The Most Important Revelation About Gaza Casualties
Seth Mandel for Commentary.org
The headlines about an essential new study by the Henry Jackson Societyfocus on the fact that the casualty numbers out of Gaza have been “inflated.” And that is true, and important. But more important is howthose numbers have been inflated, and which casualties this effect applies to.
HJS’s Andrew Fox spearheaded the rigorous study, and provided a great public service in doing so. It is now incontestable—though it was evident already—that Hamas has lied. But this report implicates the Western press and politicians in ways that may be uncomfortable to face. Regardless, face them we must.
Let’s jump right to the point. At the beginning of the war, Hamas Ministry of Health statistics on fatalities were the only regular source of data on the subject and were mainly supplied by hospital officials. A couple of months into the war, a second source became regularly available: official family reporting of loved ones lost. These require eventual verification because they are tied to government benefits due the bereaved families.
At some point, hospital records were disrupted by the effects of the war and Hamas began changing its methods of collecting the data to less reliable, less scientific, and less reviewable ways.
Can you guess what happened? Sure you can.
At the beginning, both Hamas and family reporting found that military-aged males constituted a similar share of casualties. When Hamas changed its counting methods, those numbers diverged significantly.
Can you guess which one matched the trendlines from before the divergence? Of course you can.
The family reports remained statistically consistent and the Hamas numbers went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
From April to August of this year, the report states that, according to Hamas hospital numbers, 45 percent of those killed were men and 37 percent were children. According to the more reliable family reports, men were 64 percent of casualties and children were 22 percent.
Except, “children” generally means under 18 and Hamas has been known to tweak it to 19. Which means we know for a fact a chunk of that 22 percent were combatants. Some of those combatants were children, some weren’t. The fact that Hamas uses child soldiers actually benefited the terror group in the media narrative, because the numbers never distinguish between civilians and combatants, and news consumers don’t read “children” and assume “combatants.” The press was broadly complicit in normalizing and incentivizing the use of child soldiers, a fact that should stain many reputations forever.
But wait, there’s more. The report notes that Hamas—and thus the press—includes natural deaths in the casualty count. There were more than 5,000 natural deaths in that time, by conservative estimate.
But wait, there’s even more. A review of the first 1,000 names on Hamas’s casualty list between the beginning of the war and the summertime found more than 100—that is, 10 percent—had their ages revised downward. In other words, between the time that Hamas numbers could be plausibly verified and the more recent counts, lots of people suddenly became “children.”
But wait, there’s still more. Gaza casualty numbers include those killed by Hamas or other Palestinian armed groups. Remember the al-Ahli hospital blast that was reported initially as a Israel’s fault, only to become clear soon after that it was an errant Palestinian rocket (likely from Palestinian Islamic Jihad)? Those deaths still get reported today by the press as caused by Israel because they are included in the casualty numbers—as are, if you can believe it, all Gazans murdered by Hamas security forces during the war.
But wait, there still even more. Cancer patients, the report shows, were listed as war fatalities by Hamas while still also being listed as alive and receiving treatment in Israel or some other treatment center outside Gaza.
Two main conclusions. First, once you drop the natural deaths, approximate the numbers of those killed by Hamas or other Palestinian groups, and adjust the demographic numbers to fit the actual family reports, you end up with about as many militants killed as civilians. In an urban environment with the Hamas soldiers stationed among civilians, this means Israel’s civilian-combatant ratio is not just low but unheard of.
Second, much of the reporting and commentary has framed this war as a “war on Palestinian children.” It’s a convenient reanimation of a classic blood libel, and it is demonstrably a lie. I don’t think anyone using the “Israel is murdering Palestinian children” talking point was never interested in statistical accuracy, but it is important that the rest of society is aware of the level of deception being practiced by those who propagate it.