OOPS: Hamas Quietly Revises Own Propagandistic Casualty Figures… Guess What Changed?
Those numbers are as cooked as Biden's economic ones... for similar reasons
Will the news media that were so happy to tout these figures to do maximum reputational damage to Israel’s role in the conflict be demanding answers or giving an apology? Of course not.
We try not to play the ‘I told you so’ card very often. But, well… you know. Not as though the press would listen.
Calling BS on Hamas data
Being as these numbers came from a government office that worked under the Hamas regime and not a third party these numbers were suspect from the beginning. How much more so when we remember they were frequently used as part of a long-standing practice of Hamas leveraging moments of carnage (real or staged, they’re happy to use it either way) to turn global public opinion in favor of their cause and against Israel.
As far as tactics go, this one has been pretty effective. But like the key moment in the Wizard of Oz, all it takes is pulling back the curtain just a little and you see all is not as it appears on the news reports.
When the rocket ‘hit’ that hospital
An early clue as to how unreliable these numbers were should have been seen in the report that hundreds were killed when a rocket struck a hospital. Weird how they had such a figure in the middle of the night, in the dark and the press never questioned it.
It wasn’t long before we realized that (a) the rocket blew up rather harmlessly in the parking lot and that (b) this heinous act worthy of international outrage had nothing to do with Israel’s air strikes at all. This was one of Hamas’s own misfired rockets raining down on their own heads.
If that wasn’t enough to make the press question their numbers, how about the ‘expert analysis’ the ‘believe the science’ people love so much?
Flunking Out In Stats 101
The numbers being reported by Hamas bore no resemblance to how large number models ought to behave in reporting something as obviously random as high-density population casualty results.
The mainstream Canadian Newspaper ‘National Post’ was one of many that picked up on this question in March of last year, giving concrete examples of why these numbers could not be trusted statistically.
The most glaring of these red flags is what Wyner calls in his piece an “almost metronomical linearity,” or maintaining a steady rhythm, in daily reports of the total number of deaths in Gaza, which averaged “270 (deaths) per day plus or minus about 15 per cent” through an entire 16-day sample. For this trendline to be accurate, Israeli forces would have had to kill a near-identical number of Gazans each day for over two straight weeks, notwithstanding the inevitable variations in the day-to-day frequency of bombings and density of sites bombed.
[…] The far more likely case, writes Wyner, is that “the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behaviour of naturally occurring numbers.”
Irregularities in the ministry-reported data also call into question the oft-repeated claim the 70 per cent of the dead in Gaza are women and children; again, Wyner argues, because reported daily death counts increase too consistently to be plausible — this time across age and sex demographics.
“Hamas casualty figures mirror the population figures almost exactly,” Wyner told me (adult males make up about 25 per cent of Gaza’s population). Accounting for the fact thatat least a third of the dead are Hamas combatants, “this implies that either all Gaza men are fighters — obviously false — or that many, if not the majority, of the reported child casualties are actually fighters.” —NationalPost
Pay particular attention to that final sentence. We’ll be coming back to that question soon enough.
Unlike the regime-based numbers from the Hamas health ministry that were long taken at face value by so many among the compliant media not to mention international agencies, the numbers we are about to look at come from a third-party source.
It’s not a slam-dunk for accuracy, but a far sight better than taking official government figures from a party involved in the conflict with a vested interest in making the other side look like ruthless baby-killers.
The revised numbers
Honest Reporting came back with different numbers, including far fewer dead children, showing that a vast majority of their casualties were, in fact, fighting-age men.
Hamas quietly removed the names of thousands of Palestinians it had previously alleged were killed during the Israel-Hamas war, Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting told The Telegraph on Tuesday after analyzing Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update.
Hamas has previously claimed that 70% of casualties have been women and children, a claim no longer reflected in their recently updated lists, according to the research. Approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men – the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants.
“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Aizenberg asserted. — JPost
This is reporting from Hamas itself.
Even if you doubted Honest Reporting to live up to its name, Hamas itself has changed the casualty lists. It lines up with what another group, Henry Jackson Society said about the numbers.
Let’s keep this discrepancy between the propaganda and the hard numbers in our minds as the conflict grinds on. Hamas inevitably goes back to claiming unsubstantiated mass casualty numbers, or misattributes those killed in the conflict as ‘non-combatants’.
They’ve lied to us before, and are likely to do so again should they think it will serve their purposes.
As importantly, pay attention to our own media who are happy to parrot such dishonest talking points.
It hasn’t even been a week since Leslie Stahl had former Hamas hostage Keith Siegel as a guest on 60 Minutes and came off sounding to some like she was an apologist for his captors when she asked “Do you think they starved you, or they just didn’t have food?”
The reason media types no longer have the esteem of the public they once enjoyed has a lot to do with the realization that journalists were no longer REPORTING the NEWS (if indeed that was ever their role), they are activists with an ax to grind.
An ax that just happens to align with whatever ‘current thing’ the Democrats are championing this week.
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