It's not. Nowhere in my statement did I attempt to justify it. I explained the context so that people wouldn't walk away confused as to what that short sentence actually means.
Apparently that context being added irritates you. That is interesting in it's own right.
700k fatalities is a little high as consensus estimates go, but it’s not ridiculous, even low estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s been going on for more than 13 years and has way more factions than anything happening in Gaza right now, many/most great powers both regionally and globally have a hand in somehow, and the Western press doesn’t report on it nearly as much as on more recent conflicts.
If college campus protests were driven directly or substantially by human suffering you’d be hearing about Sudan every day.
Riots for what? Assad was blamed and bombed by the West already, what should have people rioted for?
Besides, the entire Syrian civil war was started and fueled with American money and weapons- which ended up in the hands of each and every rebel/ terror group, including ISIS. Then the West blamed Assad for fighting back instead of leaving the country in the hand of those terror groups. Had he done that, now Syria would be a wasteland roamed by warlords, Mad Max style.
But Syria is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "brown people killing brown people" which college students shrug at. While Israel is (incorrectly) stereotyped as "white people killing brown people" which is a big no no.
Incorrectly because if you look at pictures of Syrian dictator Assad, he would be considered white in the US. Certainly whiter than many Israelis of Yemenite ancestry.
According to the Lancet medical journal, the Gaza deaths are closer to 200k but other sources say it might even be higher. No one knows because most of the hospitals are not operational, the dead from collapsed buildings can't be retrieved.
For Syria, I've heard ranges of anywhere between 300k and 700k. The difference between Syria and Gaza is most of the dead in Gaza are woman and children and the Syrian civil war death toll is over a decade
Lancet's numbers are not based in facts. Here's the exact excerpt from them:
> Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
> In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Again, from their own words, these numbers are not based in any reality on the ground, they are just taking the current number of reported deaths and multiplying it by 5. It also includes theoretical deaths in the future.
I had to look that up. Apparently the Lancet just multiplied by five the numbers from the Gazan health ministry, on the basis "of four indirect deaths per one direct death". That inflation technique is not used in any conflict anywhere else in the world, and particularly not in the Syrian conflict we're discussing and comparing to. If you would like to use that number, then apply that inflation technique also to the Syrian conflict as well.
It's worth mentioning the ongoing civil war in Syria that so far result in around 700k dead.