Gaza Body Count
Looking at fatalities in Gaza since the beginning of the October 7th war
Introduction
I’m going to talk about the body count in Gaza. And I’m going to do my best to be objective about it. Being objective will not be difficult, because there is data available to interrogate and we don’t need to rely upon feelings or opinions.
Well, it actually helps that all of the available data on civilian fatalities comes from either the Hamas Government Media Office, or the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of health. You’d think that these two outlets would have the same information, but apparently that’s not exactly the case.
A new study by a UK think tank, the Henry Jackson Society has just been published as a 40 page report by Andrew Fox. The study interrogates the available data on Palestinian fatalities in Gaza. The document is well sourced, footnoted, and accessible in terms of the language it uses and the methodologies that it employs.
I’ve read the report several times so that you don’t have to. I’ve also looked at the source material and probed the claims.
I think this is an important study that can help to untangle this tangled subject.
There’s nothing super complicated or tricky about the report and the findings are not mind-blowing given the circumstances. The report is sober enough. It doesn’t attempt to refute the deaths of Palestinians.
I have to also say that I’m not absolutely crazy about the fact that the best (and only) study on this has been done by a private think tank, whose political leanings are already supportive of the Israeli conduct in the war.
It would be much better if a more robust set of critical analyses were available.
Unfortunately, there are no comparative analyses that I could find from outfits like BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, or other groups openly hostile to Israel, like Forensic Architecture in the UK and the Qatari propaganda network Al-Jazeera. It looks as though academic and journalistic institutions these days simply receive the data from the Ministry of Health and pass it on with the proviso that this institution is run by Hamas.
Body Count
Nobody disputes that a lot of people have been killed in Gaza. In fact, the number of deaths is not really in question. Obviously, there are too many deaths.
Just to get a little perspective on absolute numbers, as of the middle of September, 2024, western intelligence estimates of Russian casualties in their Ukraine war had the number of dead as high as nearly 200,000 and wounded at around 400,000.
That’s a lot of people.
Clearly, despite their political issues with Ukraine, if Russia had not attacked in February 2022, there would be an astounding 200,000 extra people still alive on planet earth, give or take natural deaths.
In the case of Gaza - despite whatever grievances they might have - If the Palestinians had not attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, around 44,000 of them would still be alive and doing stuff.
Dead people is an almost inevitable consequence of war. But still, 44,000 dead people is a lot. It’s a really big number if you compare it to a non war situation. Around 5,000 Gazans die a year from natural causes, so 44,000 is a very large increase in deaths.
44,000 dead is about 2% of the pre-war Gazan population.
But Gazans are part of a larger group of people who are classified as an ethnic group called Palestinians.
If we include the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian Citizens of Israel, and the Diaspora, the Palestinian population is around 14 million.
Thus, 44,000 is approximately 0.3% of 14 million.
To put this into perspective with other conflicts that have attracted the word “Genocide”, around 35% of the global Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust.
The Turks killed around 25% of the Armenian population in their Genocide.
The Cambodian Genocide also killed around 25% of the population.
The above examples of course almost a hundred percent non combatant.
Keeping to the middle east, the Syrian civil war has so far killed 2.5% of the population. The Lebanese civil war killed around 3.5% of the population.
Terrible stuff.
In the Ukraine war, the vast majority of Russian dead are military combatants. The main reason for this is that most of the fighting isn’t happening in Russia, but in Ukraine. Plus, the fighting is mostly confined to established lines. Two entrenched armies behind defensive fortifications, facing off against each other, blasting away.
Gaza is different. There is no front line. There is no symmetry between the opposing forces. Palestinian combatants are deeply entangled with the civilian population. That’s clearly a feature rather than a bug. If Palestinian combatants were not operating from a dense tunnel system dug underneath the civilian population the war would obviously be over already.
Suffice it to say that the Palestinians prepared the battlefield themselves by digging one of the most extensive tunnel networks in the history of warfare.
Only the North Korean DMZ is more extensive. Gaza is around 150 square miles, and the tunnel network is understood to be between 350 to 450 miles in length. It’s truly a labyrinth dug under and within the living fabric of a civilian population.
Many institutions, like the UN, CNN, BBC, and much of the Academic world put out a consistent narrative that the body count in Gaza demonstrates that the IDF operates with a complete disregard for civilian deaths, and shows a deliberate targeting of civilians.
This view forms the basis of the loud calls for both cease fire, and accusations of genocide.
Which is exactly why a close and dispassionate look at the body count is essential.
The Stakes
Why is this important and interesting? Why do we need to get into the weeds on fatality data coming out of Gaza. Isn’t it enough to know that 44,000 people have been killed?
I recently saw a BBC panel discussion about this issue which almost made me insane.
One of the panel members was a British Green Party politician named Ellie Chowns. She’s an elected member of the UK parliament who represents a real constituency in this country. When questioned about how she’s so sure that Israel is committing a “genocide”, Chowns kept on saying this weird phrase over and over. “We see it on our television screens”.
“We see it on our television screens”.
She would get this dumb look on her face and repeat this.
“We see it every night on our television screens”.
By the way I got this thanks to the wonderful work of Melanie Phillips.
On the face of it, this phrase was just maddeningly stupid. But, given this politicians background, it’s actually clear that it is a well practiced camera ready sound byte.
This phrase “We see it every night on our television screens” is meant to mean that knowledge of Israeli genocidal behavior is self-evident. Like you don’t need any actual evidence.
Look, it’s right there on our television screens! All you need to do is turn on the tv and the truth comes tumbling out.
The politician, Ellie Chowns, holds a PhD in Political Science. I can’t help but feel that her performance on this BBC show was literally just that, a performance directed at the perceived bias of her political constituency.
To me that’s shitty. It’s sad. It’s not the way things should be done. It’s perfectly indicative of a political class that has lost its moral and ethical bearing.
By the way, I also want to mention that i’m not.. super ecstatic to be examining the body count in Gaza. This is grim stuff and depressing as hell. The entire conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seems completely avoidable. I could do several episodes on solutions to the conflict, but here we are a year and some months into the latest episode of war.
Yeah, these are episodic wars that don’t conclude, unfortunately. It’s one of the features of the middle east, wars don’t end.
I’ll give you two good reasons why it’s important to go through this shit and critically examine the Gaza body count.
Credible criticism of the Israeli government and military is very important. Critique supports voices and forces inside of Israel who have a different view from the governing parties. Every legitimate government should have legitimate opposition.
At the same time, Illegitimate, or biased and unfounded criticism of Israel actually supports the governing coalition and far right extremists because it makes their case for them. Their case is: We are alone and the world is against us.
They seem to have a point, unfortunately.
In the context of so much bias against Israel, voicing any critique of the Israeli state lumps the legitimate critics together with illegitimate bigots like Ellie Chowns and much worse.
There are a whole barrage of accusations against the Israeli state and elected officials that are extremely serious. Before coming to the conclusion that something like a genocide is being perpetrated, you’d think that it would be a good idea to check the figures and examine where they came from.
Well apparently this is not so, which is very disappointing.
Certainly you’d expect that any court of law would not be satisfied with whatever images the television networks chose as a nightly spectacle or simply click bait.
Limits of The Inquiry
Before I get into the actual report, I wanted to say something about the limitations of this inquiry.
There is an interesting axiom in the scientific method. If you are attempting to look at a phenomenon closely, you are also, and at the same time, neglecting other phenomena.
Trying to dispassionately look at the Gaza body count means that we are not going to be looking at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian populations in the West Bank. We will make no value judgements about the Gaza war, if it was a good idea to do x or y or whatever.
We’re also not going to be looking at the Turkish occupation of large swathes of northern Syria, or the fact that the Egyptian border with Gaza is way more militarized than their border with Israel.
We’re not going to be discussing the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, when they literally shot Fatah activists in the head, or threw them from tall buildings. We likewise won’t be looking into the question of UNRWA and the perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee problem for the last 75 or so years.
We’re only looking at the body count of Palestinians killed during the war in Gaza from October 7th, 2023 until roughly December 2024. It’s not even me doing the looking, I’m just discussing Andrew Fox’s report.
And, I have zero animus towards the Palestinian people as a collective.
I’ve read Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, and a very large quantity of whatever else there is to read about this issue.
My own high level view is that the Palestinian political classes lost out in the big post war state creation gasm between the end of world war 1 and 1949.
At the time something on the order of 90% of Arabs living in mandate era Palestine were illiterate. I guess the same would have been true all throughout the Arab world. Therefore, the classes capable of dealing with the British on a near peer basis were tiny. Essentially a few notable families who had run the place for the Ottomans back in Istanbul or Damascus.
In that post mandate period, the Baghdad and Damascus elites got their state, the Hashemites got theirs, as did the Egyptians and the Lebanese. Obviously most of these projects have now failed terribly with awful consequences that actually far outweigh Palestinian suffering, but nobody seems to care about that, right?
So the Palestinian elite families didn’t get their chance because the Jews happened, because the Europeans went bat-shit crazy in the mid-20th century. Because nobody would take in the displaced Jews from the concentration camps, because the weirdness of Jerusalem makes everything all the more complicated in that place. Because shit happens, and also because the Palestinian leadership have consistently fucked up at each and every important milestone along the way.
October 7th is just the latest example of that.
I have no idea how they should go about getting better leaders, or if the leaders they have do or don’t provide an accurate representation of the people more generally.. do they, don’t they? I’m not sure it’s for me to say.
Would it have been better for the world if a Palestinian state had been created at any of the junctions in history where that might have happened? Would it have been better for everyone living between the river and the sea? We can only speculate. I think the answer is no. I look at Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and think.. hot damn, the Israeli Arabs are simply the luckiest people on earth.
But, the suffering in Gaza is real. I mean… we can see it every night on our television screens.
Let’s examine Andrew Fox’s report. I’ll comment along the way.
Methodologies
First the basics.
The Gaza body count numbers that the Henry Jackson study looks at come from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
This was an institution taken over by Hamas when they seized power in 2007.
Maybe people don’t completely understand what Hamas is. Hamas is a relatively insular organization that had, and still has, independent sources of funding from abroad, Qatar and Iran for example. Hamas are and were a political party operating within mainstream Palestinian politics. As such, Hamas is the rival of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. When they took control of Gaza in 2007, they installed a well organized and very brutal totalitarian regime.
Totalitarian how?
Well, for example they’d shoot you in the head, or the kneecap, or throw you off buildings, or put you in prison where bad things happened to you kind of totalitarian.
Thus, to this day, no institution in Gaza is independent of Hamas control. I suppose this gets to the heart of the issues that Andrew Fox’s report has with the fatality counts coming out of the Gaza Ministry of Health.
I’m only saying this to make it very clear who we’re dealing with. It’s one reason that making an equivalence between the IDF and Hamas is wrong. The issue isn’t that it’s somehow morally depraved to make this equivalence. It’s simply wrong in the sense that your search for truth will be impeded by the notion that the IDF is to Hamas as the British army is to the French.
So, yes.. everyone in the world gets their figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is a Hamas run entity. It is quite literally the only source of information on the Gaza body count.
The Ministry of Health has published its fatality data in two formats: regular statistical fatality reports and infrequent lists of named fatalities. All fatalities in the regular reports are referred to as “murdered by IDF action” and no information regarding the identities of casualties, circumstances of death or their status as civilian or militant are included.
This is why you see headlines about 44,000 people killed in Gaza with no distinction between combatant and non-combatant. What’s more difficult to explain is why the media outlets publish numbers like this without comment.
I suppose that this is just how click bait works.
This published data derives from three sources which are not independently verified. Not a critique, just a statement of fact.
Hospital records, registered by ‘medical staff’.
Unknown ‘information sources’, which are said to include media and social media reports.
Public submission of information or ‘family notification’.
There are already a few things to note here.
First, the lack of distinction between combatant and civilian dead in the published data.
Second, none of the published lists include either date of death or circumstances of death.
Third, the lack of distinction between war related deaths and naturally occurring death.
We don’t need to rely upon Hamas controlled ministries to know that there are combatants killed and not just civilians. Indeed, the IDF publishes it’s own fatalities. Israeli soldiers are being killed and wounded, there is combat in Gaza.
The health ministry fatality reports include ALL deaths in Gaza for the year. If you look at Gaza before the war, in normal times, there were approximately 5,000 naturally occurring deaths per year. Age and illness related, car accidents, normal stuff like that.
Indeed, the Henry Jackson investigation found that cancer patients listed for exit visas to Egypt for treatment were duplicated onto the fatality lists produced by the Ministry of Health.
Systems Down
It won’t surprise anyone to learn that the Hamas run information networks had issues once the Israeli military began to respond to the massacre and hostage taking of October 7th.
Some people might be surprised to learn that every person born in Gaza is issued an identity number, just like they would in Sweden or Belgium. Nobody lives alone, and each dead Gazan was part of a family. What I’m getting at here is that the identities of the dead are by and large known or knowable.
Between November 2023 and February 2024 there was no access to the computerized database of citizens with Gazan national identity numbers. Hospitals lost all access to this civil registry.
This disruption led to significant reporting errors that the study picked up.
These included errors like falsely registering male fatalities as female, and registering adult fatalities as children.
Apparently, throughout the war, where a date of birth was missing from the data, the Ministry of Health defaulted to child. There were many instances where an 18 year old male’s date of birth was dropped a year to make him 17, and therefore a child.
Why would this be important?
Demographics
Because, what’s at stake here is a kind of necro-demographics. This is really the crux of the issue. Disgusting but true.
The higher the proportion of female and children dead to military aged male deaths, the worse it looks for the IDF and vice versa.
If a large proportion of the dead are military aged males, then it looks like the IDF is fighting a war against Hamas while trying to avoid killing innocent civilians.
On the other hand, if there is an over representation of women and children dead and very few military aged males, it looks like the IDF is simply targeting civilians.
You can take a total number of deaths, and use this for whatever narrative you wish to propagate. This all very horrible, but 44,000 dead people can either be a war or a genocide, depending upon who exactly is killed, and how they died.
So, you can see what’s at stake in the way fatalities are counted.
The key findings of Andrew Fox’s report all relate to this demographic battleground.
Men listed as women to inflate female fatalities.
Adults registered as children.
Actual disproportionate deaths of fighting-age men.
Inclusion of natural deaths in reporting.
And media underreporting of combatant deaths.
It’s not certain that one hundred percent of the errors here are malicious, by the way.
Communications networks go down. War more generally creates massively chaotic situations. When the use of civil infrastructure like hospitals and schools is part of the Hamas military strategy we can guess that things get infinitely worse.
it’s perfectly understandable that mistakes are made in counting fatalities. At the same time, It’s also clear that there is an ongoing campaign to manipulate the data.
The real issue for me isn’t so much that the data coming out of a Hamas run institution has a bias to it. Is that really surprising?
The issue is how supposedly respectable institutions like the BBC, CNN, or the UN handle it. The consequences feed down to International human rights organizations, public intellectuals, academics, influential figures and celebrities, and eventually to totally uninvolved people around the world going out to protest against Israel.
As Andrew Fox says:
These errors serve to artificially increase the numbers of women and children who are reported as killed. Such basic errors demonstrate the unreliability of the collection methodology—which places a responsibility on the world's media not to report the numbers of men, women, and children killed as unquestioned fact.
Changing Methodologies Creates New Problems
If you recall, one of the sources of data that the Hamas Ministry of Health uses to produce their body counts are media and social media.
According to the Ministry of Health, from November 11th 2023, fatalities in northern Gaza were no longer registered through a hospital information system (which had collapsed), but collated via “reliable media sources”, primarily news sites and TV reports.
In other words, conditions were so bad in Northern Gaza, that hospitals could no longer communicate. There was no internet connection. Therefore, the Ministry of Health began to rely upon what they termed “reliable media sources”.
It’s not hard to understand the problem.
The solution, apparently, was to put out a ballpark number gleaned from social media and available television news reports, and lump them all into the dead martyr column.
At one point the claimed fatalities from media and social media sources amounted to 45% of the total.
I’m having a hard time here NOT imagining how this might work. A half dozen people in a room looking at social media on laptops and trying to make a ballpark estimate of who’s dead?
Weird.
To further complicate matters, on January 6th, 2024, the Ministry of Health published a Google form on social media and called upon the public to report “martyrs” or missing persons.
According to Andrew Fox:
The form did not include fields for whether the reported fatality was a civilian or a militant belonging to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or another armed group engaged in hostilities, nor for the circumstances of the reported death (either as the result of IDF action or otherwise). It also requires no proof of death, allowing families to report missing relatives as dead.
In April of 2024, the Ministry of Health made another change in the way fatalities were counted.
They began to distinguish between complete and incomplete data, and started using what they called “Judicial Committees” as arbitors of the fatality list.
I’ll quote again from Andrew Fox’s report.
In the August 2024 list, there are only 1,910 entries marked as approved by a decision of the judicial committee, as opposed to 9,817 marked simply as ‘family notification’. This distinction makes it unclear whether the latter have been approved by the judicial committee. If we interpret that those marked simply as ‘family notification’ have not been reviewed by the judicial committee, then as of November 2024, most of them still do not appear to have been reviewed.
The judiciary in Gaza is run by Hamas, and this has brought its credibility and impartiality into question. Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization, has repeatedly criticized the bias of the judiciary in Gaza and has detailed the extensive links of judges to Hamas militants.
The demographic breakdown of family reports vs Ministry of Health records
The most recent list, published in September 2024, contains 34,344 names and every entry states the channel through which the name was recorded:
Ministry of Health records account for 27,445 names (80% of the list).
Public reports by family members – 5,480 names (16% of the list).
Reports approved by the ‘judicial committee’ – 1,103 names (3% of the list).
The researchers examined the data coming out of those channels and found dramatic differences in their demographic breakdown.
In the family reports, men accounted for 62% of the dead, versus 42% of the dead in the reports coming out of Ministry of Health records.
Children (anyone under 18) accounted for 22% of family reports versus 35% of Ministry of Health records.
Essentially, the study finds that while the demographic composition of Ministry of Health records fluctuates dramatically, the family report breakdowns remain demographically consistent.
The report claims that:
Together, these anomalies provide a strong indication that at least some aspects of the ‘Ministry of Health records’ are distorted, and the actual demographic breakdown of the fatalities data is much closer to that of the family reports – that is, around 60% men, 16% women and 24% children – at least during the period starting from January 2024, when the family report submissions began.
Statistical Anomalies
The research identifies a number of statistical anomalies during the first months of the war that appear to show an over representation of women and children deaths.
A few examples will suffice:
On 26 October 2023, the MoH reported 7,028 cumulative fatalities versus 6,547 the prior day, an increase of 481. But the number of newly reported women and children killed increased by 626 (417 women and 209 children) on the same day, which was more than the increase in total fatalities.
On 31 October 2023, the MoH reported 8,525 cumulative fatalities 33 versus 8,309 the prior day, 34 an increase of 216. The number of women and children reported killed increased by 210 on the same day – which would imply that 97% of the people who died that day were women and children.
There are more examples like this.
Clearly, it’s possible that there’s a reasonable explanation for the anomalies. Time lags between various reports coming into the ministry, for example. But to date no explanation has been given.
Tabulating the demographic composition of Ministry of Health reports in the first three months of the war, the numbers show a steady increase in the proportion of women and children killed, reaching an implausibly high 74% by 5 December 2023.
If these numbers were accepted as correct, it would mean that males made up 26% of fatalities, which would imply that few, if any, persons killed in Gaza were combatants.
Fox writes:
No evidence has been produced to show that the IDF has deliberately targeted civilians, which is what casualty outcomes of the type generated by the Ministry imply was happening. In fact, if the figures are taken on face value, they would suggest the IDF was actively choosing to prioritize the killing of civilians rather than armed combatants. That the IDF is in combat with militant groups is unquestionable: up to 27 October 2024, 368 IDF soldiers were listed as killed in action, with a further 2,394 listed as wounded since the start of ground operations.
You will recall that the Ministry of Health reports have been composed of regular statistical fatality reports and infrequent lists of named fatalities.
The anomalies that I’ve just discussed are from the daily statistical reports, while the named lists published since January 2024 tell a completely different statistical story.
There is a significant spike in the rate of male deaths (as a percentage of Gaza’s total population) between the ages of 15 and 40. This is in line with the expected ages of combatants, suggesting that Israel has targeted Hamas fighters, not civilians. The death rate of women is almost completely static between the ages of 0 and 60, and well below the comparative levels for men. The death rates for children are well below that of any other age group. This is concrete evidence that neither of these demographic groups have been targeted.
Hospital Reports versus Family Reporting
I mentioned early the distinction between fatality reports from medical facilities, and those from family self reports.
In July of 2024 you can see a clear spike of military aged male deaths from the family reports, but not from the hospitals. This coincides with intensity in the fighting. During this war and others, Hamas uses buildings and tunnels as cover from the IDF. Rather than enter into a booby trapped building or tunnel, the IDF will often just attack the structure and bring it down on the enemy.
Andrew Fox suggests that bodies buried under rubble would be accounted for more readily by family reporting than by hospitals, because it’s pretty hard to dig out bodies from a destroyed building or tunnel.
He finds a clear spike in deaths of ‘fighting age’ men aged 25 to 40 reported by families, in comparison with any other age group. There also appear to be disproportionate numbers of child and women deaths registered in hospital records, compared to the family reports.
All of which suggests war and fighting rather than a genocidal attack on non-combatants.
Deaths Unrelated to IDF Action
Finally, there are the deaths unrelated to IDF action.
These include:
Fatalities caused by secondary explosions of hidden ordnance. It has not been rare for an IDF strike to unknowingly set off a hidden arms cache.
The many cases of Hamas misfire of anti-tank rounds, rockets, or mortar rounds, aimed at the IDF but not finding their targets and causing civilian death.
I mean, just like any other armed force, Hamas is capable of inflicting collateral damage.
There are well documented accounts of Hamas killing civilians to prevent them from evacuating.
Well documented accounts of Hamas killing civilians in order to seize aid shipments.
The lists do not specify civilians trampled to death in riots around food supplies.
Nor do they specify deaths due to accident or criminal activity.
Finally, they do not specify the 5,000 natural deaths that would have occurred even if there hadn’t been a war.
IDF Reported Combatant Death
Let’s end with another source, IDF reports of Palestinian combatants killed.
Given the insanity of the media reporting you could easily forget that the Israelis are fighting a war that was initiated by the attack of a well armed military grade force. Hamas began the conflict with approximately 40,000 soldiers.
By May 2024, the United States intelligence community had estimated that Israel had killed 30 to 35% of Hamas’s combatants. This range by American intelligence would equate to 12,000– 14,000 combatants. The current official IDF estimate is that 17,000–20,000 militants have been killed inside Gaza.
The IDF has reported these numbers over time based on field reports and various sources of intelligence. 10,000 of the 17,000 have been identified by name.
Fox writes that:
The IDF is better able to identify combatants than civilians because it targets combatants and invests resources in assessing enemy casualties. It is common for a military operation to know who the killed combatants are but not the civilians, due to the difficulties in counting the dead from air strikes and chaotic, dynamic close-quarter combat. The IDF is similar to comparable militaries and carries out post-mission battle damage assessments and team debriefs, where the numbers of enemy combatants killed are reported.
Conclusion: Media Fail
Given everything i’ve discussed here, you would expect that interested people, like journalists, would at least make some attempt to examine the fatality reports that have been coming out of Gaza since October 7th.
The report includes a study of how eight leading English language media outlets have handled the fatality reports coming from Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
An analysis of 1,378 articles published between February and May 2024 revealed that combatant fatalities are almost entirely excluded from reported totals, with most outlets relying heavily on data from Hamas-controlled sources like the Gaza Ministry of Health and marginalizing information provided by Israeli sources.
The outlets studied were CNN, BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters and the Australian ABC.
Highlights of their findings are the following:
Neglect of Combatant Fatalities l Only 3% of articles included the number of combatants in reported fatality totals. l Just 16% of articles mentioned that the Health Ministry’s figures fail to distinguish between combatants and civilians. l The failure to report combatant deaths perpetuates the narrative that all fatalities are civilian, reinforcing claims of disproportionate force.
Underrepresentation of Israeli Sources l Only 5% of the analyzed articles cited Israeli sources for fatality data. l In contrast, figures from Hamas-controlled organizations appeared in 98% of the articles studied, often without scrutiny or context.
Limited Critical Analysis of Hamas Data l 19% of articles treated figures provided by Hamas-controlled organizations as established fact without attributing the figures to anyone. The rest presumably made do attributing the data to the “Hamas run Ministry of Health”. l Less than 2% of the media sources that used the Ministry of Health’s statistics acknowledged that they are unverifiable or contested. l Conversely, of the smaller number of articles which used Israeli-sourced statistics, 50% questioned their credibility.
There’s a lot more in this report that I would have liked to include.
I’ll sneak in just one more thing.
People will have forgotten that this current war is the fourth Gaza war since Hamas seized power in 2007.
In 2014, following kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers, Israel launched “Operation Protective Edge”, a period of open warfare that lasted around two months.
During the war, the Hamas Ministry of Interior uploaded guidelines for “social media activists” in the Gaza Strip to its website, Facebook and Twitter pages. An excerpt from the guidelines states that: Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add “innocent civilian” [Arabic] or “innocent citizen” [English] in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza … Do not publish photos of military commanders. Do not mention their names in public, and do not praise their achievements in conversations with foreign friends!
That’s just one example of such instructions over the years. It’s the reason you don’t see images of wounded or dead Hamas fighters “Every night on your television screens”.
I suppose the least you could say about all this is that war is war and information is fair game. I don’t necessarily blame the Palestinians for distorting the data on their fatalities. it makes the enemy look bad and makes them look more like innocent victims.
I’m also sure that we can’t trust everything that comes from the mouthpieces of any army, any political body, anywhere in the world. It’s just that usually there is a free press whose role it is to critically examine such statements. Their role is to help produce a clearer picture of reality than you would get otherwise.
This is one of the foundational elements of liberal democracy and, at least in the case of Israel, it seems that the fourth estate is missing in action or worse, KIA.