Since the Israelis responded militarily to the Hamas group which was behind the Pogrom of 7/10, Western media has been full of casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The Hamas supplied figures supplied to media organisations such as the BBC have been treated as being true representations of the casualty figures and especially civilian casualty numbers during the Israel-Gaza war.
But how accurate are the Hamas casualty figures? Many of us on the pro-Israel side have questioned the accuracy of casualty figures released to the media by Hamas. We have been critical not only because we support Israel against the cause of jihadist savagery, but because we know that it is the interests of Hamas to inflate casualty figures and therefore make Israel look bad in the eyes of Westerners. Hamas know that there are a large number of journalists in the West who will not check the figures they are given by Hamas and that the rebroadcasting of these figures will inflame the many ‘useful idiots’ that exist in the West and thereby put pressure on Western governments to in turn put pressure on Israel for a ceasefire that could only and would only benefit Hamas.
Now at last we have some sort of answer to how many civilians and Hamas fighters have perished in a war that Hamas started on 7/10. It’s an answer that many of us were expecting as it shows that Hamas were being less than honest or accurate with their casualty figures.
A report for The Henry Jackson Society and the Centre for New Middle East by Andrew Fox, a former Major in the British Parachute Regiment, has shown that not only did Hamas inflate civilian casualty figures but also that Western mainstream media such as the BBC, accepted Hamas casualty figures uncritically. This report , entitled ‘Questionable counting’, examines in great depth how Hamas were compiling death toll figures in Gaza and exposes how Hamas have downplayed the deaths of their fighters and in some cases have claimed that a dead fighter was in fact a civilian. The report outlines numerous other examples of the statistical debauchery of Hamas and how they used such bent death toll numbers to try to bolster their cause overseas.
The report concluded:
**Our investigation into the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health’s fatality reports during the conflict reveals widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process.
These distortions primarily result from flawed methodologies, including reliance on media reports and incomplete family submissions and the inclusion of non-conflict-related deaths such as natural causes and accidental fatalities. The MoH, operating under Hamas, the perpetrators of the 7 October massacre in Israel, 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 distortion of data not only creates a misleading picture of the conflict but also raises significant concerns about the credibility of the numbers being reported across the world. The global media’s uncritical acceptance and dissemination of these unreliable figures has compounded the issue, shaping public opinion and international discourse on the conflict in ways that may not reflect the reality on the ground.
Many media outlets fail to scrutinise the sources of the fatality data, often presenting the MoH figures as authoritative without question. This has led to a narrative where the IDF is portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants. This lack of transparency and clear attempts to inflate the civilian death toll further erode the credibility of the reporting.**
It’s clear from this report that Hamas were miscounting fighter deaths as civilian deaths and indeed shoving any death, even if that death came about by natural causes, into the ‘victims of Israeli aggression’ column. Anybody with any knowledge of the Middle East or politics or jihad or even a modicum of common sense, would have known that Hamas would inflate death tolls in order to make the Israelis look bad.
What is utterly baffling and for a Briton quite shaming, is that media organisations such as the BBC, accepted Hamas casualty figures as being honest and accurate, even when it would be highly likely that these figures were going to be inaccurate. Truth is often the first casualty of war and the BBC didn’t seem to make any credible attempt to ascertain what was or was not the truth or whether the figures given out by Hamas were either accurate or honest. This finding should shame the BBC into returning to journalistic accuracy with regards to foreign news stories and hopefully lead to many more people cancelling their Television Licences in disgust. I certainly hope that the revelation that the BBC has colluded with the genocidal jihadis of Hamas to publicise what is fake news on the subject of death tolls in Gaza will cause even more people cancel their TV Licence than the 500k who did so last year.
Those of us who have considered the Israeli death toll figures to be more accurate than those of Hamas have to a large extent been vindicated by this report. Whilst I admit that counting casualties in an active war zone is an inexact science, it certainly seems as if the Israelis have been more accurate and thorough in recording the deaths that they know of, than Hamas ever were.