The Palestinians' Fraudulent Casualty Figures, Exposed
"Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all."
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It boggles my mind that I need to dedicate an entire essay to demystifying the Palestinians’ flagrant lies, untruths, and propaganda, including but not limited to Hamas — you know, the world’s fifth-most active terrorist organization which has a massive sample size of some of the most sinister, repulsive, inhumane behaviors.
But such is the world we live in, apparently.
NGOs, media outlets, politicians, bureaucrats, and quasi-activists keep citing the (Hamas-run) “Gaza Healthy Ministry” as a credible, believable, reasonable source for Palestinian casualties in Gaza during the current Israel-Hamas war (which we have to incessantly remind many in the crowd that Hamas started on October 7th).
“The figures, repeated by everyone from the White House to the BBC, are freighted with familiarity: 30,000 dead in Gaza, 70 percent of whom are women and children,” wrote Jake Wallis Simons, editor of The Jewish Chronicle.1
Recently, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration seemed to give legitimacy to Hamas’ figures. When asked at a congressional hearing three weeks ago how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since October 7th, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.”
Biden himself earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.”
“Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real,” wrote Abraham Wyner, a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.”2
According to Wyner, there is potential evidence of deliberate fabrication in the Hamas-promoted numbers themselves. From October 26th until November 10th, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures which include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.
“The first place to look is the reported ‘total’ number of deaths,” wrote Wyner. “The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity.”
“This regularity is almost surely not real,” wrote Wyner. “One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15 percent. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.”
Similarly, Wyner wrote, we ought to see variation in the number of child casualties which tracks the variation in the number of women, because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels, which in turn should result in strong variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups.
“This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability,” wrote Wyner. “The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all.”
The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that approximately 70 percent of the casualties are women or children, a total which is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel.
Another red flag, raised by author Salo Aizenberg, is that if 70 percent of the casualties are women and children, and 25 percent of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low.3 This in and of itself significantly suggests that the numbers are, at best, grossly inaccurate and, at worst, completely manufactured.
Additionally, about a month ago Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represented more than 20 percent of the total number of casualties reported at the time. Taken together — women, children, and combatants — this is impossible unless Israel is somehow not killing non-combatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
(Israel estimates that at least 12,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed. If this number is relatively accurate, the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is unbelievably low: at most 1.4-to-1 and even as low as 1-to-1, compared to the UN-stated international average of 9 civilians to one combatant.)
The issue is not just that Hamas’ numbers are intentionally fraudulent, but that Israel is continuously blamed or held responsible for all deaths in Gaza, including when caused by Hamas and other non-Israel actors. To add insult to injury, our social media-driven world produces quick and easy “soundbites” of information, which are dangerously void of nuance, context, and depth.
Never mind that Hamas profusely uses human shields on a daily basis, or that it kills Gazans both purposely and incidentally, or that it groups combatant deaths with civilian ones into one big, round number. And that is just scratching the surface of Hamas’ unconscionably manipulative media circus.
Ahead of this past Monday’s IDF raid against Hamas terrorists at Al-Shifa Medical Complex (where Hamas operates its headquarters), the Gaza Health Ministry called on international NGOs to act as human shields to protect Hamas.
In a statement that also accused Israel of deliberately destroying Gaza’s health system and violating the Geneva Conventions, the ministry said, “We call on international institutions to immediately go to Al-Shifa Medical Complex to protect it and everyone inside it and prevent the specific Israeli targeting of it.”
There is no way that the administrators at Shifa did not know Hamas was hiding inside. A top leader of Hamas’ Interior Ministry had an office there. There were weapons caches and safes filled with terrorist money there. This means that they are asking NGOs to be human shields for Hamas. In a reference to international law, the ministry belligerently violated international law.
For those familiar with “Pallywood,” the term coined to describe the Palestinian industry of faking everything from casualty numbers to Israeli attacks, the fact that Hamas produces phony numbers is obviously self-evident.
But these casualty numbers matter. They are the vehicle through which anti-Israel propaganda is generated, while justifying demands for a “ceasefire” that leaves Israeli hostages in Palestinian captivity, as well as baseless accusations that the Jewish state is committing “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” or “forced displacement.”
These casualty numbers could also prevent Israel from resoundingly winning this war, thereby restoring desperately needed security to its people, deterrence to its enemies, and calm to the Middle East.
More specifically, the city of Rafah — which borders Egypt to the south and where more than a million Palestinians are reportedly sheltering after being evacuated from other combat zones in the strip — is the last Hamas stronghold, and quite possibly the key to defeating the terror group’s grip on governing power in Gaza.
Dozens of politicians and bureaucrats have warned against a major Israeli ground operation in Rafah, citing Hamas’ fraudulent civilian casualty numbers. What are these folks essentially telling Israel? You cannot attack Hamas military targets because there are civilians in the way and they might be killed. But you cannot ask civilians to get out of the way because then they will be displaced.
“The logical conclusion,” said Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy, “is that they are telling Israel not to attack Hamas at all.”4
One issue could be that, according to the United Nations, it is dangerous to evacuate civilians from Rafah because the rest of Gaza is “littered with unexploded ordinance.” In other words, Hamas booby-trapped tons of roads with explosives ahead of the IDF’s advance — a strategy to pressure the West by putting Israel in impossible predicaments and weaponizing Palestinian deaths produced by Hamas.
“The oft-leveled charge that ‘too many Palestinians have been killed’ implies that a smaller number would have been acceptable,” wrote Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “The history of our previous rounds of fighting with Hamas, each of which produced similar claims of ‘too many Palestinians killed,’ suggests that no such number exists.”5
“This could be the devastating proof that Hamas is faking its death figures.” The Telegraph.
“How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.” Tablet.
Aizenberg on X
Eylon Levy on Instagram
“The US Charge of ‘Indiscriminate Bombing’ is Over the Top.” Clarity With Michael Oren.
No wonder the woke have come to consider math racist. Abraham Wyner reminds me of Harry Markopolos, the finance guy who found a linear progression in Bernie Madoff’s returns. Investment portfolios never produce linear growth. War doesn’t produce linear growth in casualties either.
What a perfect world the Hamas Health Ministry lives in, when each day, a meticulous counting of bodies can create such a beautifully drawn graph. I saw this in the morning paper and couldn't help but think how high school students could create this graph, but then I thought this must have been UNRWA's classroom lessons on how to fudge numbers. The pathetic part is that so many believe this.