SHOCKER! Gaza Death Toll Number ‘Totally Unreliable’

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You’ve got to hand it to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Their inventiveness and outright fraudulent methods of calculating the number of deaths during the war between Hamas and Israel are deserving of some kind of international recognition.

Sorry, they are already getting plenty of press. Their bogus numbers are reported in the world’s leading media outlets as the gospel truth. A few discerning media sources add the note that the ministry is run by Hamas, and even fewer report that the numbers do not differentiate between civilian and military casualties. 

The 44,000 dead Palestinians reported by the Gaza Health Ministry is pure, unadulterated propaganda. Numbers from the ministry have always been propaganda, and the fact that the world’s media pretends they’re even close to being accurate is one of the more sickening aspects of the war’s coverage.

We can all agree that any civilian deaths in war are tragic. But the issue here is whether or not Israel is deliberately targeting civilians to kill them (“genocide”). And while there have been accidents and mistakes typical of what happens in any war (more so because Hamas uses civilians as human shields), there is no evidence that Israel is deliberately and systematically targeting Palestinian civilians to kill them.

A new study on Gaza casualty figures by the Henry Jackson Society exposes the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers as the propaganda we’ve always known them to be.

The New York Sun interviewed one of the authors of the study, Andrew Fox, who told the outlet, “These casualty lists are totally unreliable. From methodology, to mistakes and flaws in the data — it just shouldn’t be used by the world’s media.” 

The report further suggests that the ministry inflates the number of female and child fatalities by routinely recording dead males as women or children. In August of 2024 alone, 103 individuals who were recorded under the female fatality list had male names, like Mohammed, according to the report.

In other cases, the ministry revised downward the ages of victims. When the researchers compared the first 1,000 names on the population registries for October 2023 and July 2024, they found that more than 100 individuals had turned one year younger. Some age misclassifications were more drastic: researchers found that an individual aged 22 was listed as a four-year-old and a 31-year-old was listed as an infant.

The authors write, “This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing international sentiment and media coverage.”

Perhaps the most egregious example of outright fraud in the ministry reporting the death toll in Gaza was their including 5,000 deaths of cancer patients. 

These are known as “indirect deaths,” which was a methodology discredited two decades ago when the British medical journal The Lancet published a bogus study a week before the U.S. presidential election in 2004 that surmised there were an estimated 98,000 excess Iraqi deaths at a time when the Iraqi government was estimating less than 15,000.  

“I expected the media stats to be bad,” Mr. Fox told the Sun, “but I didn’t expect them to be as bad as they are.” 

It’s only propaganda if the media allows it to be.

While 98 percent of the articles included in the analysis cited figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, fewer than 2 percent acknowledged that the statistics were unverifiable or contested. Only 3 percent of articles even bothered to include the number of combatants in reported fatality totals. The lax scrutiny, however, didn’t extend to the data supplied by Israeli sources — 50 percent of articles which cited Israeli-sourced statistics questioned their credibility.  

The media hasn’t faced much criticism for reporting bogus numbers. The authors note, “This failure means that the narrative has been distorted into something that misrepresents the situation in Gaza. This affects public opinion, influences policy-making and has broader implications for international relations and conflict resolution.”

How many Hamas fighters were killed? Israel and U.S. intelligence believe that at least 17,000 terrorists have been killed while many more legitimate military targets including support staff and command and control staff were also killed. We’ll never get an accurate count of dead civilians in Gaza.

Truth is, indeed, the first casualty of war.