Cynicism and Consequences: The Numbers Game Over the Casualties in Gaza
Cynicism and Consequences: The Numbers Game Over the Casualties in Gaza
A DEADLY GAME
In yesterday’s post about the case accusing Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), I pointed out that this was just one part of Iran/HAMAS’ political warfare:
The IRGC/HAMAS strategy to counter [the Israeli military campaign] and ensure its survival relies on its tunnel network. The tunnels, built using the aid money the “international community” gave the U.N. for the benefit the Palestinian population, are embedded in civilian areas throughout the entire Strip and have their entrances in “protected” sites, particularly hospitals, as well as schools and mosques. HAMAS is under no illusion it can militarily defeat Israel. Instead, HAMAS intends to cause the deaths of as many Palestinians civilians as it takes to generate international political pressure on Israel to halt its campaign.
To reach the threshold of international outrage necessary to enforce a “ceasefire” that saves HAMAS, the group has pursued several lines of active measures. Probably the most notorious is spreading distorted casualty numbers through its “health ministry” and betting that they will be credulously repeated by the international media—a good bet so far.
For HAMAS and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) which controls it, the Palestinian civilian casualty number is not just a potent propaganda weapon, a tactic towards overall objectives. The inflation of that number—in reality and perception—is essentially the centrepiece of HAMAS’ strategic vision of the war. HAMAS’ enormous expenditure to physically construct in Gaza the most uniquely difficult urban battlefield of the twenty-first century is geared less towards gaining a strictly military advantage and more towards increasing Palestinian civilian casualties. It is a most evil innovation in modern warfare, but it has proven effective in every previous round and might yet carry the day again this time.
As such, it is one of HAMAS’ paramount successes that most of the international press and the “human rights” non-governmental organisations (NGOs)1 report the number of Israeli civilians deliberately murdered by HAMAS and the (HAMAS-supplied) number of Palestinian civilians incidentally killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) side-by-side, as if they are legally and morally comparable, with the implication that the larger Palestinian number demonstrates Israeli iniquity. This has correctly been described as “a grossly irresponsible journalistic practice and a form of barely disguised anti-Israel activism”.
The most basic, flagrant problem is using HAMAS to gauge the civilian casualties caused by Israeli military operations: the axiomatic illegitimacy of relying on one party to a conflict to report about the other party would not even need pointing out to journalists in any conflict that did not involve Israel. Moreover, the “Dresden defence”—the Nazi attempt to create an equivalence between the deliberate house-to-house murder of Jewish civilians by the Einsatzgruppen and the incidental civilian deaths caused by Allied aerial attacks on German military targets in cities like Dresden—has been recognised as a legal and moral absurdity since the 1940s. Nonetheless, this false equivalence has continued in the reporting over the present war in Gaza because of the political proclivities of a majority of journalists, and there is no doubt about its messaging effectiveness.
The beauty of this active measure for HAMAS is that it is difficult to even talk about the fact that it is an active measure. It is an inherently distasteful topic, and anyone who questions the numbers in circulation for Palestinian civilian casualties can be portrayed as themselves engaging in propaganda on behalf of Israel, not to mention being callous, racist, and God-knows whatever other buzzword is in vogue that week. Yet, everyone has known about the problems with the Gaza civilian casualty counts for a long time.
Early in this round of fighting, on 17 October 2023, the global media ran with a story from HAMAS’ health ministry that an IDF airstrike on the Ahli Hospital in Gaza had killed 500 people, leading to a cascade of violence against Jews across the world, attacks on Israeli and Western Embassies, and serious diplomatic trouble in the Middle East. By the morning of 18 October, this was exposed as a lie: another IRGC unit, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), had tried to fire a missile at Israeli civilians and it fell short, landing in the hospital car park and killing between 10 and 50 Gazan civilians.
Many outlets, including The New York Times, made some changes after this, notably they started prefacing “Gaza health ministry” with “HAMAS-run”, though within a few weeks scrupulosity on this point began to fade as HAMAS and various media outlets tried to rehabilitate the “ministry’s” reputation. Even these minor reforms were far from uniform, however. The more ideological and activist outlets, notably The Washington Post, stuck to the original story of an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital long after it was verifiably debunked, and the Post has continued to uncritically cite HAMAS’ statistics, sometimes in a quite deceitful way, by ostensibly sourcing the numbers to the United Nations or various “human rights” groups, which do not disguise the fact the numbers they use are drawn from HAMAS’ health ministry.
The Ahli Hospital episode brought to public attention the problems with HAMAS’ “health ministry”—to this day, the ministry’s death toll openly includes 500 imaginary fatalities from Al-Ahli—and it was to deal with this humiliating public-relations fiasco that many media organisations started being honest about relying on HAMAS for their Palestinian casualty figures. The media organisations had known where the numbers came from since 2014, if not before, of course, and made a conscious decision to conceal this from readers, thereby disseminating terrorist propaganda as if it was reliable data.2
HOW IT WORKS
If the Palestinian casualty number is so central to this war, it would help to have some idea how HAMAS produces it, and for that we turn to a new paper by Gabriel Epstein at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), “How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers: Examining the Male Undercount and Other Problems”. Do read the whole thing.
Epstein begins by noting that some have tried to argue for trusting HAMAS’ health ministry based on its record. In the previous rounds in Gaza—2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021—the overall health ministry totals for Palestinian fatalities “have lined up somewhat closely with counts verified by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and have not deviated extraordinarily from assessments by … the Israeli government”, writes Epstein. But the trouble begins right away, for three interconnected reasons.
First, the prior OCHA totals were generated using a “Protection Cluster”—“a network of ‘NGOs, international organizations, and UN agencies’ directed by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)”, as Epstein explains—that verified in real time whether the slain person reported by the Gaza health ministry was a civilian or a combatant. The Protection Cluster mechanism simply has not operated this time around, and OCHA is upfront about this: it has no independent figures at all. “Thus, for the first time”, Epstein writes, the only figures in circulation are those produced by HAMAS, and “the U.N. relays HAMAS claims, giving them an air of credibility” they do not deserve.
Second, which some people will have spotted already, HAMAS’ health ministry does not even purport to make a distinction between civilian and terrorist casualties. Epstein points out that this means a serious qualifier is needed to the idea there has been general agreement about the accuracy of prior health ministry casualty counts: its undifferentiated total for 2014, for example, led to OCHA concluding that a fifth of the approximately 2,000 Palestinians killed were terrorists, while Israel concluded about half were.
Third, HAMAS’ health ministry makes no attempt to distinguish between Palestinians killed by Israeli actions and those killed by the Palestinian terrorist groups. The ministry records all fatalities as “martyrs” in the struggle against the Zionist project. This is not a detail. HAMAS and the other IRGC units covered their storming of the border on 7 October with 3,000 missiles and since then another 8,000 have been fired at Israel’s civilians. Of these 11,000 rockets, about 2,000 have fallen within Gaza. The Ahli Hospital is only the most extreme case of the distorting effect this has on the data: the health ministry not only records a number of fatalities that is ten times or more higher than the true figure; it attributes them to the IDF. There is simply no way of knowing how many Palestinian civilians HAMAS/PIJ have killed in this way.
Putting aside the issue of the total itself being inflated—we will come to that in a minute—the lack of even an attempt this time by external bodies to monitor and disaggregate civilian and terrorist fatalities in Gaza is allowing HAMAS to implicitly present the total as if all of the dead are civilians and all were killed by Israel. Epstein puts it minimally when he says this is leading to a “skewed perception” of the war.
In truth, the idea that all of the Gazan casualties are civilians is distorting popular perceptions of the entire nature of the war, giving people the impression that what is happening is an Israeli military attack on a civilian population. This information operation is a crucial part of how the IRGC wages war. The apparently-all-civilian casualty lists are paired with the careful management of the media visuals out of Gaza. When Israel fought the IRGC in Lebanon (“Hizballah”) in 2006, a report afterwards noted: “Throughout the conflict, the rarest picture of all was that of a Hezbollah guerrilla. It was as if the war on the Hezbollah side was being fought by ghosts.” The same has been true in Gaza.
Before getting into the more specific problems, Epstein flags up a further problem with the HAMAS data on its own terms: the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza began on 27 October and on 10 November a statement under the health ministry’s name said the institution had lost the ability to produce daily casualty counts. Whatever semblance of professionalism supposedly went into coordinating between the thirty-six hospitals in Gaza to produce casualty counts ended at that point. The final tally given under this system was 11,078 dead: 3,545 men, 3,027 women, and 4,506 children. (If those numbers seem a little odd, we’ll get there.)
So, how is it that we now hear the health ministry has recorded a death toll over 26,000 in Gaza?
On 12 November, the HAMAS-run “Government Media Office” (GMO) in Gaza, which is part of the “ministry of information” (or “propaganda ministry”, if we are to speak plainly), started putting out its own daily casualty totals. You may wonder how it is that HAMAS media officials in their tunnels were able to calculate the fatalities across the Gaza Strip when the established communication mechanism between the hospitals had collapsed, and you will continue to wonder because there has not even been the pretence of an explanation about the “methodology” the GMO used in compiling the figures it started releasing publicly in November and which the United Nations started dutifully recording. In case you were worried that this was not bizarre enough, fear not.
Epstein describes what happened next:
The Health Ministry resumed reporting a daily total on December 2 but has not included subtotals [for men, women, and children] in its daily reporting since then. OCHA sourced data exclusively from the GMO from November 22 through December 2, then drew from both entities through the end of the year, although it stopped reporting subtotals for women and children on December 11. On December 21, OCHA cited the GMO count for the final time and, after reporting the office’s figures continuously for a month, offered its first caveat that the GMO’s “methodology is unknown.”
Additionally, in a detailed December 11 public health emergency report, the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that after November 10, it had begun to rely on “reliable media sources,” mainly meaning news websites and TV clips, to track fatalities in the north. The use of this method, far less accurate than relying on hospital and morgue counts, has not been acknowledged in any news or OCHA reports … An end-of-year Health Ministry report confirmed that this practice continues and that just over 60% of deaths reported between November 11 and December 31 were based on media sources.
And on January 6, introducing a third counting method, the Health Ministry began calling on Gazans to submit fatality and missing persons reports via a Google Form.
Just to underline: this is the situation the HAMAS regime is admitting to and the United Nations has partially acknowledged, with a rather glaring exception. Epstein is scrupulously unpolemical, so attaches no commentary after laying out this extraordinary state of affairs. My own view is that no fair-minded person, knowing this is the advertised set-up and knowing that the reality is probably considerably worse, has any reason to trust the data being produced by HAMAS’ nominal “institutions”.
Let us turn now to the specific problems. The “health ministry” and “GMO” figures, and the OCHA figures drawn from them, show a consistent inconsistency: a “low adult male fatality count coexists with a correspondingly high tally for children”. The underreporting of adult male fatalities in Gaza is the “single most evident flaw” in the data HAMAS has put out, says Epstein. This got worse after 10 November, but it has been there since 7 October—and, indeed, since 2008. Epstein includes a caveat: “even as most combatants are men, most Gazan men are still civilians, rendering the overall number of men killed an imperfect proxy for HAMAS fighters”. Quite so.
OCHA, citing the GMO, reported that 853 Gazan children were dead on 16 October. On 19 October, that number was raised to 1,524, now citing the health ministry. 671 child deaths in three days seems on-its-face implausible, all the more so because they ostensibly represented more than two-thirds of the deaths in that period—307 adult male and female deaths were recorded over those three days—and this pattern is “highly unusual … relative to every other period of the war”, as Epstein writes.
After the Ahli Hospital incident on 17 October, the health ministry revised the initial 500 deaths claim down to 471, and then reported seven deaths the next day, despite the report from an OCHA “Flash Update” that 62 Gazans had been killed in airstrikes in the Bureij and Jabalia “refugee” camps late on 17 October. Was this an admission that Ahli Hospital death toll was lower? Should the total have been 533? There were really only seven people killed in the Strip that day? No attempt was made to reconcile any of this, and the U.N. never asked HAMAS to explain itself.
Epstein shows much more charity than many would in writing: “The al-Ahli explosion was a unique event, however, making it unclear whether the extent of data manipulation reflected an exception or the norm.”
After President Joe Biden said, on 25 October, “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”, HAMAS health ministry released an apparently detailed list of what the document (and OCHA) said was 7,028 names of slain Gazans. But it did not add up—literally. The number given on the front page conflicted with three separate graphs in the report: one showing the total fatalities, one comparing adult and child fatalities, and one comparing men and women. The list also conflicted with the health ministry’s daily totals.
In the week after Israel’s invasion, HAMAS health ministry revised the number of men killed down—twice. No explanation, let alone evidence, for this resurrection of over-300 men was ever given. From 28 October, the day after Israel’s invasion, to 10 November, the day the health ministry said it could no longer do daily counts, the male percentage of the fatalities fell from the 34% it had been from 7 to 27 October, to 17%. This is flabbergasting amid the heavy ground fighting between Israel and HAMAS.
“Inconsistencies grew even more pronounced after the Gaza Health Ministry’s fatality-counting effort collapsed around November 10 and the GMO took over until at least December 2, at which point the Health Ministry resumed its daily reporting”, Epstein writes.
Freed from any kind of oversight with the removal of the “Protection Cluster”, there seems little doubt “health ministry” wing of the HAMAS apparatus is massaging the fatality total upwards. Epstein does not consider the possibility the health ministry is fabricating the figures wholesale, and let us join him in the assumption they are not.
By the health ministry’s own 12 December report, it had lost its ability to survey the north of the Strip, and roughly 4,000 of the 18,000 fatalities recorded over the previous month—back to 11 November—were from media reports. This 20% or so of figures drawn from media reports has since risen to an admitted 60%. “This admission, which goes unnoted in OCHA publications or elsewhere, raises multiple methodological concerns”, in Epstein’s understated words. Grant the presumption the health ministry is sourcing casualties as it claims. It is perfectly plain that the media in Gaza emphasises women and children being killed, and some of these reports are surely true, while simultaneously the media—operating under political terror and usually working directly for HAMAS—downplays if not omits the terrorist casualties for the reason mentioned above, to comply with the IRGC media strategy of creating the impression the IDF is fighting “ghosts”.
Epstein phrases it far more judiciously, but the GMO data since November does show every sign of just being made up: the GMO vaguely tracks the health ministry total, but diverges sharply in its demographic breakdown, recording ever-more-extreme proportions of deceased children and intermittently resuscitates hundreds of men so its percentage tallies for child fatalities keep increasing.
The health ministry has not released disaggregated male, female, and minor death counts since 2 December, but still claims to be sure that 70%-plus of the fatalities are women and children, “a proportion repeated by many news outlets and the U.N.”, as Epstein notes:
OCHA … used a blend of Health Ministry and GMO figures for its subgroup fatalities, but has refrained from updating those numbers since December 11, even as it updates the overall total. On December 11, OCHA cited a GMO tally from December 7 to report 5,153 women and 7,729 children killed, implying a male death toll of 5,514, which is already below the Health Ministry total of 5,577 male fatalities among the 14,253 fatalities in its central collection system alone. In other words, OCHA appears to be uncritically relaying the GMO’s unsupportable claim that no men died in northern Gaza between November 11 and December 11.
After using GMO tallies for a month, OCHA issued its “unknown methodology” caveat on December 21. Notably, on this date, the GMO claims indicated a maximum of 5,800 men killed, just 23 more than the Health Ministry had identified from its central collection system alone ten days earlier. On January 3, OCHA removed any mention of fatality subtotals from its reports, and after January 11 the office no longer highlighted the claim that 70% of Gazan deaths are of women and children.
Again, to put it more bluntly than Epstein does, the United Nations’ conduct on this issue has been disgraceful. The health ministry’s own figures belie its repeated claim—foregrounded by the U.N.—that 70% of the fatalities are women and children, pointing to a figure under 60%, and the severing of the health ministry’s connection to the north, where there has been two months of heavy ground combat between Israel and Palestinian terrorists, mean that even if the ministry was acting in good faith it would have missed hundreds and possibly thousands of adult male Gazan fatalities.
The IDF claimed two weeks ago that it had killed over 9,000 HAMAS and allied Islamist militants in Gaza (plus 1,000 terrorists within Israel on and after 7 October). Epstein quite correctly says this estimate “should … be treated with some skepticism”, and it is an open question whether it was wise for Israel to get into playing the numbers game. Be that as it may, U.S. intelligence followed by leaking its estimate that Israel has killed between 20% and 30% of a HAMAS force that was estimated at 25,000 to 30,000 before the war, which would mean the IDF has eliminated 5,000 to 9,000 terrorists. Assuming that anything like this is true, it underlines the male-underreporting issue with the HAMAS fatality counts: the health ministry recorded 6,088 men dead as of 31 December; however that discrepancy was resolved, it would involve a radical increase in the male total, and a corresponding decrease in the female and child totals. That said, the most these IDF numbers really tell us is that there is an “enormous gap between HAMAS and Israeli claims”, as Epstein puts it.
Epstein sums up:
Expecting significant precision or accuracy in death tolls in a war zone … is a fool’s errand. What can be said for certain is that HAMAS-produced statistics are inconsistent, imprecise, and appear to have been systematically manipulated to downplay the number of militants killed and to exaggerate the proportion of noncombatants confirmed as dead.
The clear intent of HAMAS and its allies is to portray the Israeli military campaign in Gaza as indiscriminate at best, and really as quite discriminating, targeting women and children in a genocidal rampage. A key metric in judging such claims, Epstein notes, is “the civilian-combatant fatality ratio”, and we simply do not know that.
“None of the analysis presented here diminishes the scale of the human tragedy in Gaza since HAMAS sparked the war with Israel in October 2023”, Epstein goes on, adding that refusing to trust HAMAS’ statistics is not an attempt to minimise the death toll in Gaza: there are an unknowable number of people, innocent civilians and terrorists, buried under the rubble and likely in the tunnels by the time this is all over. When they are uncovered and documented, the total fatalities might be higher than what HAMAS is currently claiming, albeit the make-up of that total will include a much smaller percentage of children and a much higher percentage of terrorists.
CONCLUSION
It is obviously important to highlight when the herd of independent minds directing the media coverage of an event as important as war is engaged in systematic bias and misinformation to the detriment of one party involved, in this case Israel. It has to be emphasised, however, that the main victim of the media’s behaviour is the civilian population in Gaza: when the media and “human rights” NGOs collaborate in Iran/HAMAS’ political warfare over the casualty figures, it vindicates the human sacrifice strategy, incentivising the IRGC to continue on this path, and shows other terrorists they can profit by adopting this strategy. Those journalists and activists doing this in the sincere belief that helping generate enough pressure on Israel to force a ceasefire is the most humanitarian option must understand they have it exactly wrong. The elimination of HAMAS is vital not only to protect Israel from further genocidal assaults like 7 October, but to prevent HAMAS using the Gazan population like this ever again and to send a clear message to all the malign actors watching this that they will not benefit if they try to follow in HAMAS’ footsteps.
Post has been corrected with respect to the source of the Ahli Hospital casualty count
REFERENCES
The “media” should be understood in most of this article as a synecdoche for the whole complex of press outlets, “human rights” monitors, and political activists. This is partly for the sake of readability, and not much is lost substantively: these groups not only behave similarly; they are overlapping sectors—in some cases, literally the same people wearing different hats.
Amnesty International, for example, uncritically uses HAMAS-produced casualty numbers without any citation to indicate where they come from. Human Rights Watch is a little more circumspect, citing “Gaza’s government media office” and “local authorities”, but deliberately omits mentions of HAMAS. Amnesty continued pretending there was uncertainty about who struck the Ahli Hospital long after the evidence was in. And so on.
HRW’s own founder said in public fifteen years ago that the group had gone badly astray in dealing with Israel, and a senior official who recently left HRW confirmed things are even worse now.
Amnesty, the world’s largest “human rights” organisation, cast aside any semblance of neutrality to become a political activist group no later than 2005, when it referred to Guantanamo Bay as “the GULAG of our times”. A few years later, Amnesty forced out the head of its Gender Unit, Gita Sahgal, when she objected to Amnesty’s high-profile embrace of Moazzam Begg, an Al-Qaeda operative.
Even by Amnesty’s low standards, Israel is a special case. In February 2022, despite the protests of some of Amnesty’s own staff, Amnesty released a report accusing Israel of “apartheid”, and its leadership conceded far more than intended in a car-crash press conference afterwards, admitting the political motivations of the report: Amnesty prefers to focus on Israel, rather than, say, China, and the “apartheid” accusation had become part of the zeitgeist on the far-Left, meaning Amnesty had an audience from which it could gain prestige (and donations) by joining in. Amnesty’s leadership is quite open about its hostility to Israel’s existence, and its reaction to the 7 October pogrom—not even bothering with a pro forma condemnation of HAMAS—reflected this outlook.
It is not to deny there is a special charge in Amnesty’s conduct towards Israel, some of which is blatantly antisemitic, to note that there is a broader worldview at work, wherein the West is the oppressor and the enemy, and Amnesty tends to count Israel and her Jewish inhabitants as Western. This worldview is shared broadly in the media and NGOs, leading to a general sympathy with the Palestinian cause. It is also what led Amnesty to its absurd claims that the Shah’s Iran was worse than the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and the more recent lies Amnesty has circulated about Ukraine, lending cover to Russia’s aggression against Kyiv. (This is to stick to the strictly political: the mistreatment of staff and financial corruption at Amnesty should, obviously, be factored into any analysis of its moral standing.)
As an aside, this habit of wilful forgetting showed up on many other fronts, and always in the same direction: to cast Israel in the most negative possible light. For example, many media outlets, the Washington Post pre-eminently, have, in the past few months, turned the fact that HAMAS uses hospitals as military command centres into a he-said/she-said “controversy” at best, and usually presented this as an unproven Israeli accusation. The Post’s own reporters in Gaza documented how HAMAS uses hospitals a decade ago.