A shocking new report has exposed how Gaza’s Health Ministry deliberately inflated death tolls, misclassified victims and included unrelated fatalities to fuel a narrative of Israeli atrocities. The Telegraph has the details.
Researchers accuse the Gaza Ministry of Health of overstating casualty data by including natural deaths, failing to differentiate between civilian and combat casualties and over-reporting the numbers of women and children killed.
The study by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, claims the figures have been manipulated by the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza for propaganda purposes, with international media outlets happy to repeat them uncritically.
The Gaza Ministry of Health has estimated that more than 44,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its military response to the October 7th Hamas attacks.
The Henry Jackson Society found that, based on Israeli and U.S. military and intelligence reports, around 17,000 of these were Hamas fighters, but claims that this has been frequently overlooked in media reports.
Its report states: “The Ministry of Health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began.
“This has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the a
ctual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.”
Critics of Israel say that even if anomalies are excluded from the casualty figures, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza.
The report found numerous statistical anomalies and inaccuracies. Researchers say that around 5,000 natural deaths, which would have happened even without the conflict, appear to have been added to the list of casualties, including cancer patients who later appeared on lists of those still receiving hospital treatment.
Other errors – some of which were later rectified by the ministry – include adult casualties being recorded as children and several men being wrongly recorded as women, thereby artificially increasing the number of women and children recorded as killed.
Researchers, who established that the majority of those killed were men aged 15-45, said they found a pattern of victims’ ages being revised downwards by at least one year when compared to data on the Palestinian Population Register in an apparent attempt to inflate the number of children recorded as killed.
“This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing sentiment and media coverage,” said Andrew Fox, the report’s author.
The Henry Jackson Society said the casualty figures also failed to distinguish between Gazans killed by the IDF and those killed by misfired Hamas rockets or during the distribution of food aid.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Israel is shutting its Dublin embassy, with Foreign Minister Gideon Saar blasting Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel” stance, according to the Standard.
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What a surprise. NOT! The regular daily increase in numbers supplied by the terrorists should have told anyone with a functioning brain the figures were lies. Are the IDF so good they can ‘kill’ the same number each week?
Soon the population in Gaza will be negative.
Jews don’t have saints.
The resident terrorist-supporting Jew haters would believe Jihadis over Jews. Go figure! ”Oh, suffer the children….” Youths/children = cannon fodder and mini Jihadists. Fact;
”A 13-year-old has been killed in shoot-out between terrorist factions in Jenin in the West Bank.
13-year-old Hamas member Muhammad al-Amer was killed by the security forces of the Palestinian Authority.”
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1868228126041690620
‘On 11 July 2014, the Ministry of Interior, Gaza, 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 …’
‘After the border protest incident on 14 May 2018, the Ministry of Health, Gaza, reported that 55 protestors were killed during the protest, which was accepted as fact by OCHA.
However, after receiving criticism from a Palestinian interviewer that Hamas had allowed so many civilian protestors to be killed, a Hamas official revised the numbers and stated that 50 of the approximately 60 killed were Hamas members.’
Rumbled…..
What a pathetic effort at journalism.
Critics of Israel say that even if anomalies are excluded from the casualty figures, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza.
Undeniable, whereby the report (at least the part of it printed here) does not name any figure.
Researchers say that around 5,000 natural deaths, which would have happened even without the conflict, appear to have been added to the list of casualties, including cancer patients who later appeared on lists of those still receiving hospital treatment.
Except that cancer patients will not be receiving any treatment at all because most hospitals have been destroyed (war crime) and any medical facilities remaining have long since run out of medications.
The Henry Jackson Society said the casualty figures also failed to distinguish between Gazans killed by the IDF and those killed by misfired Hamas rockets or during the distribution of food aid.
The last part is revealing: killed during the distribution of food aid. Now how did that happen (frequently)? The well known answer is that Israeli drones machine-gun queues of people lining up for food.
And who has ever heard of the Henry Jackson Society?
As I wrote today under News Round-Up, the total number of deaths in Gaza lies probably in the hundreds of thousands. USA has flown over 500 cargo aircraft loads of ammunition to Israel since 7th October, which Israel has clearly used. The devastation in Gaza is clear for all to see, or who want to see, in the independent news media reports. I repeat that I consider it reprehensible to make light of the misery and death meted out by Israel on the Palestinians as documented in the ICC and ICJ reports.
Israel is charged with genocide and The Daily Sceptic would do well to take that allegation seriously.
Maybe… maybe… if the Palestinians hadn’t committed an act of war on Israel and committed such unspeakable atrocities, none of this would be happening.
What do you think?
Let us take it to a personal level. If somebody killed all your family (say, your husband or wife, and two children), the police would jail your murderer (hopefully). You would probably like to kill the murderer. Would you also want to kill the murderer’s family? Possibly, if you are the violent type. Would you want to kill all the people living in the murderer’s street? Would you want to kill all the people living in the murderer’s village, town or even city? Probably (hopefully) not.
So, if you are upset at the 1200 Israelis killed by Hamas operatives on 7th October, of which probably half were killed by trigger happy Israelis in their helicopters and tanks, how do you think Israel should have reacted? Was Israel justified in killing 1200 Palestinians? Which ones? Just a random selection? Or was Israel justified in killing 12,000 Palestinians, i.e. an Israeli life is worth 10 Palestinian lives?
There is no real solution going down this road, is there? Is Israel supposed to be a civilized country or not?
During the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, over 3,600 people were killed and thousands more injured. OK, it was not all in one day but at no time did UK consider bombing Northern Ireland, even when the provocations were extreme, e.g. the assassination of a member of the Royal Family.
Watch the video suggested by Sforzesca below (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PFdRW-nQ44). It is only 12 minutes long (the video is 3 months old). The destruction is overwhelming and the population is clearly in a dire situation. And the number of dead is estimated by now to be around one million.
Is one million dead a satisfactory figure for Israel? What about the death and destruction in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq? When does ‘self-defence’ stop and unmitigated, raw, utterly primitive and unjustified murder and destruction start?
No, I doubt very much it’s possible to work for the UN and maintain one’s integrity. It would appear, as posters on here have stated previously, that Israel has the ability to ‘genocide’ Gaza so effectively it’s resulted in a population increase. I’m confident this lady can find employment elsewhere that’s a better fit for somebody with morals and who has understanding of the meaning of words;
“Can anyone with integrity survive at the UN?” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial asked on Tuesday, arguing that the UN was refusing to renew the contract of Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu due to her determination that Israel’s actions in Gaza could not be defined as “genocide.”
The publication cited her 2022 paper on “when to refer to a situation as ‘genocide,’” which affirms the importance that “United Nations officials adhere to the correct usage of the term.”
Her paper stated this was necessary due to the term’s “frequent misuse in referring to large-scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations; the emotive nature of the term and political sensitivity surrounding its use; and the potential legal implications associated with a determination of genocide.”
According to Nderitu, the term “genocide” encapsulates the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by the Hutus on the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Serbian attacks on Bosnian Muslims, and the killings being carried out in Sudan.
With regard to Israel, the WSJ editorial noted, “As a legal matter, establishing a pattern of violence as a genocide requires demonstrating intent. Israel’s campaign of self-defense doesn’t qualify.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/un-employee-refuses-to-accuse-israel-of-genocide/
Blimey, every single one of those hyperlinks takes you to another Telegraph article. So if anyone would actually like to take a look at the report, here it is;
https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HJS-Questionable-Counting-%E2%80%93-Hamas-Report-web.pdf
If anyone has a Twitter account Andrew Fox has posted a helpful thread here. Too much to cut and paste;
”We have very deliberately tried to omit value judgment and opinions from the report and give benefit of the doubt as much as possible. It’s still damning: there’s just too much wrong. Too many errors, too many impossibilities, too many signs of obvious data manipulation.
We wrote this not to give a definitive figure. We wrote it to give people the means to rebut the false narrative wherever possible.
We have relied solely on Hamas’ own figures to damn them. Our primary source, overwhelmingly, was Hamas themselves.
Let me break it down chapter by chapter.”
https://x.com/Mr_Andrew_Fox/status/1868216225072853209
”Number of Civilians Killed in Gaza “Inflated to Vilify Israel”
I’m shocked! Shocked! I tell you.
You must be seeing something in JXB’s comment that I can’t. There’s no reference to Israel not lying or otherwise.
Just for a bit of balance –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PFdRW-nQ44
Henry jackson Society.
Not at all a pro Israeli propaganda think tank whatsoever.
Lol.
You wouldn’t expect a report by the highly biased Henry Jackson Society to say otherwise.
The Henry Jackson Society is a neo-conservative think-tank that has been described as having an “anti-Islam agenda.”
https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-henry-jackson-society/
“A letter published in July by the medical journal The Lancet, written by three public health researchers, said if a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death was applied, based on direct deaths reported by June 2024, the true death toll attributable to the Gaza war ultimately could be 186,000, or 7.9 per cent of Gaza’s population.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-19/gaza-death-toll-numbers-killed-israel-strikes-buried-body-parts/104259532
Prof. Mearsheimer referenced a report some time ago on https://www.youtube.com/@judgingfreedom which claimed the ratio of indirect to direct casualty deaths in a conflict could be as high as 17:1 (if my memory serves me correctly – I cannot find the video).
Obviously, the Gaza data are extreme because Israel blows up a village and then claims the inhabitants were all terrorists. In the current circumstances where the government directive is to give “No food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel” to Palestinians, the loss of a ‘bread-winner’ in the family can be truly catastrophic, especially when all normal means of acquiring nutrition or medical assistance are gone. Furthermore, it is impossible to get accurate mortality data while Israel continues its daily bombing campaign in Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring countries.
The Henry Jackson Society is far from impartial. See further analysis at
https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1868396405196538014?s=61&t=dHgbuqcd3vpb8Hf3dsv1bQ