking for sources to write the content are searching using "Israel-Hamas war" and finding a very biased subset of the resources available. e.g. see above re relevance of apartheid. Irtapil (talk) 04:44, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support. I prefer without the disambiguation, per WP:CONCISE and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, but I would also support the proposed as more accurate than the current title. BilledMammal (talk) 04:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support I continue to believe that Israel-Hamas is an unacceptable name for the war and the discussion close was premature. However, I'm fine with deciding the date issue for now, and I also believe that either way there should be the date included. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 05:33, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  I will say that this should not be taken as an endorsement of using the name Israel-Hamas, I do not believe the article should be titled that and believe Israel-Gaza is the only way to avoid a NPOV violation. However, when it comes to the date issue I'm fine with the change on principle. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 22:23, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support, as it's factually no longer 2023, and the war is still going on. XTheBedrockX (talk) 07:00, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose: I would prefer Israel–Gaza war (2023–present) with a separate article titled Spillover of the Israel–Gaza war (2023–present). Prodrummer619 (talk) 09:54, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion is about disambiguation, not the generic name. Parham wiki (talk) 10:10, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

No, the discussion is about whether to rename the article to Israel–Hamas war (2023–present) or to something else. There are no reasons to avoid discussing the larger issues with the article name in this thread. MClay1 (talk) 06:27, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support: move to Israel–Hamas war (without disambiguation) per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:CONCISE and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC.  // Timothy :: talk  10:13, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support this title without disambiguation, there is only one war with this title, unlike for example, Gaza war, noting that the current title is subject of ongoing discussion and without prejudice to any other RM discussing that. Selfstudier (talk) 10:39, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support without disambiguation Yes there are the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israel-Hamas wars, but this is much better known than either one using this name; the others are Israel-Gaza wars. 🐔 Chicdat  ^{Bawk to me!} 12:46, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support without disambiguation – It is concise and identifiable enough without the disambiguation. FunLater (talk) 14:07, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support Support without disambiguation - Being concise is important and upon further research I don't see a need for a date. ~Politicdude (About me, talk, contribs) 20:15, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support with disambiguation, oppose without it. The change is reasonable to reflect that it is now 2024, but I do think that in the long run that we want something to disambiguate from the 2014 conflict and that it will be better to keep this consistent with similar articles. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:19, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  1. What is the guarantee that this article (of course, if it is not changed to Gaza war or something like this) will not be the main topic in the long run? The article Russo-Ukrainian War may not be the main topic in the next decades, but there is no need to disambiguate it at this time.
  2. The titles of the articles Big Bang and The Big Bang Theory were not disambiguated because of the words "The" and "Theory". The title of this article is also different from other articles (2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, 2014 Gaza War and etc).
  3. it will be better to keep this consistent with similar articles. See WP:CONSISTENT

  Parham wiki (talk) 23:35, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose any form of "Israel–Hamas", support "Gaza War" (or "War in Gaza") with year. As attested by multiple reliable sources, Israel has attacked all of Gaza Strip, including civilian structures; their constant mention of Hamas is only war propaganda, whereas Wikipedia article titles must be neutral much more than popular. — kashmīrī ^TALK 22:31, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  Comment: re: "their constant mention of Hamas is only war propaganda" is absurd.

  • Hamas governs the area
  • Hamas built the terrorist infrastructure being used in the war
  • Hamas built their terrorist infrastructure for the war in civilian areas to use Palestinians as human shields
  • Hamas planned the mass murder and sexual violence against Israeli civilians on Oct 7
  • Hamas initiated and is directing the terrorism and war they planned

  Hamas is central to this conflict.  // Timothy :: talk  23:12, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  Why writing all this nonsense? Just accept that international wars are against states, not against governments, ruling parties, militaries, offices, or other non-state entities. When you attack a sovereign territory, you attack a state. Claiming that you only attack its ruling party is bollocks. Propaganda for idiots who have no faintest idea about the basics of international law. — kashmīrī ^TALK 19:13, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

  Two things: avoid overly harsh language as this is a CTOP; and what basis does your argument have in policy, i.e. WP:COMMONNAME? Are RS calling it "Israel-Hamas war" or "Gaza war"? Remember WP:VNT. JM (talk) 02:57, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  By your reasoning, unless you consider Gaza as a sovereign state, shouldn't you be insisting on calling it a war against Palestine? Shankar Sivarajan (talk) 19:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

  The discussion is about disambiguation, not the generic name. Parham wiki (talk) 23:36, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support move to Israel–Hamas war without disambiguation, per WP:COMMONNAME. Links at the top of the page are sufficient. There is no other WP:PRIMARYTOPIC either. Paul Vaurie (talk) 01:10, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support with disambiguation I think retaining the disambiguation is helpful because it adds clarity to the timeline vs other wars between them.DivineReality (talk) 01:55, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose At this point, my perception is that the title still reflects the common name. Drsruli (talk) 09:16, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  The COMMONNAME is actually just "Israel–Hamas war", without the year. InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:23, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support Per nom. Ecrusized (talk) 12:51, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support with disambiguation.
  1. Example (2023–present)
  2. xample (2023-2024)
  3. 2023_Example

Are my preferred order of preferences... ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:21, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• Move to Israel–Hamas war per what I have been saying for months (since the conflict started). Glad to see more users are finally thinking the same thing. "Israel–Hamas war" is the widely agreed-upon term used by the vast majority of publications and style guides, including: AP, NYT, The Times, WSJ, AFP, CNN, The Telegraph, FT, CBC, Time, Bloomberg, NPR, Sky News, LA Times, The Independent, PBS, ABC News, ABC News, NBC News, Politico, CNBC, The Hill, USA Today, Pew, etc. For the record, there were also a few outliers: the BBC, WaPo, and The Guardian use "Israel–Gaza war"; The Atlantic calls it "War in Israel"; Reuters, The Economist, and CBS News are deliberately ambiguous. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority of sources have settled on "Israel–Hamas war". Secondly, Israel–Hamas war is not ambiguous; it already redirects here. Similar to Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is no other article whose title contains the phrase "Israel–Hamas war", so WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONCISE apply. Preceding the term with "2023" was already an unnecessary disambiguation, but it could have been passed off as part of the name. However, placing "2023–present" in parentheses would indicate that there is a need for disambiguation, when there is in fact no ambiguity. It is irrelevant that there may have been other Israel–Hamas wars as long as no other article is titled "Israel–Hamas war" and is demonstrably as notable as this WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support without disambiguation - I think disambiguation is unneccessary, as media covers with the name without it. Wendylove (talk) 20:46, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support no brainer. The war is ongoing and it's no longer 2023. JM (talk) 02:52, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support with disambiguation. Some of the contributors here seem to have incredibly short memories, but this isn't the first conflict in Gaza or even the first state of armed conflict to ever exist between Hamas and Israel. --Katangais (talk) 07:15, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  But none of them were called "Israel–Hamas war". There is no Israel–Hamas war, so how can this title be described as "ambigious"? InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• Israel–Hamas war (Without disambiguation), per what Parham wiki said. – Howard🌽33 10:43, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  In addition, I think it would be more accurate to call it the Israel-Hamas war since the war was officially declared by Israel against Hamas, not Gaza. Gaza is the name of a region and not a country. – Howard🌽33 10:48, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  Nevermind this previous statement I have now discovered that [[Gaza–Israel conflict]] is called as such. But I still support Parham's position. – Howard🌽33 10:58, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support Seems to me that there's been enough conflicts in the Gaza area that some form of disambiguation is required. See e.g. Gaza War (2008–2009). Nigej (talk) 13:43, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

  But the key point is, none of them are titled "Israel–Hamas war". That title actually already redirects here, and there is no Israel–Hamas war (disambiguation). If there is no other article that shares this title, then it is by definition not "ambiguous", and no disambiguation is needed. "2023 Israel–Hamas war", and "Israel–Hamas war (2023–present)" should be tagged with {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}}. This is very similar to Russian invasion of Ukraine, which dropped the year for the same reasons I have outlined. InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose if disambiguation is required then I much prefer (2023-2024). I am more sympathetic to other users' arguments for no disambiguation and support simply Israel-Hamas War. Yeoutie (talk) 16:04, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
  • Disambiguation is not needed, because there is no other article with the base title "Israel—Hamas war". InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
• Move to Israel–Gaza war. It seems pretty obvious that Hamas isn't the only Palestinian force involved in the conflict, as other parties in Gaza are also involved. NasssaNser_talk 09:46, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

  This discussion is only about disambiguation of the current base title, there will likely be another discussion about the base title in due course (see section #Title below). Selfstudier (talk) 10:25, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support This conflict is continuing into 2024, so changing the article's title to include the current year makes sense. That Tired Tarantula^Burrow 15:16, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support because to make things simple, the war is still going in 2024. Quake1234 (talk) 18:08, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support, the war is ongoing. Alaexis_¿question? 07:54, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
• Comment If anyone considers this bludgeoning I will promptly redact this post, but I would like to point out that Israel–Hamas war redirects here. Thus unless the redirect is disambiguated, this page should logically be moved to that title, since there is already a consensus that this is the primary topic. 🐔 Chicdat  ^{Bawk to me!} 12:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support Israel–Hamas war (without disambiguation) --Yorkporter (talk) 21:48, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support Israel–Hamas war (without disambiguation) per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:CONSISTENT, and Parham wiki; and per the results of some search tests; see discussion below. Mathglot (talk) 22:38, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support Israel-Hamas war without the year. The majority of reliable sources use this name to describe the war. It is unambiguous so there is no confusion on other articles. Interstellarity (talk) 02:16, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Wouldn’t “israel-Palestine war” be better here considering not only is the war in the Gaza Strip not just against Hamas and considering the deteriorating situation in the West Bank? The Great Mule of Eupatoria (talk) 07:33, 19 January 2024 (UTC) moved here from Move header at the top, by Mathglot (talk) 07:49, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

No. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank neither invaded Israel nor deploys its police/army against Israel, and Israel is not attacking the PA (which is already in its pocket) but rather assisting settlers in the violence and expropriation of land which has been characteristic of that territory for some decades. Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussion (move)

Current support level as I write seems strong enough that this discussion section might not be necessary, but nevertheless I prefer to have some data behind any decision I make in a formal discussion, so I went ahead with it. I did some search tests to see what they reveal about the proposed move question. The results appear to support "Israel–Hamas War" without any addtional qualifying terms such as year.

The tests purposely don't mention a year, in order to see whether titles that include the core title of "Israel–Hamas War" also mention a year (or some other term), or do not. Results from two searches appear to show that only a tiny number of results mention a year.

The first test I tried was intitle:Israel–Hamas_war -wikipedia and looked at 87 results (Google claims 240 results for that page, but I see only 87). Other than daily reports (e.g, #7 CNN's "January 17, 2024 Israel-Hamas war") very few titles have a year in them; the only one I see is #57: "2023/24 Israel-Hamas conflict: UK and international response" from the House of Commons Library.

The second test was similar, but uses three 'intitle' terms, to elicit titles that may have the same terms as in "Israel–Hamas War", but in any order, and conceivably with other terms mixed in. For example, if there are highly relevant published articles with the title "Hamas–Israel War" or "Gaza War between Israel and Hamas", the second test would find those, whereas the first one wouldn't.

Test two was this: intitle:Israel intitle:Hamas intitle:war -wikipedia, and the results were very similar to the first test. Britannica at result #26 was the first to use any type of date, and uses Israel-Hamas War of 2023 (even though it was updated on 18 Jan. 2024). The only other results for test 2 that included any type of year, included it only as part of a full date, such as CNN's "January 17, 2024 Israel-Hamas war" at result #4, and result #55: 'Daily Recap: Hamas - Israel War November 1st, 2023'.

These two tests do *not* address whether "Israel–Hamas War" is a more common title in reliable sources than "Israel–Gaza War", or any other wording. Both tests are aimed strictly at the move question, i.e., in test 1, whether titles in reliable sources that contain the expression "Israel–Hamas War" do or don't also contain other terms like a year or range of years; and in test 2, whether they contain those words in any order, along with year or other terms. Neither test is designed to answer a question about the most common name; a separate investigation would be needed for that. But within that caveat, they appear to demonstrate support for the Move question. Mathglot (talk) 02:31, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Concerning POV Pushing and False Narrative

I've made a number of recent edits to avoid Wikipedia stating a claim based on news reporter opinion pieces as a fact. Wiki editors on this page have pushing a narrative that "The scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history." based on those sources. But the sources, whilst reliable for news reporting, and not genuine military historians nor reliable peer-reviewed or scientific evaluations.

The language is vague, and misaligns to the sources.

I suggest this sentence be removed entirely as it frames the conflict with an unclear context and relevance to other war zones. There have been and continue to be undoubtedly severe conflicts this century - Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and other parts of the world. Many of which have higher death/casualty tolls, are more widespread, and associated with crimes against humanity that based on factual numbers go well beyond the current atrocities in Israel and Gaza.

We need to stop the POV pushing on this article, and keep to properly sourced and evidenced encyclopaedic content, not opinions.

Aeonx (talk) 07:26, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I have no interest to play your game of goalpost shifting or misrepresentation (not genuine military historians nor reliable peer-reviewed or scientific evaluations). The Washington Post article does cite experts, including former UN human rights officer, to reach the conclusion about the scale and pace of the destruction in Gaza. This discussion is so stale but I must repeat, if you can't find a countering argument from any reliable source, you can't present the statement as a partially (or narrowly) accepted POV, this act in itself is your POV pushing. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 07:59, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

The WP article itself is evidence against the ridicious claim made within this Wikipedia article. As I explained on my talk page to you already, the WP article only compares a very small number of conflict on a limited basis, limited to just recent 21st century conflicts from the last 15-years. I'm not challenging the OPINION posted by the WP, I'm challenging how it's reflected on Wikipedia. Aeonx (talk) 08:21, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

"[The Washington Post] article only compares a very small number of conflict" is your own original research. I also urge you to maintain honesty and consistency. On one hand, on your own talk page you wrote that "don't interpret an OPINION as fact"; now you claimed that "I'm not challenging the OPINION posted by the [Washington Post]". If you want to be pedantic and replace "recent history" (which is directly quoted from AP News) with "the 21st century", feel free to do so. However, please avoid subtly introducing words that may make an unchallenged statement sound like a biased point of view. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 08:43, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

It's not OR. I'm merely reading the source and referring to what the source itself says. Like for example, the source specifically refers to 21st century... Have you even read the source? Aeonx (talk) 10:19, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Have you read other sources cited in this statement, the one by Associated Press, a reliable source, which specifically uses the term "recent history"?[24] -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 10:33, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Does the article define "recent history"? It's vague, and certainly not something can be translated to a factual statement. It's largely, if not entirely, based on a small number of opinions alone. Aeonx (talk) 20:15, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Aeonx @Sameboat

21st century seems like a very reasonable definition of "recent". Mosul and Grozni (1999?) ended up looking similar, but it took a lot longer? But today I heard someone saying Gaza was worse than even Dresden. Irtapil (talk) 09:46, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

and FYI my edit DID use the language '21st century'; but it was instead replaced with weasal words and fluff because a comparison on conflicts from 2013 to 2024 apparently represents, literary, the entire "history of modern warfare" to some people. Ludicrous. Aeonx (talk) 10:26, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Mind you, the Associated Press article also made comparisons going as far back as World War II, according to the US military historian Robert Pape. I have trouble fathoming where your claim "not genuine military historians" originated. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 10:40, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Sure, in reference to Pape's assessment "destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers)." We know Gaza is a small dense place. The comparison seems to be between the Whole of Germany vs Gaza. Yet in the same sentence when comparing like-for-like, Urban areas, according to Pape, 40-50% of urban areas were destroyed vs only 33% in Gaza. Which seems to run counter to the argument. If anything, it's evidence to an argument that destruction of the Gaza is less significant (being only 33% destroyed) than that of the destruction of urban areas in WW2 (destroyed 40-50%). Aeonx (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

This comparison constitutes your own original research. We are quoting directly from the reliable source. If you disagree with the sources, please cite a counter reliable source. Additionally, using the WSJ article below as a counterargument is both misrepresentation (the WSJ article mentions nothing about structural damage, instead citing a medical expert whose statements were entirely about human casualties) and synthesis (the article is not a direct response to the 'most destructive war'). -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 01:31, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

The sentence in the Wikipedia article is not a quote from the source, nor is it a quote from a source within the references sources. Your statement is blatantly false.

Additionally, I haven't done any OR, my comment merely extracts the claimed data, verbatim, from the source. Noting one number, 33% (Gaza) is less than another number 40-50% (WW2 Urban Areas) is not WP:OR, it's just math. Aeonx (talk) 10:28, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

@Aeonx

W

What is a tangible example of something doing not damage faster?

in terms of speed of civilian destruction it's possibly third after Nagasaki? Or 4th if you include the destruction of a dam in the Chinese civil war. Irtapil (talk) 09:55, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I believe 'claimed to be ' is inappropriate and it should be said in Wikivoice unless some reliable source disagrees. It is said as fact by those sources rather than opinion and is sourced to experts. A counter to that is to find sources that disagree. One could instead try and show it falls under WP:EXTRAORDINARY or WP:UNDUE, but I don't think that will get any traction! NadVolum (talk) 09:19, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Would offer this: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/comparing-gaza-death-counts-to-those-in-other-wars-dont-bcc3a780

For consideration. Aeonx (talk) 13:51, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

This WSJ article solely about the unreliability of death toll data during military conflict is irrelevant. The statement which cites the Washington Post and Associated Press is also about bombing campaigns and the resultant destruction of civilian structures such as schools, hospitals and churches. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 14:02, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Utterly disagree - in fact I think you are intentially misinterpreting the WSJ article and cherryping one aspect (one example used) rather than the substance of the article. The WSJ article is largely about the inherent unreliability of numbers at war time, especially historic ones with few or sole sources. It draws specific reference to those from Hamas/Gaza, and other conflicts. It uses casualty estimates (not just deaths) as one example and cautionary tale, but is not specific to death tolls alone. It quotes Dr. Amir Khorram-Manesh, a lecturer in surgery and disaster medicine at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. “It is a component of the ‘fog of war’ where the uncertainty of every aspect of battle is confusing, unknown and often inaccurate.” ... likewise this could logically be applied without any WP:OR to the destruction of Gaza being compared to . There is no evidence to support that the news articles or independent claimed expert assessments, such as Pape, are in anyway accurate or factual. There are undefined metrics which allow for creative licence and interpretation to specifically fit one's narrative - there is however no tangible evidence to support the comparison of Gaza bombing to other ALL significant bombing/structural damage campgains - especially given the vast number of such campaigns in Modern military history. Aeonx (talk) 19:56, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Not a good idea to come in so hot in ARBPIA. It starts fires.

If you want another opinion (I don't care what the article says), which you can ignore if you like...

• Including the information as an unattributed statement of fact using Wikipedia's narrative voice is not ideal because the statement is only summarizing the personal assessments of a small sample of domain experts (sampled by Wikipedia editors). They are biased views, albeit from sources biased by their subject matter expertise, the kind of good bias an encyclopedia needs. Things like 'has been described as' might be better.
• Trying to dilute the statement with weasel words to balance it with some imagined but absent alternative views is not ideal. If there are contrasting views, people who don't think it is "among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history", other domain experts published by RS, sample those too. If there is provable sampling bias, why not call it sampling bias rather than POV pushing, or pushing a narrative etc?
• It doesn't really matter whether editors agree or disagree with the assessment, it's just about "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic".

Sean.hoyland - talk 10:17, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with your last point wholeheartedly, "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic". I'm seriously concerned that other editors are not doing that. I'm not saying just because someone has a Palestinian flag in their user profile that they are biased, but a history of repeated biased edits... then yeah. Editorial Bias is likely. Aeonx (talk) 10:23, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

If you are concerned with the behavior of other editors, this is not the place to deal with it. First, said editors talk pages, then AE if not satisfied. Selfstudier (talk) 10:49, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I tend to look at articles in detail when I view/edit Wikipedia rather than broadly across many different articles. I should've clarified my comment are specific to this Article and some it's frequent editors. Thus why I assess it appropriate to raise on the article's talkpage. Happy to discuss further. Aeonx (talk) 20:27, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

My understanding is that Wikipedia does not require individual editors to be neutral in their editing. Systemic bias and skewed sampling of all relevant RS is accepted and I'm not sure I can remember anyone being sanctioned for it. Rather, there is an optimistic belief that policy compliance for an article will emerge and self-assemble over time thru countless interactions like a beautiful sand dune. Reality seems more like genetic drift when the population size is small given the relatively low number of active editors as far as I can tell. Anyway, I guess my point is that there is little to be gained by complaining about things like intent and systemic bias in the way editors sample the set of all relevant sources and summarize them because anyone can be a part of fixing content issues. Sean.hoyland - talk 11:36, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

As I'm sure you already know, Wikipedia has long had a difficult time with WP:CPP. You've probably experienced it a lot and as we know fixing content issues is extremely difficult / near impossible when there is a concerted group of biased editors (and/or administrators) that push a particular narrative on an article they are interested in. You usually end up having to try to drag in neutral editors from RfCs and alike to help resolve the problem who then themselves have to deal with an extant majority who seem more intent on making things difficult rather than resolving the content problem(s). It's unfortunately cumbersome and inefficient. Aeonx (talk) 20:34, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with your points concerning the lead but I also believe that there is no point in complaining about the general thrust of this and other I/P articles. Sure there is a problem, and it's a big one, but it will not be cured here. Coretheapple (talk) 14:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

• There is a rather good discussion here but I don't see any counter POVs to "the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history" backed by reliable sources. This is while I already made a self-revert [25] in order to respect the ongoing discussion. --Mhhossein ^talk 16:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  The whole statement is vague: what does "severe" mean in this context? what is the time period of "modern history"? The sources define neither, in fact the sources don't actually support the wording at all! The sources do the opposite. The sources largely refer to 21st centary conflicts for comparison or they specifically refer to destruction of civilian infrastructure (i.e. hospitals) - although I note Israel challenges whether the Hospitals are being used as military facilities which also complicates things. Aeonx (talk) 20:02, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• This is just incorrect. You claim that no "military historians" verified this claim when in reality the cited AP article quotes Robert Pape. Worth noting is that this isn't even a requirement per se, as for current events Wikipedia always leans more into journalistic sources than scholarly academic sources, but even this dubious complaint of yours is false. JDiala (talk) 18:23, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

  Exactly, but now both scholarly and journalistic ones are supporting the statement. --Mhhossein ^talk 16:37, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  Pape's statements are considerable different to what the news article claim, and what the sentence within this wikipedia article claims. Pape stated: "Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” and “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”[26]. That's vastly different to a blanket statement of "the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history". But what it is very clearly, is yet another example of wiki editors cherrpicking facts to suit a false narrative. Aeonx (talk) 19:50, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  This carping about editors cherrypicking and false narratives is getting tiresome. WP:ASPERSIONS. Selfstudier (talk) 20:04, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  Happy to evidence my cherry-picking claims you think I haven't. Please let me know. Aeonx (talk) 20:22, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  This is one of the heaviest edited articles on WP, which editors are you referring to, all of them? Which editors are cherrypicking, all of them? Which "narrative" is false? Selfstudier (talk) 21:22, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

  I've been reviewing several of the sources used and have noted that the claims they are supposedly referencing are either misaligned / miquoting / cherrypicking or presenting opinion as fact (or all of the above) often to support a one-sided narrative that favours a particular perspective or opinion rather than a fact. The false narrative I'm referring to is the presentation of one-sided / biased (or likely biased) opinions as facts. I don't have the personal capacity to write about all of them - other than to identify there's a clear problem here - and doesn't take long to notice it unless you just ignore the sources. Aeonx (talk) 01:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

<- Maybe there is common ground to be found in the 'scale of destruction' part of the article by focusing on empirical data, the numbers, rather than opinions about that data...things like the ongoing UNOSAT analyses. Sean.hoyland - talk 08:08, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I am no so sure about it. This appears to be a classic case of the middle ground fallacy when we already have reliable sources supporting the statement. However, we are being compelled to make a compromise for an opinion that is poorly supported by the opponent's original research. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 08:52, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

To clarify, I'm not suggesting removing information cited to reliable sources (and I haven't looked at the validity of Aeonx's statements about misalignment), I'm suggesting perhaps refocusing efforts on adding empirical data for a couple of reasons. It might be something you can all agree on, objective facts. And, for me anyway, whether Aleppo, for example, was not as bad or worse is kind of beside the point. It's bad. How bad is it? There are numbers, absolute rather than relative values/assessments. Sean.hoyland - talk 09:29, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I have made no original research, moreover it's absurd you are claiming I have done so given I have not even proposed to add anything to the article let alone some aspect of WP:OR. Your accusations against me are unfounded and wrong.

The compromise I proposed, through edits already (reverted), was to either attribute the claim to make it clear that it's an opinion, or very specific to the reference source.

My originally proposed wordings were as follows:

1. [27]

2. [28]

3. [29]

But honestly, now I just think the entire sentence should be removed as doesn't align to the references.

Aeonx (talk) 10:39, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Another point worth noting, is under the Scale of Destruction section, the wording is specific to buildings "The scale, extent, and pace of destruction of buildings in the Gaza Strip ranks among the most severe in modern history.", whereas in the lede it's not.

I'm concerned with the vagueness of "ranks" (ranks where 1st, 10th, 100th, 1000th?), against what metric (scale of destruction, extent? pace?), replacing "modern history" with "21st centary" seems the be most appropriate fix to the vagueness over the comparison time period. Aeonx (talk) 10:55, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I am not sure what you are complaining. Before you got yourself involved in this particular dispute, the statement has consistently been maintained as "destruction in Gaza is among the most severe" in the article lead after it was added by @Aszx5000 on Jan 2nd[30]. This phrasing avoids ranking it as the absolutely top class in the hierarchy of damage to infrastructure in modern military conflicts. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 13:11, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm arguing the whole sentence is vague, misaligned to sources, and editors, your self included are pushing a false narrative by stating opinion as fact.

Your argument here only seems to add more vagueness.

What is "absolutely top class"? What is "the hierarchy of damage to infrastructure"?

How is

"modern military conflicts" defined? What time period/years? Aeonx (talk) 19:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

All I see is that you're cherry-picking what is otherwise a neatly presented statement, suitable for the article lead, which should be a brief summary of the details in the following sections. Simultaneously, you are directing endless personal attacks at disagreeing editors. As I mentioned earlier, I am fine if the time frame for comparison is narrowed down to the 21st century. What I can't tolerate is your attempts to discredit the sources by referring to them as 'someone' or 'some news reporters,' ignoring the fact that they cited experts on the matter. Your own comparison, which still falls under synthesis, is not backed by any reliable source. No reliable source has stated anything close to '33% (Gaza) is less than another number 40-50% (WW2 Urban Areas).' Whether your math is correct or not doesn't matter to Wikipedia. Not a dime. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 02:07, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

If you feel personally attacked then I apologise, that's not my intent. Whilst I did question your motivations and neutrality to help frame my responses and understanding.

News reporters claiming people they interview are experts doesn't necessarily make them so.

Generally, expert opinions are only established as reliable when they are eventually published and peer reviewed, preferably in a high impact factor journal. That process takes time. So we are often left with news reporting as a poor second best.

There were plenty of "experts" that were reported by news agencies for the COVID pandemic that turned out to be completely wrong. It's not for Wikipedia to agree nor accept with news agency assessments of expert credibility, nor acknowledge their opinions as fact.

Wikipedia should generally only state that particular individuals, who may be established in recognised profession, i.e. Political science or military history, have given their opinion with such background. Anything more is largely unencyclopaedic, or worse POV pushed puffery. Aeonx (talk) 10:57, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

You need to be reasonably specific about problems rather than complaining about POV pushing and saying it's easy to see and if you don't you're just ignoring the sources. NadVolum (talk) 10:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Just dealing with a single issue in the lede is already time-consuming. I'll move on to the next significant one this one is resolved. But feel free to look into, picks a few sentences at random from each section and look at the sources for it - that's how I went about it. Aeonx (talk) 10:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• I think that it would be more useful if you could cite sources that you feel disagree with the current wording, or identify problems with the existing ones. Because they seem high-quality and seem to support roughly what we say currently. Going over each for possible phrasings that could be used to tweak what we say:

• The Washington Post says that: The Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been unlike any other in the 21st century. ... The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during...
• The AP says that: The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. ... By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said [U.S. military historian Robert] Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
• CBC says: Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University are experts in mapping damage during wartime. They've studied the effects of aerial bombing and artillery strikes in conflicts ranging from Syria to Yemen to Ukraine. They applied data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite to Gaza and found levels of destruction unprecedented in recent conflicts, Scher told CBC News.

Those are pretty close to what we say. The one tweak that might be worth considering is attributing it to "experts" per both the AP and CBC sources, changing it to Experts say that the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history. I don't think that that's WP:WEASEL for the lead because it directly reflects the sources. A wide range of experts, across a wide range of disciplines, all agree on this point, and nobody has really presented any sources disagreeing with it; the only reason to consider attributing at all is because the sources do so. Either way, we can then go into detail on the individual experts in the body.--Aquillion (talk) 11:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

+1 , all I have seen here is a complaint that some prose doesn't match up with sources in the complainants opinion and the complaint is phrased tendentiously as editors pushing a false narrative. Selfstudier (talk) 11:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

+1 as well. I'd like to see a response to @Aeonx quoting what is currently in the article, and then specifically point out which words/which groups of words they do not believe are justified given these three sources. Chuckstablers (talk) 20:41, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

+1; I’ve read the same in reliable sources without seeking it out; appears accurate and due. BilledMammal (talk) 10:24, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

All 3 quoted sources refer to, and rely upon, imagery assessments of apparent bombing damage specific to buildings.

Updating the statement to be more specific and aligned to the sources, articulating the compared time period of 21st century, and destruction - specific to buildings would provide clarity and accuracy, aligning to the references. The word "among" is particularly vague and meaningless. I don't agree with your proposed change at all. Aeonx (talk) 11:03, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

+1 per others. JDiala (talk) 11:57, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I have reverted the edits by @Aeonx and applied the change suggested by @Aquillion. It seems that nearly everyone here disagrees with Aeonx, as he is mostly just splitting hairs and cherry-picking about exact wording. The word "recent" is an adequate substitute for "21st century." "Destruction specific to buildings" is an unnatural wording. All of the sources clearly state that the "destruction" or "devastation" (generically) are among the worst in (recent) history. The extensive destruction to the buildings is cited as a reason for this, yes, but the actual theses of the respective articles mention generic destruction. I frankly find it bizarre that such a discussion is being had considering the sources clearly and unequivocally say what we claim they say. It is right in the article titles. I do not believe it is worth the time of the editors here to entertain the extreme tendentiousness of an individual editor by discussing this matter any longer. JDiala (talk) 12:05, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Nice example of WP:CPP, and not even 10 minutes after I replied with my concerns, you decided to remove the tag under an alleged 24-hour consensus. Please read: WP:WNTRMT. I think you're actually proving my point on POV Pushing. Aeonx (talk) 12:42, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

WP:SATISFY applies. Just looking over this discussion, it's obvious that (while there's various suggestions about how exactly to word it) there's a general consensus that the current wording is fine. Tags aren't intended as badges of shame - if you have a specific suggestion you can suggest it and see if it can get a consensus, but editors aren't required to answer all of your objections or satisfy you personally. If you disagree with that sort of rough nose-count and don't actually believe there's a consensus, you could start an RFC, but it seems pretty clear to me. --Aquillion (talk) 18:15, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I request that you refrain from addressing people as 'civil POV pushers.' Just because the term contains the word 'civil' doesn't make your argument more civil than you may think. The related essay characterizes so-called 'civil POV pushers' as bad-faith actors. When used repeatedly against the same opponents without providing any substantiating evidence, it constitutes a personal attack. Bluntly put, please stop doing this. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 01:30, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Aquillion

Don't just say "experts", say the person who said it, instead of the place it was published. Unless it actually is in the voice of the publication. e.g. "an Al Jazeera investigation showed the hospital read bombed by the IDF".

On a related note, can we avoid "Hamas said" as much as possible, please. Use "Mohammed Deif said" or "Osama Hamdan said" or "The party isusued a written statement" etc. The only time I'd not mention the person is Abu Obaida because they're an anonymous spokesperson, but then it should be "Al Qassam said" because he's Rhee spokesperson for the military wing.

Irtapil (talk) 14:57, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

The AP literally says "experts". I quoted them saying that immediately above this. If you have a specific attribution that you believe would actually encompass all three, go ahead and offer it, but it would be inappropriate to attribute to the publications themselves when they cite many different experts - that would be downplaying the breadth of agreement. More general, as I said, WP:WEASEL itself specifically says that you can summarize broad trends in the lead as long as you place the individual citations in the body, so if you want more detail the thing to do is to use the description I provided in the lead and to go into more detail in the body. --Aquillion (talk) 18:09, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@Aquillion

Just saying "experts" is almost meaningless, if you may you can say "AP reported". Were you the one wanting to add who said it or wanting to remove it? Irtapil (talk) 03:37, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

No, experts say is what the AP says as fact and is the appropriate way to summarize multiple experts saying something in the lead section; it is clear, concise, and has an obvious meaning. If you personally disagree and personally hold the opinion that it is meaningless, take it up with the AP, which used that wording. Your proposal of attributing it to the AP alone would be inaccurate in several ways; after all, it is not only the AP reporting it, but multiple experts cited in multiple sources. It would also be completely inappropriate to attribute it to the proximate source like that in that it would violate WP:NPOV, which says to avoid stating facts as opinions; when you attribute something using an in-line citation like that you are implicitly stating it is only their opinion, whereas the fact that there is a consensus of experts on this is uncontested fact reported by multiple high-quality sources. It isn't the opinion of the AP that experts say this; it is an uncontested fact. This is also, per WP:WEASEL, the correct way to summarize a view held by a wide number of experts in the lead section; we can name the individual experts in the body, but the lead's role is to summarize. The belief that WEASEL discourages such summaries in the lead is a common misunderstanding of what the policy actually says; but it makes a clear exception for summaries in the lead. And the reason why ought to be obvious. What exactly would you replace it with in the lead, anyway? Even ignoring the NPOV problems that come from attributing facts as if they were opinions, to cover even just the sources I quoted above (which are not all the available ones; we stop at three for a single sentence) we would have to say something like According to the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. military historian Robert Pape, and Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, who are experts in mapping damage during wartime, the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history. That wouldn't be readable or useful. Choosing only one of them (as you seem the proposing) and implying that it is just the opinion of that source would be inappropriate because it would downplay the coverage. Hence, we summarize as "experts"; sometimes editors quibble over exactly how to summarize them but in this case there is no need to argue because we have a high-quality source stating attributing it to experts as uncontested fact in their article voice, allowing us to do the same. More detail on which experts goes in the body, not the lead. --Aquillion (talk) 09:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Yet another example of POV Push, comments such as "If you personally disagree and personally hold the opinion that it is meaningless, take it up with the AP, which used that wording" and unhelpful and actually adisruptive.

The notion that "the scale and pace of destruction in Gaza is among the most severe in recent history"is a fact, and not simply an opion, regardless of how many expertsmake statements. It's not a FACT. As for facts, the fact is the claim an opinion that isn't published in any scholarly journals, there's no meta-analysis, it's not peer-reviewed, we don't understand whether or not the "experts" have bias, we don't have information nor understand what evidence supports their claims - at least not in detail (other than imagery assessments). Presenting opinions as facts IS the problem here. Aeonx (talk) 20:07, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

WP:Verifiability is what we look for, and it definiely passes that. And there's nothing extraordinary about the assertion. NadVolum (talk) 20:43, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Overcitation in the lede

What is the purpose of using more than three in-line citations in a sentence in the lede? It is unnecessary, and visually ruins the lede and ruins readability. Makeandtoss (talk) 10:53, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Afaics, this happens when there has been some discussion of an issue and reflects a desire to emphasize that the discussion was resolved in a certain way. However, I agree that it is unnecessary, actually by now, all citations in the lead could theoretically be dispensed with if the points are correctly covered in the article body. Selfstudier (talk) 11:14, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

That is correct, but overcitation is a minor flaw and removing it now would just create more unnecessary drama. Coretheapple (talk) 14:51, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

We can clean them up. See WP:BUNDLING. PrimaPrime (talk) 03:57, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Without taking a strong stance on whether it's appropriate or not, this is not uncommon on Wikipedia and far from unique to this article. One argument is that for particularly contentious claims, it's best to have a large number of citations to justify the position we take. JDiala (talk) 17:33, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Contentious claims do not need more than three, and when someone is skeptical, they can be pointed out to the full citations in the body of the article. Makeandtoss (talk) 18:17, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, but doing that pointing repeatedly (which happens on high-traffic controversial articles like this one) wastes valuable time and energy from editors. Bundling citations is simpler and better at resolving issues in the long term, that's why it's widely used. --Aquillion (talk) 11:30, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

"During this attack 1,139 ______ were killed"

Currently the intro says, "During this attack, 1,139 people were killed, of whom 766 were civilians." But far more than 1,139 people were killed. There were the ~200 bodies originally misidentified as Israeli but later found out to be Gazans. Then there were also about 1000 additional people (presumed Gazan militants) killed who were never misidentified as Israeli? (But I think are still currently unidentified?)

• But we can't say "1,139 Israelis", because a lot of that 1,139 were Thai and there were a few other foreigners as well.
• Exact numbers of Israeli + foreign sort of works, and the France 24 source has that data. But it doesn't fit well in that first sentence where "1,139 people" appears.

• The best I can think of is "(not including Gazans)"?
• Does anyone have any other ideas?

Irtapil (talk) 21:21, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

"1,139 people in Israel were killed"? Or "Hamas killed 1139 people in Israel"? Chessrat ^{(talk, contributions)} 21:24, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

@Chessrat

That doesn't work

• 200 to 1200 Gazan militants also died "in Israel"
• not all of the 1139 were killed "by Hamas", at least one death was "friendly fire" (according to very reliable sources) and there is a lot of controversy about how many more, most were probably killed by the Gazan militants, but it's a bit of a mess that we can't state simply in the leade.

It works fine in the info box, showing deaths on each side, but it's hard to articulate in a sentence. Maybe "Israeli citizens and foreign nationals"? That seems like the simplest way to include all the 1139 while excluding the attackers? In a way the Gazan militants are invading foreigners, and there's a chance some has Israeli citizenship, but other than that nitpicking, it's at least fairly clear who is being referred to?

Irtapil (talk) 07:08, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Israelis and foreign nationals is precise enough. The extent of Hamas militants killed is still not known, because while 200 bodies were ruled out, the rest were not counted in as precise of a manner. See {{2023 Israel–Hamas war casualties}} for a suggested prose wording. It is already used inside the section 2023 Israel–Hamas war § Casualties ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:27, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

@Shushugah

Yeah "Israelis and foreign nationals" seems best. Change it to that anywhere you see it.

It's slightly debatable whether the invading militants are also "foreign nationals", but it's at least a lot clearer than "people" or "in Israel", and much less complicated than "by Hamas".

Irtapil (talk) 07:42, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

In fact, I was the one who phrased it like this, and I am aware of the slight ambiguity. I think most sensible readers would realize that we are not included the Hamas fighters in the casualty count. The issue is that the proposed solution "Israelis and foreign nationals" does not seem to resolve the ambiguity ... because the Hamas fighters would also technically be "foreign nationals." The other suggestions are on the awkward side (e.g., "1,139 people in Israel were killed"). To resolve this whole thing, the cleanest way is just including a footnote. JDiala (talk) 22:01, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

 Done Added the disambiguating footnote. JDiala (talk) 22:09, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

"1139 estimated people were killed by Hamas and allies." "1139 estimated people were killed by invading militants." Drsruli (talk) 09:18, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

One can neutrally state only the number of people killed on that day. The addition of an instrumental '-by' (Hamas/allies/militants) is deceptive. Undoubtedly the majority were killed by militants, but since the casualties include indiscriminately also Israelis killed by their own IDF in the counterattacks of that day, as is now admitted, with a massive volume of airpower in particular, we simply cannot determine how many of the 1139 were directly killed by Hamas and co. This is obvious and rigorously ignored on many articles.Nishidani (talk) 10:22, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Nishidani yes I'm trying to avoid why or how or killed by who, and just devise a succinct way to say WHO died. A few places in this wiki page say 1139 "people" died that day, when at least 200 Gazans militants died as well. Current best option is 1,139 "Israelis and foreign nationals" (it is actually 1105 now, this is a very weird war). Irtapil (talk) 08:32, 17 January 2024 (UTC).

Is there a source for that admission anywhere? JM (talk) 08:36, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Such a detail could be mentioned later. A few killed by friendly fire could be assumed in any similar conflict, and the onus would still be on the attackers. This is how such casualties are documented in every other instance (including the current conflict ongoing in Gaza). It doesn't matter that there was friendly fire, in this statistic. Drsruli (talk) 10:26, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

No. 'A few' That is WP:OR. We have no reliable information of the breakdown of this figure (and friendly fire has caused substantial casualties among Israeli troops in Gaza. The way classifications work there is confused as well, 29 Israelis of around 186 have died of such fire). It does matter, in terms of NPOV, to attribute to Hamas et al., all deaths of all those who died on October 7, for to state that is a matter of deliberate obfuscation, if not deceit.Nishidani (talk) 11:09, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Friendly fire by Hamas is attributed to Israeli forces, of course. (A generalization subsequently explained, can’t be characterized as “deliberate obfuscation” or deceit, especially where context and common sense are considerations.) (Which, indeed, the footnote here is the “subsequent explanation”.) Drsruli (talk) 14:47, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

@Drsruli I don't think anyone would be surprised if the militants had a high rate of friendly fire. I don't know much about guns, but some of the things they do seem like a bad idea. Like shooting directly up in the air while standing in a crowd?

'But who are you accusing of obfuscating what? '

Irtapil (talk) 08:01, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

My point is that even though we assume that some friendly fire is occurring, it is frequently not considered as a factor in death tolls when making general quotations, especially where precise attribution to friendly fire is uncertain. As you say, the reader knows that some fraction may be attributed to friendly fire. Drsruli (talk) 21:00, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Why have we no actual figure for militants killed instead of this vague 1000 or so? After all this time they would surely know how that. Is it deliberate that they do not release such figures like the way they hide the graves of those they kill? NadVolum (talk) 11:32, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

These figures are notoriously messy, and newspapers simply repeat each other from sheer laziness. One preliminary analysis may be found in Tamsin Westlake, An analysis of the 7th of October 2023 casualties in Israel Action on Armed Violence 20 December 2023

That says nothing about the militants. Those figures for the Israeli side are probably a little wrong but are certainly good enough. The dead militants have almost certainly been counted pretty accurately as well by now and even a large number of them identified, why have no figures been released? NadVolum (talk) 13:45, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

By the way I'm quite happy for those killed by friendly fire to be counted as casualties rather than having anything special about friendly fire. After all they are killed because of the fighting. A note or something in the text can give an estimate the numbers due to friendly fire but it is hard to ever know that accurately and shouldn't be in an infobox or the lead. NadVolum (talk) 14:00, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@NadVolum I'm just looking for the least ambiguous way to clearly describe who we mean. There being debate about friendly fire means saying "killed by Hamas" is unclear if we're counting everyone or if we're asserting that those 1,139 were not killed by Israeli weapons. So "Israelis and foreign nationals" fits best. Irtapil (talk) 08:21, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@NadVolum

Can you find me a source where they have been "counted accurately by now"? Or tell me where the bodies ended up?

Or are you saying you're confused like me?

Israel supposedly claims they killed 1000 invading militants? But I'm beginning to think they just made that number up? But it would be several dozen at the very least? But I've found amost nothing about it.

Irtapil (talk) 07:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Refrain from making inflammatory statements without evidence. JM (talk) 03:12, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Who are you referring to and what do you think is without evidence? NadVolum (talk) 09:01, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

You and the inflammatory statement you made without evidence. JM (talk) 18:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

You mean this sort of thing [31]? NadVolum (talk) 08:07, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

So not "hiding the graves of those they kill", but withholding corpses, according to Jacobin. Which Palestine also does, see Deaths and ransoming of Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin#Ransom demands for the soldiers' bodies for one example. In any case, this has nothing to do with the topic being discussed, as has now been shown. JM (talk) 08:22, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The original poster said "Then there were also about 1000 additional people (presumed Gazan militants) killed who were never misidentified as Israeli", how can this not be relevant to the topic being discussed? We don't even know if that 1000 has just one or two significant figures in it - it could mean anything from 500 to 1500. NadVolum (talk) 10:29, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hamas-fighters-bodies-israel-toll-gaza-ground-invasion-rcna119640

https://abcnews.go.com/International/live-updates/israel-gaza-hamas/1500-palestinian-militants-found-dead-along-israeligaza-border-idf-says-103856155?id=103804516

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47754

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-says-gaza-border-finally-sealed-bodies-of-1500-terrorists-found-inside-israel/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/hamas-prepared-for-a-long-war-with-israel-as-concerns-for-hostages-in-gaza-grow Drsruli (talk) 21:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

That was a couple of days after the raid. I was hoping they had something better by now. I'll copy it to the talk page about the raid as they still say 1000. Sounds like it was evem ore of a suicide mission than I first thought. That takes real hate. NadVolum (talk) 22:35, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

My understanding that Gaza Health is aware of these expired IDs and includes this in the total deaths since 10/7.

So far as the suicide nature of the mission, it is apparent that the militants did not expect to return home, many or most of them, at least. See the popularized recording of the call home, the militant who “killed 10 Jews”.

Also, subsequent to these published estimates, over 200 deaths previously ascribed to Israel were subsequently reclassified as militant. Drsruli (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@NadVolum Is there a mass grave somewhere? Wouldn't they want to check very thoroughly that none were Israeli or foreigners?

The sheer volume of unaccounted for corpses is doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should be ambiguous? If it' 1000 men, that's over 60 tons?

There's 7000 people in the rubble that used to be Gaza. But where on earth are the 1000 who allegedly died in Southern Israel?

Irtapil (talk) 08:12, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Presumably they are buried in one of the various cemeteries of numbers in a closed off military area or some may still be in freezers. Yes they would have checked for Israelis or foreigners. The hiding is that they don't say anything about them so some families may think they're being detained or dead or hope they're still alive somewhere.[32] The only mention I can see in Wikipedia is under Necroviolence. I'm a bit surprised there's no article specifically on the cemeteries of numbers, there's lots of reliable sources and it has been going on for decades. NadVolum (talk) 10:20, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Reasons for attack in the lede

Currently the lede only mentions the stated reasons for the attack. The experts acknowledge some overlap between the stated and actual reasons (e.g., freeing Palestinian prisoners), however they also believe that there were other reasons, such as resisting the normalisation trend, re-established ties with Iran and burnishing resistance credentials. These are some of the sources which discuss the reasons CBS, Al Jazeera, NYT.

This should be reflected in the lede per WP:DUE as otherwise only Hamas's stated reasons are mentioned. Also, WP:LEDE should summarise the article and now this part of article is not reflected in the lede.

My attempt to improve the lede has been reverted, so I'd like to understand which policies it was based on. Alaexis_¿question? 20:31, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

The experts can be left to give their opinions later. The stated reasons by Hamas were attributed to them and definitely are of lead type interest. NadVolum (talk) 21:24, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

I would say that the opinion of neutral geopolitical experts is at least as relevant as the stated reasons from Hamas: the average reader will want to know why experts believe Hamas started the war, and not only why Hamas says it started the war. Chessrat ^{(talk, contributions)} 21:33, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. PrimaPrime (talk) 22:07, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Chessrat - absolutely support this. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 07:42, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Just to add that stated reasons are often bollocks meant for non-expert domestic audience (i.e., the electorate). We don't write, for example, that Russia attacked Ukraine "in order to save its population from neo-Nazis", or that the US invaded Iraqi or Libyan oil fields "to combat terror". Hamas's statements (of revenge, etc.) are also destined for its domestic audience. IMO, wider geopolitics should be given a prominent place in such articles, even if it means relying on sources not consumed en masse by the electorate. — kashmīrī ^TALK 23:24, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

While I agree that expert opinion should be emphasized over Hamas' view, I'm not sure your Russia comparison is quite accurate. Russia's justifications were simply lies ("Donbas genocide"). This is why we did not take them seriously. However, Hamas' justifications regarding settlements, West Bank flare-ups, and Palestinian prisoners are true and independently attested to. JDiala (talk) 02:54, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, although I simply wanted to underscore that there are war rationales, and there are rationales for the masses, and both usually deserve to be mentioned. I didn't intend to compare the veracity of individual claims. — kashmīrī ^TALK 09:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I said 'The stated reasons by Hamas were attributed to them'. The attributing is important. The attributed reason is more encyclopaediac than some american expert sitting halfway across the word spouting his expert opinion on what are the 'real' reasons are - which most definitely should also be attributed properly wherever it is stuck in. NadVolum (talk) 08:07, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I completely agree with this comment. In the version I suggested both sets of reasons are attributed. Alaexis_¿question? 08:35, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

The reverted bit removed some important bits of what Hamas said. Its quite likely the leaders did have the concerns the experts said but I hardly think that was primary or that three thousand militants went into what was essentially a possible suicide mission because of that! Russians and Americans didn't think of the Ukraine or Iraq as possible suicide missions. NadVolum (talk) 10:03, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I tried to keep the lede concise and so mentioned the key issues ("desecration" and settlements) while labelling everything else as "other actions in the West Bank and Gaza." If that was the issue, we can mention more of them. I'll give it a try shortly.

You're making a good point when you say that the geopolitical reasons are unlikely to have motivated ordinary Hamas fighters. The motivations of the Hamas leadership are not necessarily the same as those of Hamas fighters and ideally the article should discuss both of them. Unfortunately, our sources do not allow us to make this distinction for now. Alaexis_¿question? 11:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@Alaexis: reverted, most immediately because of the weasel wording. Being the lead in a contentious area in which you've made similar bold edits twice, I think a full-text draft of the proposed change and then getting clear consensus is the best path forward. To be clear I agree in spirit with what you're trying to do it just needs more polish before it goes live. I do want to not per the exchange immediately above - I don't think motivations of the individual combatants is of encyclopedic interest to the lead in an article about the war. We care about the strategic reasonings, not the individual motivations of the people involved (which will vary by individual with a near-infinite number of permutations). Also, we generally should focus on the reasons for the war as evaluated by third-party sources, not the stated purposes by the parties (even if attributed) to the conflict (which will be heavily politicized at best). VQuakr (talk) 22:09, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Okay, so here's the change.

−

Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued [[Israeli occupied territories|Israeli occupation]] of the [[Palestinian territories]], the [[blockade of the Gaza Strip]], the expansion of [[International law and Israeli settlements|illegal Israeli settlements]], and the plight of [[Palestinian refugees]] and [[Palestinian prisoners in Israel|prisoners]] the latter of whom it sought to free by taking an estimated [[2023 Israel–Hamas war hostage crisis|253 Israeli and foreign captives]] into Gaza as leverage.

+

Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued [[Israeli occupied territories|Israeli occupation]] of the [[Palestinian territories]], the [[blockade of the Gaza Strip]], the expansion of [[International law and Israeli settlements|illegal Israeli settlements]], and the plight of [[Palestinian refugees]] and [[Palestinian prisoners in Israel|prisoners]]. According to experts Hamas wanted to disrupt the [[Arab–Israeli normalization]], assert its presence as a significant security and political force, and resolve internal debates over its primary focus between governance and confrontation.

The main goal of the change is to give equal weight to stated reasons and to reasons reported in secondary sources (although you're right that the latter should eventually have greater weight). The clause I've removed in order not to inflate the lede isn't crucial for the lede in my opinion. If the problem is with "according to experts," then could you suggest another way of introducing this (the CBS article does include several experts' opinions)? Alaexis_¿question? 22:21, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The experts added renormalization as a reason rather than saying it was the reason. As far as I can see not all mentioned wanting to resolve internal tension or wanting to reassert themselves as a reason. NadVolum (talk) 23:30, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The lead summarizes the body. Where in the body do we talk about the expert opinions on the cause of the 10/7 attack? (I didn't immediately see it but the article is rather long and I may have just missed it). VQuakr (talk) 01:21, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Very good point, @VQuakr, I have, likewise, struggled to see it clearly in the main body of the article. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 02:32, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

These opinions are discussed in the 3rd and 4th paragraph of the Hamas motivations section. Alaexis_¿question? 08:06, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

The text I'm proposing also doesn't say that preventing the normalisation was *the* reason. It's listed as one of the reasons.

As to your second comment, it's true that only one source supports each claim ("reasserting its power" and "resolving internal tension"). Let's look at the reasons mentioned in the 3 articles I've listed above (Al-Jazeera, CBS and the NYT). Please feel free to add more sources dealing with this.

1. Derailing the normalisation: 3/3
2. Mending fences with Iran: 3/3
3. Palestinian desperation: 2/3 (AJ, NYT)
4. Reasserting power: 1/3 (CBS)
5. Resolving internal tension: 1/3 (NYT)
6. Drawing Israel into a quagmire 1/3 (CBS)

So it looks like the reasserting power and resolving internal tensions should be removed and instead we should mention the ties with Iran. Here's a new version. Per u:VQuakr's comment I'm starting with the reasons from secondary sources and then mention the stated reasons.

−

Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued [[Israeli occupied territories|Israeli occupation]] of the [[Palestinian territories]], the [[blockade of the Gaza Strip]], the expansion of [[International law and Israeli settlements|illegal Israeli settlements]], and the plight of [[Palestinian refugees]] and [[Palestinian prisoners in Israel|prisoners]] the latter of whom it sought to free by taking an estimated [[2023 Israel–Hamas war hostage crisis|253 Israeli and foreign captives]] into Gaza as leverage.

+

The reasons for the attack included the desire on part of Hamas to disrupt the [[Arab–Israeli normalization]], Palestinian frustration with settler violence and deepening ties between Iran and Hamas. Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued [[Israeli occupied territories|Israeli occupation]] of the [[Palestinian territories]], the [[blockade of the Gaza Strip]], the expansion of [[International law and Israeli settlements|illegal Israeli settlements]], and the plight of [[Palestinian refugees]] and [[Palestinian prisoners in Israel|prisoners]].

Alaexis_¿question? 20:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

References

Title

The RM prior to the disambiguation RM above was closed on 4 January and then reclosed on 10 January. In between, an informal discussion took place and continued until said discussion was closed on 13 January. That informal discussion indicated a possible change in consensus as to the title of the article. I would like to test the waters once again and see what appetite exists for a new RM that would change the title to Israel-Gaza war (EDIT: or Gaza War with some disambiguation). This is not a formal discussion, more of a straw poll.

FYI, NPR/WAPO/BBC/AJ/Guardian/UN/The Conversation/Axios and CNN (which appears to have recently switched) all refer to the war as the Israel–Gaza war (Israel's war on Gaza - AJ, Israel's war in Gaza - CNN). Selfstudier (talk) 19:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Strong support because of sourcing and, primarily, because of how the international law defines a war. A military attack against sovereign territory is considered as an attack against a state; not against a ruling party, etc. (Bombing of the US territory would be viewed as an attack against the United States and not against the Democratic Party.) Here, too, we have ample evidence that the infrastructure of the Palestinian state, along with its civilian population, have been the actual target of the Israeli attack; and not just a militant group. Framing this war as "anti-Hamas" is a valid propaganda move of the attacker; however, Wikipedia titles must represent a neutral point of view regardless of the number of WP:GOOGLEHITS on POV versions. — kashmīrī ^TALK 19:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
• Far too soon for a new RM; to open one would be disruptive. If you disagree with the close, the correct place to challenge it would be WP:MRV. BilledMammal (talk) 19:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

  (Having checked a few, your list of sources that have switched also appears incorrect, but that isn’t currently relevant.) BilledMammal (talk) 19:50, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• Procedural close wait until the date is settled. ~Politicdude (About me, talk, contribs) 20:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

• I am in favour of the "Israel–Hamas" form of the title still, but I don't think there would be any harm in having another RM focused on this question once the current one is closed. Chessrat ^{(talk, contributions)} 01:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
• Support after the date issue is settled above. Israel-Hamas war is a biased and inaccurate name unacceptable for Wikipedia. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 19:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• I agree with Selfstudier, for many reasons, including (1) calling it Israel-Hamas war seems close to an Israeli POV, (2) clearly all of Gaza is affected, (3) few reliable sources use the title "Gaza war" or "War in Gaza" seem to dominate. So both by NPOV and COMMONNAME, the title should be changed. Jeppiz (talk) 20:54, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• Comment. I am not opposed to such idea, but we better wait and see. This war is happening also in West Bank and on the northern border of Israel, not mentioning the strikes in Lebanon, Syria and Houthis. It is not limited by Gaza, and it is not only with Hamas. My very best wishes (talk) 02:28, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Map

When was the last time the map was updated? I found a source that used a online mapping software to claim that Israel has taken over northern Gaza. I don't know if this is real but I am confused as to why the map has not been updated, is the war just a stalemate? LuxembourgLover (talk) 05:56, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Never mind, the source was blocked. So is the war a stalemate? You think the map would have moved a little. I might just be blinded so I would like it if someone could clarify how maps for ongoing wars work on Wikipedia. LuxembourgLover (talk) 05:58, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

From what I've gathered from the discussions above, the map (at least the Gaza Strip portion of it) is an exact, albeit incorrectly-labeled copy of the daily maps produced by the Institute for the Study of War, for lack of any other reliable sources publishing regularly updated maps. What we have here is a particularly unique situation as it relates to maps for ongoing wars on Wikipedia - most of the others I am familiar with follow different processes. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 09:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Why isn´t the name changed to 2023-2024 (or even 2023-present) Israel-Hamas war

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Let´s face it´s going to go on for a while, we don´t have the crystal ball to know when it will come to an end. StrongALPHA (talk) 18:28, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Being dealt with above. Selfstudier (talk) 18:45, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@StrongALPHA

Because we cannot agree on who or what Israel is at war with. Irtapil (talk) 06:49, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is Middle East Eye reliable?

Is Middle East Eye a reliable source? I wanted to include this article as an example of Israeli war crimes. JDiala (talk) 23:54, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@JDiala

I read it quite a lot. Fairly reliable. It's cherry picked but it's factual. In my personal experience the stories it tells line up well with other reliable sources.

It won't give the whole story, but nothing will. It gives a selection of bits of the story that tend to have a pro middle east slant, but each story it does give is factual, as in the details match other reliable sources. We couldn't base a whole article on it, but we shouldn't do that with any source, it's useful as one of the sources to include.

In terms of how much I personally trust it, compared to others with a similar stance, I'd rank it as less reliable than Al Jazeera (one of the world's most reliable news outlets on any topic other than the Qatari government) but more reliable than TRT or Electronic Intafada (I'm unsure how much to trust TRT).

According to it's own Wikipedia page it's a UK based spin off of Al Jazeera, I'm not sure if that's official or just some staff who left and did their own thing.

Irtapil (talk) 03:54, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@JDiala

For that particular story I would give it a brief mention prefaced "Eyewitnesses told Middle East Eye…" (exactly as they have) it's important to include as a thing that was observed / reported / claimed, but we can't say it's a thing that definitely happened. Irtapil (talk) 04:19, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

That is not the only consideration. Is the source reliable enough that we can say in wikivoice that eyewitness told them something? Either way, is it significant enough for this page, or is it WP:UNDUE? JM (talk) 08:45, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

An anonymously written article from "occupied Palestine" quoting people whose names were changed, produced by a news source believed to have ties to the Qatari government. No, I think that for a contentious subject we need much better sourcing than that. Coretheapple (talk) 00:06, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Coretheapple I think it would be appropriate to include as "witnesses reported that". This same story is also appearing in other sources.

And "occupied Palestine" is a fairly common term for Gaza and West Bank, the particularly slanted sources use that to refer to Israel, but I think MEE just calls it Israel.

Irtapil (talk) 03:58, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

It will be appropriate once the sourcing meets the requirements of WP:EXCEPTIONAL. "Any exceptional claim requires multiple high-quality sources." One anonymous report in a biased publication citing anonymous people doesn't even come close. Coretheapple (talk) 14:02, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Coretheapple "Northern Gaza, occupied-Palestine" I think most of the world would think it was a stretch to say that Northern Gaza is not currently "occupied", it's full of IDF soldiers. Irtapil (talk) 04:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Whiteout comment on the source, I found this on RSN Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 243#Hind Khoudary Middle East Eye. ping @Nableezy: to this conversation, they seem to have long term knowledge about this source.  // Timothy :: talk  04:13, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

  That editor is temporarily topic-banned from Israel-Palestine articles so you'll be waiting a while. JM (talk) 08:39, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

  My mistake, I thought that had ended at AE, but still has a couple of weeks.  // Timothy :: talk  09:20, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• Comment 2: I think the above referenced incident [33] needs more than one WP:RS for inclusion, it makes extraordinary claims based on "witnesses reported that" statements, there needs to be more substantial and independent sourcing than witness statements.  // Timothy :: talk  04:26, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

  @TimothyBlue We can't include it as a fact, but we should include it AS a witness report "witnesses told Middle East Eye…" or just "witness reported that…" exactly as MEE have presented it. Other sources will probably trace to the same witnesses, the other sources would just be endorsing MEE. The discussion on the reliabile sources notice board (that someone linked above) says very reliable sources like the BBC already have a track record of quoting MEE as a reliable source. Irtapil (talk) 04:48, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• I was the one that posted RSN thread. Not every rumor or witness statement published on the internet needs to go in the article WP:FALSEBALANCE. WP:EXTRAORDINARY states, "Any exceptional claim requires multiple high-quality sources." This is especially important in a CTopics article. // Timothy :: talk  09:29, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. Is the source listed under any pages listing levels of source credibility ? If so, what is its stated level of reliability? (Can't remember what the page that lists sources and their reliability is called). JM (talk) 08:41, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

It's a newsorg and presumed reliable (even if biased). Also not too difficult to find other sources reporting the same thing Selfstudier (talk) 14:16, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I rather sadly did not find it an extraordinary story though it was shocking but yes I'd have agreed it should not go in without more support as there's a lot of propaganda about. However the above does seem to be an actual independent reliable source corroberating it rather than just duplicating the source and it looks due to me. NadVolum (talk) 16:14, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

This other source is hardly better than Middle East Eye. The chairman of Euro-med Monitor was the assistant director of Council for European Palestinian Relations, an organisation tied to Hamas [34]. More recently he was positively ecstatic about the October 7 attack, calling the attackers "elite young men" and "heroic knights". Alaexis_¿question? 21:26, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Wow. That's a horrific statement, especially from someone claiming to represent human rights. Definitely a partisan organization, so hopefully not reliable even when their claims are reported by RS. I wonder if there's some way to blacklist the organization's claims, not familiar with those aspects of Wikipedia. JM (talk) 21:47, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Just saw that someone has already started a discussion at WP:RSN which is the appropriate venue for that, feel free to chip in. Alaexis_¿question? 21:52, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with Middle East Eye, either. Selfstudier (talk) 22:02, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Misplaced paragraph?

The following paragraph is in the subsection War Crimes -> Following Hamas Attack

>In a 12 October preliminary legal assessment condemning Hamas's attacks in Israel, international humanitarian law scholar and Dean of Cornell Law School Jens David Ohlin said the evidence suggested Hamas's "killings and kidnappings" potentially violated Articles 6–8 of the Rome Statute as well as the Genocide Convention and were "crimes against humanity"; over a hundred international scholars expressed support for this position.

But clearly the paragraph pertains to the Hamas attack, not events following the attack, so it is misplaced. I wasn't sure where else to put it. Suggestions? JDiala (talk) 10:13, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@JDiala

I think it belongs in Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel instead of either of the other two? Irtapil (talk) 22:25, 17 January 2024 (UTC)