RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a press conference in the early days of the Israel–Hamas conflict, President Joe Biden was asked about casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. He responded that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” The next day, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked the same question, and in turn explained, “We all know that the Gazan Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas. It’s a — it’s run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. I’ve said it myself up here: We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value.”

Fast forward to February 29, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had no such qualms, parroting before Congress Hamas’s claim that “over 25,000” women and children have perished in Gaza. A few short hours later, the Pentagon walked back the secretary’s claim. Why? Because nobody has any idea — any honest idea — how many Gazans have died in the war that began with Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The 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 c0-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.

In the fog of war, it is not surprising that death tolls are incorrect. Only about half of Gaza’s hospitals are functioning, movement within the Strip is challenging, and burials are happening without notification to any health authorities. As of November 7, the Hamas Ministry of Health stopped reporting deaths, ceding that task to the Government Media Office. The media office, in turn, freely admitted that it was deriving at least half of its own numbers from unreliable public media reports. The cumulative problems of unreliable Hamas reporting, battlefield 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.