I didn't downvote you, for the record.

That article has mixed feelings about the reliability of the 20k estimate

True.

ARE THE PUBLISHED CASUALTY NUMBERS COMPREHENSIVE?

No, experts told Reuters.

"Our monitoring suggests that the numbers provided by the Ministry of Health may be under-reporting as they do not include fatalities who did not reach hospitals or may be lost under the rubble," the U.N. human rights office spokesperson said. "It is a logical assumption that the numbers being reported are underestimated, are low," said Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, who has worked on death counts in armed conflict and natural disasters for more than 20 years. The PA's Oct. 26 report said at least 1,000 bodies could not be recovered or brought to morgues, citing families interviewed by its Gaza staff - a clear and plausible example of the impact of war "on data capture and reporting", the Lancet article read. The number of bodies feared buried under the rubble now reaches into the thousands and much of the Gaza civil defence force's digging equipment has been destroyed in air strikes, the PA's health minister al-Kaila said on Tuesday.

The problem faced by the IDF is in fighting an insurgent force that deliberately embeds itself into the civilian population of a very densely-populated area with shoddy building quality. There’s basically no way to fight Hamas without innocent Palestinians getting caught in the crossfire.

In any other situation where a group was using civilians as hostages like this, we would call bombing the hostages as a first resort psychotic. This is just as true for Israel.