Dear Editor,
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 fake numbers is self-evident. Death tolls reported during a war are notoriously unreliable. According to Taylor Seybolt, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who co edited the book “Counting Civilian Casualties,”estimating civilian casualties can take years. In fact, in some cases, detailed verification of civilian deaths never happens”.
During the Kosovo War in 1998-99, media reports claimed that 10,000 Kosovars were massacred by Serbian troops. Years later, however, at Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s war crimes trial, the International Criminal Tribunal concluded there were just 2,788 bodies accounted for in mass graves. The truth is, death tolls for wars historically are estimates at best, notoriously inaccurate and often vary by hundreds of thousands.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden expressed healthy skepticism, given the fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is essentially Hamas. Biden said on Oct. 25, 2023 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.”
When US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appeared at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 29 2023 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.”
Gaza’s death toll does not indicate who bears responsibility for victims’ deaths. The Hamas controlled Health Ministry simply describes all fatalities as victims of “Israeli aggression,” including those killed by Hamas.
For example, Hamas instantly blamed Israel for an air strike at Al-Ahli hospital, claiming a death toll of 500. Days later, however, Israel produced hard evidence that it was rather a failed terrorist rocket launch that caused the blast, killing 52. Thus, the blood of anyone killed in the blast is on the terrorists’ hands, not Israel’s.
Extensive documentation proves Hamas uses civilians as human shields by placing themselves and their terrorist infrastructure in the vicinity of civilian structures. In fact, in December 2023, the IDF uncovered one of the largest caches of weapons found in Gaza so far near a school and hospital. Using human shields is a war crime, as is using civilian structures like Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital as military bases.
But the casualty numbers matter. Those numbers 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 “genocide.”. The Hamas terrorist organization is disseminating fictitious figures for casualties in the current war in Gaza. The numbers are not real. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children. In fact the majority are Hamas fighters, the numbers themselves to show it.
From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.The daily reported casualty rate increases with metronomical linearity – a regularity that is unreal based on aggregated veri provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) based on the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health figures.
Any statistician 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 but this has not been the case.
Firstly, the 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. But the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health reported numbers do not show that correlation, which is enough evidence that the numbers are fake. Counting the dead in a war—especially war in a bombed-out urban environment is a long, tedious and usually imprecise exercise, even for objective observers, which Hamas is not.
Secondly, 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 veri show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the second piece of evidence that the numbers are fake.
Thirdly, the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health figures showed other anomalies, such as contradictory numbers on Oct. 29 2023 and Oct. 28 2023 that suggest 26 men came back to life.
Fourthly ,the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health also claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children, a total far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. 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 terrorist fighters. This by itself strongly shows that the numbers are outright fake given that on Feb. 15,2024 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 the IDF is somehow not killing non-combatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
What the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health has done is to provide a daily arbitrary fake number which is too consistent to be real. The fake veri indicates that Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health assigned 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.
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 2023). Based on those numbers the ratio of non-combatant 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 such as hospitals and schools, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians. In contrast, the United Nations put combatant-to-noncombatant deaths caused by U.S. and British forces in Afghanista n and Iraq in 2015 between 3:1 and 4:1.
In sharp contrast , some people have denied atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 in Israel, posts making such claims routinely get millions of views on social media. Some falsely say that Hamas did not kill civilians on that day, or that the scale of civilian casualties has been massively exaggerated. Some even go further, falsely claiming that most of the victims were actually killed by the Israel Defense Forces, not Hamas.
These actions only undermine the ability to even begin approaching reconciliation efforts betw een the two sides. What really matters is how Israel and Hamas respectively conduct themselves relative to innocent civilians. Indeed, Israel does its utmost to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas does the opposite.
Yours truly,
Priya Singh