Why Should Anyone Trust Hamas’ Casualty Figures?

Eric Rozenman discusses the credulous acceptance by news media of Hamas’ figures on casualties in Gaza — figures that appear to have been made up out of whole cloth — here: “Hamas’ Gaza Casualties Can’t Be Trusted; Biden Was Right the First Time,” by Eric Rozenman, Times of Israel, December 6, 2023:

News outlets have reported nearly 16,000 deaths in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as Israel attempts to remove the group that slaughtered 1,200 Israelis on October 7, and many innocent Jews in the preceding years.

But Gaza casualty figures come from the Hamas-run health ministry.

Hamas’ full name is the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. Its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and a genocide of Jews. By 1995 the United States had designated Hamas — funded, armed, and trained by Iran — a terrorist organization.

The group’s casualty figures, usually said to comprise “mostly women and children” are used to destroy support for Israel on the world stage, and put pressure on President Joe Biden to let Hamas survive. The demand that Israel stop or reduce its campaign – dressed as concern over “indiscriminate” Israeli attacks, comes from administration staffers, congressional Democrats and America’s post-liberal, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish left.

So, the Biden administration, which botched the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and failed to discourage Vladimir Putin before he launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, now attempts to direct and manage Israel’s war against Hamas.

There are good reasons to doubt statistics from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (more on that below). But assume momentarily the casualty count is correct. Do likewise with Israel’s late November estimate that it had killed up to 4,000 terrorists.[in fact, in late November the IDF said it had killed 5,000 terrorists]. That leaves approximately 11,000 noncombatant Palestinian Arab fatalities.

Four thousand dead gunmen to 11,000 noncombatant fatalities is a proportion of 2.63 to 1. In 2015, the United Nations put noncombatant-to-combatant deaths caused by US and British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq at between 3:1 and 4:1.

In other words, noncombatants killed by the IDF were a smaller percentage of the overall casualty numbers in Gaza than was the case in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American and British forces fought to suppress Islamic insurgents.

And that’s assuming Hamas’ numbers can be trusted. But they can’t be.

After the 50-day Israel-Hamas 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, Gen. Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that Israel had gone out of its way to minimize non-combatant casualties, including by warning civilians of pending attacks in their neighborhoods.

The IDF in October dropped 1.5 million leaflets in northern Gaza, urging residents to flee to the south, as the north would soon become the main battlefield. And it continued to warn people away from the north, so successfully that 90% of them in the end did leave and moved southward. Furthermore, the IDF continues to warn people in Gaza away from civilian buildings about to be targeted, by emailing, telephoning, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. These warnings of course also allow Hamas operatives to escape, but the IDF persists in this practice in order to minimize civilian casualties, despite the harm it does to its military operations.

The IDF has done the same in current fighting, dropping leaflets, making phone calls by Arabic-speaking IDF soldiers, and otherwise urging civilians to flee from Hamas targets. As Daniel Pomerantz pointed out, Israel even fired against Hamas soldiers to protect Palestinian civilians.

According to Lenny Ben-David, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Hamas’ current figures are essentially “fanciful propaganda statistics.” That’s because after the 2014 war, which Hamas provoked by kidnapping and murdering three Israelis, its health ministry stopped specifying fatalities by age and sex.

Now Hamas lumps all Gazan deaths since October 7 together. This includes all Hamas terrorists; the approximately 750 who died of natural causes through November 30, per CIA calculations; the hundreds supposedly killed by strikes at the al-Ahli Hospital (by the errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile) in the Jabalya refugee district (more likely 40 to 50 combined as suggested by photographs); and an unknown number of “collaborators” killed by Hamas or its junior partner, the Iranian-supported PIJ….

How do we know the number of Gazans killed and wounded? The answer is: we don’t. We have no idea by how much Hamas inflates its figures. There has been practically no visual or other evidence presented by Hamas to support its claims. For example, only one mass grave for 110 KIA, has been filmed by the terror group; had there been others, Hamas would certainly have made those visuals available. Nor does Hamas distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths; it simply lists the total number of casualties without distinguishing them, no doubt hoping that most will be considered by the credulous media to have been “innocent civilians.” The media have largely done as Hamas predicted, by referring over and over again to “a deeply disturbing figure of 16,000 dead Gazans.”

It is only when the war is over, leaving the IDF in control of the Strip and thus able to investigate more systematically the number of enemy fatalities, that something like the true figures will be possible to calculate. Not only will gravesites and tunnels, whether intact or reduced to rubble, be available for inspection throughout Gaza, but captured Hamas combatants can be interrogated as to their direct knowledge of the group’s casualties. Ordinary Gazans, too, can be questioned as to their knowledge of the numbers of non-combatants who were killed or wounded. Then we will see how many Hamas combatants were killed, and how many Gazan civilians. One Israeli expert claims that Hamas is overstating the number killed by 50% — which would mean, in early December, that not 16,000 but 8,000 Gazans have been killed by the first week in December. And Israel, which has a long record of telling the truth, thinks that in the first two months of war the IDF has managed to kill “about 5,000” Hamas members. If both estimates are correct — 8,000 killed in Gaza, and 5,000 Hamas KIA, that would mean that by December 7, only 3,000 civilians in Gaza had been killed, not the “16,000” that the media is credulously reporting as “total killed,” without mentioning that that figure given out by Hamas includes both combatants and non-combatants.

For now, any figures put out by Hamas should be rejected as spurious. Can the international media hold back from transmitting Hamas’ false numbers and wait for the IDF (possibly allowing American experts to join in the investigation, and the calculation, of casualties) to present its figures, and how they were arrived at? Not likely, for they know how eager their audience is to be provided with such casualty figures. So we will, by mid-December, have Hamas releasing a figure of “20,000 dead, most of them women and children” as phony as every other figure Hamas has provided the world since October 7. Israel can’t issue a correction insisting that that number is 1) greatly exaggerated and 2) counts combatant losses as non-combatant deaths, because such a correction will seem to the world not as necessary truth-telling, but as a “callous” attitude of the IDF about the “tremendous loss of civilian life.”