FDR_Reagan
Platinum Member
- Nov 20, 2023
- 2,073
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The weirdest thing is that no one at MSM bothers to stress where the "figures" done from but just parrots it.
There is no secret as to WHY Pallywood should ever lie
___
This is now (Mar 2024):
Hamas fakes casualty figures: ‘The numbers are not real’.
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, says the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are likely "grossly inaccurate."
(March 12, 2024 / JNS)
The Hamas terrorist organization is disseminating fictitious figures for casualties in the current war in Gaza. That’s the conclusion of a deep dive into the data published in Tablet magazine in a March 7 report titled “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.”
“The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters,” writes Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the report’s author.
For those familiar with “Pallywood,” the term coined to describe the Palestinian industry of faking everything from casualties to Israeli attacks, the fact that Hamas produces phony numbers will seem self-evident.
But the casualty numbers matter. They are the foundation on which today’s anti-Israel propaganda is built, justifying demands for a “ceasefire” that leaves Israeli hostages in captivity and accusing the Jewish state of (so-called) “genocide.”
The Biden administration has recently “lent legitimacy” to the Hamas numbers, the report notes, citing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s appearance at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 29 where he said “over 25,000” Palestinian women and children had been killed since Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas massacre.
The Pentagon felt compelled to clarify that Austin “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.”
Even U.S. President Joe Biden has come to embrace the numbers. He first expressed healthy skepticism, given the fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is essentially Hamas. Biden said on Oct. 25, when the casualty number stood at only about 6,500, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
Now, the president repeats the 30,000 figure, which has subsequently passed 31,000. “You cannot have another 30,000 dead as a consequence [of pursuing Hamas],” Biden told MSNBC in an interview on Sunday.
When looking at Wyner’s analysis, those first 30,000 are at the very least “suspicious.”
Wyner started from the premise that if the Hamas numbers are fake, there may be evidence “in the numbers themselves” to show it.
“While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children,” he writes.
He first looked at the total number of deaths. What he found was that the daily reported casualty rate increases with “metronomical linearity”—a “regularity… [that] …is almost surely not real.”
This unnatural, clockwork-like increase can best be seen in the first graph included with the report. It’s built from data aggregated by Wyner and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) based on Gaza Ministry of Health figures.
“One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less,” Wyner observes.
“Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers,” he writes.
Secondly, Wyner notes that child casualties should track with women casualties. The reason has to do with the daily variation in strikes on residential buildings and tunnels.
“Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported,” he writes.
But the numbers don’t show that correlation, a “second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real.”
He also says that the daily number of women casualties should be “highly correlated” with the number of male casualties, because “of the nature of battle.
“The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real,” he notes.
Wyner reports other anomalies, such as contradictory numbers on Oct. 29 and Oct. 28 that suggest 26 men came back to life.
The Gaza Health Ministry also claims that about 70% of the casualties are women or children, a total “far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel,” he says.
Another warning sign, which Wyner says has been noted elsewhere, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children, and 25% of the population are adult males, then Israel isn’t doing a very good job eliminating Hamas fighters.
“This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked,” he said noting that on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted losing 6,000 of its fighters, “which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.”
“Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
“Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers,” he says.
“Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed,” Wyner hypothesizes, in attempting to make sense of the numbers.
Wyner says the truth may never be known but that the total casualty count of civilians is likely “extremely overstated.”
Noting that Israel puts the number of terrorists killed in Gaza at 12,000 [with another approximately 1,000 killed inside Israel on and immediately after Oct. 7], Wyner concludes, “If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.
“By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians,” he writes.
www.jns.org
_
And:
Don't fall for Hamas's numbers game
only sources of data about casualties in Gaza are Hamas-controlled organizations. And despite a demonstrable record of manipulation designed to exaggerate the deaths of women and children (and minimize the numbers of men — the targets of Israeli military action), these numbers have become the data of record, used without qualification by the United Nations, its specialized agencies, the media, and, pace Joe Biden, one of the U.S. government’s highest officials.
As early as October, after false claims that 471 were killed by an alleged Israeli attack on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, Hamas’s credibility should have been shot. The “attack” turned out to be a misfired missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that damaged an area adjacent to the hospital, and most experts concluded that deaths totaled half that number or even fewer. But doubts about Hamas’s honesty soon dissipated, and much of the press returned to an uncritical repetition of Palestinian statistics.
There can be little doubt that many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have perished. The IDF says that 12,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed — and presumably most, if not all, of these casualties are men. As a proportional matter, if 12,000 men have been killed, it is possible that roughly the same number of women (who are approximately 50 percent of the Gazan population), and almost as many children under 18 (47 percent of the overall population), have also died.
On the other hand, this is not the bombing of Dresden or the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. House-to-house fighting is generally aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, and the IDF has until recently conducted much of its campaign with air support for troops on the ground. Thus, we should assume that a proportional death toll in Gaza of men, women, and children is unlikely. However, Hamas’s penchant for co-locating their operations with mosques, schools, and hospitals means higher risks for Palestinians who are young, elderly, or infirm.
A detailed Washington Institute for Near East Policy study of the reporting on casualties in the Israel–Hamas war reveals numerous discrepancies: For example, on October 19, Hamas officials reported that a total of 3,785 Gazans had died since the war’s inception, 307 more than the day before. Hamas also reported that for that same 24-hour period (October 18–19), 671 children had died. In other words, more children “died” than deaths reported overall. Ditto the statistics about the percentages of women and children killed. On October 18, per Hamas, 25 percent of total deaths for the war were children. One day later, that percentage magically jumped from 25 to 40 percent of total deaths. The math doesn’t add up.
Examples abound: A week later, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, the death toll for October 26–27 stood at 481 Gazans total; but also per the ministry, 626 women and children died in that same two-day period. Two days later, Hamas announced that 328 women and children had been killed in a 24-hour period, even though the health-ministry data showed that only 302 Gazans in total had died. Notably, in this 24-hour period (like many others), no men were reported to have died — only women and children. On November 7, per the data, only four men died. In other words, on days when hundreds of Gazans allegedly lost their lives, none of them were men...
uncertainty, the media’s lack of information, and, additionally, media bias suggest that the numbers of fatalities and casualties emanating from Gaza as “authoritative” have been increasingly untethered to reality.
Despite the mathematically impossible claims and doubts about accuracy that have eroded the credibility of Hamas reporting, these are the numbers that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) began using at the outset of the conflict and still uses today. Only in December 2023 did UNOCHA warn that it could not defend the numbers because of the use of “unknown methodology” by Hamas sources. UNOCHA also removed any mention of fatality subtotals from its reports at that time. And after January 11, the office stopped claiming that 70 percent of Gazan deaths were women and children.
But if Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Government Media Office numbers are inaccurate, and if UNOCHA gets the only information it has from those two Hamas sources, what is the real state of play in Gaza? How many have been killed? How many injured? How many are men? Women? Children? The sad but simple answer is that no one knows. The Israelis have said that they believe there has been a high number of combatant deaths and additional collateral casualties, largely because Hamas is so deeply embedded in civilian areas — both to use civilians as human shields to protect its fighters and to exploit and fan international sympathy over the civilian death toll. But even they do not know definite numbers.
Notwithstanding the White House’s own
skepticism, and repeatedly demonstrated lies, exaggerations, and manipulation of casualty figures by Hamas, many parts of the U.S. government regularly rely on Hamas data. The taxpayer-funded Voice of America cites Gaza Ministry of Health numbers in its reporting on the war and Hamas. A U.S. Agency for International Development fact sheet echoed the Hamas/U.N. numbers. And an early survey by the Huffington Post checked on how much play the Hamas statistics were getting, finding a dozen instances where the State Department relied on Hamas for data.
Ironically, Hamas’s questionable numbers underscore a narrative that Israel has been slow to emphasize: If Hamas is correct that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza have killed 30,000 or so people, and if Israel is correct that, as of late February, the number of Hamas terrorists killed is around 12,000, the civilian-to-combatant ratio (an important measure of collateral damage in war) is in the range of
1.5:1 — in other words, 1.5 civilian deaths for every combatant death. And while there is some disagreement within the scholarly community over the question of what is a “normal” ratio — with some suspect research (echoed by the United Nations) suggesting it can be as high as 9:1 — there are few recent conflicts where the ratio has been so low as it is in Gaza.
But that’s not the story the media, many in the U.S. government, or the United Nations wants to tell. Israel’s critics are hoping that the steady repetition of Hamas claims will soon become a de facto part of the historical record, and that Hamas’s fabrications will lead to Israel’s punishment, certainly in the court of public opinion and, if Hamas and its supporters have their way, at the United Nations, at the hands of European governments, and in the United States. Israel’s aid, arms supplies, and international legitimacy rest on the support of its friends abroad. And slowly but surely, Hamas’s narrative — though built on a foundation of lies — is taking hold.
_
Dec 2023 piece:
This will come to no one’s surprise, at least not to anyone who isn’t a woke millennial TikToker, but Hamas is obviously lying. A board member of the media watchdog Honest Reporting who goes by the single name Aizenberg took a close look at the day-to-day casualty figures that the UN publishes from Hamas and found a large number of significant anomalies. “It is immediately obvious,” notes [] Aizenberg, “that Hamas does not report ANY combatant deaths & the numbers amazingly seem to indicate that IDF bombs & bullets disproportionately hit women, children & elderly. The IDF CANNOT seem to hit too many fighting age men.” But also, “the numbers are faked.”
On Oct. 19, for example, the total casualty number increased by 307, from 3,478 to 3,785. Yet at the same time, the total number of children killed went from 853 to 1,524, an increase of 671. Nor was that the only time such a thing happened. On Oct. 26, the total number of casualties increased by 481, while the number of children casualties went up by 626. Clearly, the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza is not too concerned that people will study these numbers closely; the idea is simply to shock and appall people with Israel’s alleged inhumanity, and that is working well enough.
____
Even Biden parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech
And:
UN deliberately laundering its Gaza casualty statistics to make them appear to not come from Hamas
In January, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped reporting the Hamas claims that 70% of casualties in Gaza were women and children. It had been relying on Hamas' Ministry of Health statistics, and that ministry had stopped reporting on women and children allegedly killed in December.
____
And this is 2014:
Hamas Lies About the Gaza Civilian Death Toll – And the Media Bought It
Aug 12, 2014 — Casualties in Gaza are often misreported by Hamas. It's the Mideast equivalent of "Dog bites man," but it took the media nearly a month to recognize its sheer obviousness: Hamas lies.
____
And this is 2009:
It took Hamas 22 months to admit Israel was right in how many terrorists were killed in Operation Cast Lead
A lot of Hamas apologists try to claim that Hamas has a track record of telling the truth in its casualty claims in previous wars. But that is not true.
Hamas didn't lie much about things it could not get away with, like total deaths, because there were NGOs on the ground counting. But they did lie about everything they could.
There is no secret as to WHY Pallywood should ever lie
___
This is now (Mar 2024):
Hamas fakes casualty figures: ‘The numbers are not real’.
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, says the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are likely "grossly inaccurate."
(March 12, 2024 / JNS)
The Hamas terrorist organization is disseminating fictitious figures for casualties in the current war in Gaza. That’s the conclusion of a deep dive into the data published in Tablet magazine in a March 7 report titled “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.”
“The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters,” writes Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the report’s author.
For those familiar with “Pallywood,” the term coined to describe the Palestinian industry of faking everything from casualties to Israeli attacks, the fact that Hamas produces phony numbers will seem self-evident.
But the casualty numbers matter. They are the foundation on which today’s anti-Israel propaganda is built, justifying demands for a “ceasefire” that leaves Israeli hostages in captivity and accusing the Jewish state of (so-called) “genocide.”
The Biden administration has recently “lent legitimacy” to the Hamas numbers, the report notes, citing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s appearance at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 29 where he said “over 25,000” Palestinian women and children had been killed since Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas massacre.
The Pentagon felt compelled to clarify that Austin “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.”
Even U.S. President Joe Biden has come to embrace the numbers. He first expressed healthy skepticism, given the fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is essentially Hamas. Biden said on Oct. 25, when the casualty number stood at only about 6,500, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
Now, the president repeats the 30,000 figure, which has subsequently passed 31,000. “You cannot have another 30,000 dead as a consequence [of pursuing Hamas],” Biden told MSNBC in an interview on Sunday.
When looking at Wyner’s analysis, those first 30,000 are at the very least “suspicious.”
Wyner started from the premise that if the Hamas numbers are fake, there may be evidence “in the numbers themselves” to show it.
“While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children,” he writes.
He first looked at the total number of deaths. What he found was that the daily reported casualty rate increases with “metronomical linearity”—a “regularity… [that] …is almost surely not real.”
This unnatural, clockwork-like increase can best be seen in the first graph included with the report. It’s built from data aggregated by Wyner and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) based on Gaza Ministry of Health figures.
“One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less,” Wyner observes.
“Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers,” he writes.
Secondly, Wyner notes that child casualties should track with women casualties. The reason has to do with the daily variation in strikes on residential buildings and tunnels.
“Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported,” he writes.
But the numbers don’t show that correlation, a “second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real.”
He also says that the daily number of women casualties should be “highly correlated” with the number of male casualties, because “of the nature of battle.
“The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real,” he notes.
Wyner reports other anomalies, such as contradictory numbers on Oct. 29 and Oct. 28 that suggest 26 men came back to life.
The Gaza Health Ministry also claims that about 70% of the casualties are women or children, a total “far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel,” he says.
Another warning sign, which Wyner says has been noted elsewhere, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children, and 25% of the population are adult males, then Israel isn’t doing a very good job eliminating Hamas fighters.
“This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked,” he said noting that on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted losing 6,000 of its fighters, “which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.”
“Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
“Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers,” he says.
“Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed,” Wyner hypothesizes, in attempting to make sense of the numbers.
Wyner says the truth may never be known but that the total casualty count of civilians is likely “extremely overstated.”
Noting that Israel puts the number of terrorists killed in Gaza at 12,000 [with another approximately 1,000 killed inside Israel on and immediately after Oct. 7], Wyner concludes, “If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.
“By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians,” he writes.
Hamas fakes casualty figures: ‘The numbers are not real'
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, says the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are likely "grossly inaccurate."
www.jns.org
_
And:
Don't fall for Hamas's numbers game
only sources of data about casualties in Gaza are Hamas-controlled organizations. And despite a demonstrable record of manipulation designed to exaggerate the deaths of women and children (and minimize the numbers of men — the targets of Israeli military action), these numbers have become the data of record, used without qualification by the United Nations, its specialized agencies, the media, and, pace Joe Biden, one of the U.S. government’s highest officials.
As early as October, after false claims that 471 were killed by an alleged Israeli attack on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, Hamas’s credibility should have been shot. The “attack” turned out to be a misfired missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that damaged an area adjacent to the hospital, and most experts concluded that deaths totaled half that number or even fewer. But doubts about Hamas’s honesty soon dissipated, and much of the press returned to an uncritical repetition of Palestinian statistics.
There can be little doubt that many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have perished. The IDF says that 12,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed — and presumably most, if not all, of these casualties are men. As a proportional matter, if 12,000 men have been killed, it is possible that roughly the same number of women (who are approximately 50 percent of the Gazan population), and almost as many children under 18 (47 percent of the overall population), have also died.
On the other hand, this is not the bombing of Dresden or the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. House-to-house fighting is generally aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, and the IDF has until recently conducted much of its campaign with air support for troops on the ground. Thus, we should assume that a proportional death toll in Gaza of men, women, and children is unlikely. However, Hamas’s penchant for co-locating their operations with mosques, schools, and hospitals means higher risks for Palestinians who are young, elderly, or infirm.
A detailed Washington Institute for Near East Policy study of the reporting on casualties in the Israel–Hamas war reveals numerous discrepancies: For example, on October 19, Hamas officials reported that a total of 3,785 Gazans had died since the war’s inception, 307 more than the day before. Hamas also reported that for that same 24-hour period (October 18–19), 671 children had died. In other words, more children “died” than deaths reported overall. Ditto the statistics about the percentages of women and children killed. On October 18, per Hamas, 25 percent of total deaths for the war were children. One day later, that percentage magically jumped from 25 to 40 percent of total deaths. The math doesn’t add up.
Examples abound: A week later, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, the death toll for October 26–27 stood at 481 Gazans total; but also per the ministry, 626 women and children died in that same two-day period. Two days later, Hamas announced that 328 women and children had been killed in a 24-hour period, even though the health-ministry data showed that only 302 Gazans in total had died. Notably, in this 24-hour period (like many others), no men were reported to have died — only women and children. On November 7, per the data, only four men died. In other words, on days when hundreds of Gazans allegedly lost their lives, none of them were men...
uncertainty, the media’s lack of information, and, additionally, media bias suggest that the numbers of fatalities and casualties emanating from Gaza as “authoritative” have been increasingly untethered to reality.
Despite the mathematically impossible claims and doubts about accuracy that have eroded the credibility of Hamas reporting, these are the numbers that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) began using at the outset of the conflict and still uses today. Only in December 2023 did UNOCHA warn that it could not defend the numbers because of the use of “unknown methodology” by Hamas sources. UNOCHA also removed any mention of fatality subtotals from its reports at that time. And after January 11, the office stopped claiming that 70 percent of Gazan deaths were women and children.
But if Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Government Media Office numbers are inaccurate, and if UNOCHA gets the only information it has from those two Hamas sources, what is the real state of play in Gaza? How many have been killed? How many injured? How many are men? Women? Children? The sad but simple answer is that no one knows. The Israelis have said that they believe there has been a high number of combatant deaths and additional collateral casualties, largely because Hamas is so deeply embedded in civilian areas — both to use civilians as human shields to protect its fighters and to exploit and fan international sympathy over the civilian death toll. But even they do not know definite numbers.
Notwithstanding the White House’s own
skepticism, and repeatedly demonstrated lies, exaggerations, and manipulation of casualty figures by Hamas, many parts of the U.S. government regularly rely on Hamas data. The taxpayer-funded Voice of America cites Gaza Ministry of Health numbers in its reporting on the war and Hamas. A U.S. Agency for International Development fact sheet echoed the Hamas/U.N. numbers. And an early survey by the Huffington Post checked on how much play the Hamas statistics were getting, finding a dozen instances where the State Department relied on Hamas for data.
Ironically, Hamas’s questionable numbers underscore a narrative that Israel has been slow to emphasize: If Hamas is correct that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza have killed 30,000 or so people, and if Israel is correct that, as of late February, the number of Hamas terrorists killed is around 12,000, the civilian-to-combatant ratio (an important measure of collateral damage in war) is in the range of
1.5:1 — in other words, 1.5 civilian deaths for every combatant death. And while there is some disagreement within the scholarly community over the question of what is a “normal” ratio — with some suspect research (echoed by the United Nations) suggesting it can be as high as 9:1 — there are few recent conflicts where the ratio has been so low as it is in Gaza.
But that’s not the story the media, many in the U.S. government, or the United Nations wants to tell. Israel’s critics are hoping that the steady repetition of Hamas claims will soon become a de facto part of the historical record, and that Hamas’s fabrications will lead to Israel’s punishment, certainly in the court of public opinion and, if Hamas and its supporters have their way, at the United Nations, at the hands of European governments, and in the United States. Israel’s aid, arms supplies, and international legitimacy rest on the support of its friends abroad. And slowly but surely, Hamas’s narrative — though built on a foundation of lies — is taking hold.
_
Dec 2023 piece:
This will come to no one’s surprise, at least not to anyone who isn’t a woke millennial TikToker, but Hamas is obviously lying. A board member of the media watchdog Honest Reporting who goes by the single name Aizenberg took a close look at the day-to-day casualty figures that the UN publishes from Hamas and found a large number of significant anomalies. “It is immediately obvious,” notes [] Aizenberg, “that Hamas does not report ANY combatant deaths & the numbers amazingly seem to indicate that IDF bombs & bullets disproportionately hit women, children & elderly. The IDF CANNOT seem to hit too many fighting age men.” But also, “the numbers are faked.”
On Oct. 19, for example, the total casualty number increased by 307, from 3,478 to 3,785. Yet at the same time, the total number of children killed went from 853 to 1,524, an increase of 671. Nor was that the only time such a thing happened. On Oct. 26, the total number of casualties increased by 481, while the number of children casualties went up by 626. Clearly, the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza is not too concerned that people will study these numbers closely; the idea is simply to shock and appall people with Israel’s alleged inhumanity, and that is working well enough.
____
Even Biden parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech
And:
UN deliberately laundering its Gaza casualty statistics to make them appear to not come from Hamas
In January, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped reporting the Hamas claims that 70% of casualties in Gaza were women and children. It had been relying on Hamas' Ministry of Health statistics, and that ministry had stopped reporting on women and children allegedly killed in December.
____
And this is 2014:
Hamas Lies About the Gaza Civilian Death Toll – And the Media Bought It
Aug 12, 2014 — Casualties in Gaza are often misreported by Hamas. It's the Mideast equivalent of "Dog bites man," but it took the media nearly a month to recognize its sheer obviousness: Hamas lies.
____
And this is 2009:
It took Hamas 22 months to admit Israel was right in how many terrorists were killed in Operation Cast Lead
A lot of Hamas apologists try to claim that Hamas has a track record of telling the truth in its casualty claims in previous wars. But that is not true.
Hamas didn't lie much about things it could not get away with, like total deaths, because there were NGOs on the ground counting. But they did lie about everything they could.
Last edited:
