The thing to do when you feel like a commenter is "beyond reason" is to flag the comment. Writing a long response to what you feel is an unreasonable or bad-faith comment is just feeding the toxicity. The abyss is commenting back into you, so to speak.

You can see the effect here: in trying to compose a reply to the parent comment, you managed to violate a variety of HN guidelines yourself.

Ah OK. I didn't realize I was violating guidelines. I'll try flagging in the future.

I thought there was some utility to analyzing the comment because it's characteristic of much of the rhetoric on this topic and it seemed like a good "teachable moment." But point taken.

Flagging is supposed to be used for posts that go against the guidelines, not something you disagree with.

Yes.

I’d like to note that it is not Hamas which is reporting the official death count, it is the Gaza Health Ministry. While the ministry is under the control of Hamas, the actual reporting is done by actual public health professionals, doctors, etc. who may be Hamas members simply as means of occupation. So Hamas is not under reporting anything.

Second, the methodology of the reporting is a lower bound. They compile a list of names who health-care workers (doctors, nurses, etc.) confirm dead. This list is very credible, as you can cross reference the names with the Israeli controlled Gaza population registry, you can find real people behind those names, with social media profiles, obituaries, etc. This methodology has been proven to be accurate in previous wars. This is still a lower bound, because there are still around 7000 people missing and presumed dead. This number is harder to estimate because this may actually include double counting, and false positives (e.g. successfully fled over the border). It may also be an under count as there are cases of entire families being bombed at the same time with nobody left to report them missing. Your parent’s 100 000 is not realistic, but around 40 000 is not an unrealistic estimate (the 100 000 is used to described the sum of dead + missing + injured, so perhaps this was a simple mistake by your parent).

And finally the statistical methodology of the article you cited earlier is—to but it bluntly—pseudostatistical crap. The your parent was correct in pointing out that the assumptions based in that article are never sufficiently justified to proof an abnormality. This is actually from the playbook of Trump election denialism, where the distribution of votes was somehow proof of tampering. Here the distribution of reported death is not proof of any abnormality. This article you cited has actually been submitted and flagged, submitted and flagged repeatedly here on HN. The HN community has weighted that article and deemed it unfitting. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684474)