Hamas’ Spokesman and Chief Liar was Formerly Gaza’s Minister of Health

Basem Naim is the main spokesman for Hamas, and thus in charge of lying to the world about the number of casualties in Gaza. But before he became the chief spokesman for the terror group, Naim was for many years the Gazan Minister of Health. Now he insists that “no Israeli civilians” were killed in the Hamas attacks on October 7. They were all, you see, soldiers. Even the babies, apparently. Even the children. Everyone understands that is an absurd lie. But when Basem Naim puts out entirely unverified numbers of “Gazans killed or wounded” by Israel, for some reason these figures are uncritically accepted by media around the world. They might at least append words of doubt, explaining that these figures on casualties in Gaza “are put out by Hamas, that has a long record of lying about the casualties it attributes to the IDF.” In truth, the international media have every reason to doubt the present figures, given Basem Naim’s long record of lying. None of us — save for Hamas, which has a long record of exaggerating the number of casualties attributed to the IDF — knows how many dead and wounded Gazans have resulted from the IDF’s counterattack since October 7. But so great is their anti-Israel animus that the international media are prepared to accept the inflated numbers of “civilian casualties” in Gaza that Naim now puts out. More on this former Minister of Health turned fulltime propagandist for Hamas can be found here: “Hamas’ chief liar, who denies Hamas killing a single Israeli civilian, used to be Gaza’s health minister!,” Elder of Ziyon, November 26, 2023:

Hamas spokesperson Basem Naim has been a staple on TV interviews, strenuously denying that Hamas killed any civilians in Israel on October 7 on multiple occasions.

I think we can safely say that the man is a liar, and will say the most ludicrous statements in the service of Hamas.

Now, guess what job her had from 2007-2012?

Basem Naim was Gaza’s health minister!

It is quite obvious that this position is simply meant to act as a terrorist mouthpiece. 

Yet the New York Times just published an analysis of civilian casualties based on the fake numbers that the Gaza health ministry issues.

They defend it by saying “International officials and experts familiar with the way figures are compiled by health officials in Gaza say the overall numbers are generally reliable.”

The Times ought to tell us which “international officials and experts” claim the figures put out by Hamas health officials are “generally reliable.” Then we might be able to look into their past records in calculating casualty figures. The Times wants us to put our faith in its assurances that it has relied on these unnamed “international officials and experts.” But if we don’t know anything about them, why should we be so trusting of their figures? Sorry, Grey Lady. No can do.

But they [those international officials and experts] are relying on outdated information.

In previous Gaza wars, there were independent NGOs in Gaza who also did their own counts of casualties. While their statistics of how many civilians were killed were quite skewed – they counted most terrorists as civilian – organizations like PCHR and Al Mezan were independent sources that kept the health ministry honest.

That is not the case this time. The NGOs gave up on trying to count casualties by day 5 because it was too dangerous for them, and since then, Hamas has owned all the information on casualties.

So, for example, when the Al Ahli hospital was bombed by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket, the ministry claimed 471 dead, even though no expert that looked at the damage accepted anything close to that number. But that was the only “official” number and the number of dead counted by the MoH increased by more than 500 on October 17….

The Hamas-run Ministry of Health insisted that “about 500” people were killed by airstrikes at the Al Ahli Hospital, and continued to parrot that claim when the intelligence services of several Western countries, including the United States, had concluded that the real number of casualties was “between 10 and 50.” The figure of “500” nonetheless remains in the Hamas Ministry of Health’s calculations of casualties.

The NGOs that were on the ground in previous conflicts in Gaza, and managed to keep the lying by Hamas within bounds, stopped working in Gaza after the fifth day of hostilities in this latest war; the raging battles simply made it too dangerous for its personnel to remain in the Strip. This meant that the only check on Hamas has been Hamas itself, which means that there is no check.

I have no idea how many civilians have been killed in Gaza to date. Nor does The New York Times, or the BBC, or The Guardian, but they and I differ — they won’t admit it. They insist that the figures put out by the Hamas Ministry of Health be reported, and taken seriously, without a hint of skepticism. We do know that Hamas does not distinguish between the deaths of civilians and the deaths of its own operatives. In Hamas’ view, just as no Israeli killed on October 7 was a civilian, so every Gazan who has been killed since October 7 was, according to Basem Naim, a civilian.

Think of how many false casualty figures have been put out by the Palestinians — not just by Hamas — in the past. I’ve already mentioned that claim of an “airstrike at Al-Ahli Hospital that killed 500,” which turned out to be, instead, a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that misfired and fell, not on the hospital itself, but on the parking lot of the hospital, and not 500, but between 10 and 50, Gazans died. There was the so-called “massacre of Jenin” in 2002. On April 7, 2002, a senior Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, suggested to CNN that some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the camp by the IDF. Five days later, when the fighting stopped, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI that the number of Palestinians killed was in the thousands. Stories of hundreds of civilians being killed in their homes as they were demolished spread throughout international media. Subsequent investigations found no evidence to substantiate claims of a massacre, and official totals from Palestinian and Israeli sources confirmed that between 52 and 54 Palestinians, and 23 IDF soldiers, were killed in the fighting. That’s not a massacre. Or think of the killings at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. There was a massacre of its inhabitants, but Israel was wrongly accused of taking part in it. The Israelis never entered those camps, and had no idea that the Christian militias would engage in mass killings of Palestinians. But much of the world continues to blame Israel, and not the real killers, for “Sabra and Shatila.”

Think of the false charge that the IDF had “in cold blood” murdered 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, when evidence about the trajectory of the bullet showed that the boy had in fact been shot by the Palestinians themselves. The only argument that now remains is whether or not the shooting was intentional, carried out in order to create a Palestinian “martyr” killed by Israel — or was simply a mistake.

One side, that of Hamas, has a history of lying about everything, but especially about casualties, first by wrongly blaming some on Israel, when Hamas itself was responsible, and about the number of casualties, exaggerating them sometimes by a factor of fifty. The other side, Israel, has a history of telling the truth, as when it was quick to reduce the number of Israelis killed on October 7 from 1400 to 1200, instead of keeping the higher figure to elicit more sympathy. When Israel determines that it is responsible for a death that had been previously in dispute, it promptly owns up, as it did in the case of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Given all that, shouldn’t the media be wary of passing along Hamas’ casualty figures without including, very prominently, a skeptical distancing from those figures? From now on, mark every statement made by Hamas with a mighty obelus.