American Academic Claims Israeli Killings in Gaza Worse Than Darfur

An American professor, Alan J. Kuperman, who has no doubt read many times that famous work “How To Lie With Statistics,” has now come out with a study that claims more civilians are being killed by the IDF in Gaza than the black African civilians killed by the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed in Darfur, Sudan.

More on his statistical legerdemain can be found here: “US Academic Skews Stats in The Guardian To Compare Gaza To Worst Recent Genocides,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, April 18, 2024:

Statistics have been used to devastating effect since the outbreak of the October 7 war.

From Hamas-curated death tolls reported in the Gaza Strip to the disputes over the number of aid trucks entering the Strip, the spread of misleading or outright false data has done considerable harm to Israel’s reputation.

The latest example of such stats being weaponized to smear Israel comes in the form of an op-ed by Alan J Kuperman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, whose research reportedly focuses on the causes and preventions of genocide.

Unfortunately, Kuperman’s expertise in the crime of genocide hasn’t stopped him from fudging his calculations to supposedly make the case for the greatest and most persistent anti-Israel libel in existence: that it is committing genocide against the Palestinians.

In ‘Civilian deaths in Gaza rival those of Darfur – which the US called a “genocide”,’ the academic states the “death rate in Gaza has equaled or exceeded that in three other recent cases that US presidents did call ‘genocide’.”

Comparing the war in Gaza to the outbreak of the still-ongoing Darfur war in 2003, Kuperman writes that from “late 2003 to early 2004” up to 10,000 civilians were killed per month, in addition to the displacement of 2 million civilians.

He goes on to compare this to Gaza, claiming that Israel retaliated to the October 7 Hamas massacre “by attacking Gaza so indiscriminately that nearly 20,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, were killed during the first two months alone.”

How does Kuperman know that there were “20,000 Palestinians” killed during the first two months of the Gaza war, when the only figures, unverified and almost certainly exaggerated, come from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry? And how can he be sure that these were “mostly civilians”?

“In January, a US official confirmed that ‘more than 25,000 civilians have been killed’. Gaza officials now say the toll exceeds 33,000 people. Netanyahu himself has conceded 28,000 deaths,” he adds.

In January 2024 the US confirmed only a total death toll of 25,000, the figure provided by Hamas, which did not break down the number into civilians and combatants killed.

Kuperman argues these figures demonstrate that Israel’s “killing rate of civilians in Gaza is roughly equivalent to that in Darfur and higher than in the other two recent cases, all of which our government labeled ‘genocide’.”

First, the headline of Kuperman’s piece claims “civilian deaths in Gaza rival those in Darfur,” which misleadingly implies there has been an equivalent death toll. But in the piece, Kuperman fails to state the overall number of civilian deaths in Darfur, instead referring to the average number of people who died during an undefined period from the start of the Darfur conflict.

The total deaths in the seven months of the Gaza War, according to the unverifiable, and likely exaggerated, figure put out by Hamas, are 34,000. The total number of Hamas and PIJ combatants killed in that same period, according to the IDF estimate, are 15,000. That means the total number of civilians killed so are 19,000, and the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths 19:15, which is lower, according to both British Colonel Richard Kemp and West Point Professor John Spencer, than any civilian-to-combatant ratio achieved by any other army in the history of warfare. You won’t be hearing about that from Professor Kuperman.

He states that the Gaza death toll reached 33,000 in the six months since the war began (an average of 5,500 per month). However, he then claims that the “killing rate of civilians” matches that of Darfur, where 10,000 were killed from “late 2003 to early 2004.” Misleadingly, he is actually comparing the first two months of the October 7 war, during which 20,000 people in Gaza were killed. Of these, 7,000 were confirmed as Hamas terrorists, resulting in a civilian death count of 13,000.

Remember that the world is supplied with statistics on Gaza deaths by the Health Ministry that is supplied with its figures from Hamas. And Hamas provides only a total, without separating civilian from combatant deaths. Hamas has a long history of exaggerating civilian deaths. Remember the “Jenin massacre,” when Hamas accused the IDF of killing “500 civilians.” Subsequent investigation by the IDF, and the Americans, determined that 52 people had died, at least 45 of whom were terrorists. Another example is the Hamas claim that an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza had resulted in — again — “500 deaths.” It turned out, as both the Israeli and American intelligence agencies confirmed, that there had not been any Israeli airstrike. Instead, a rocket launched from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had misfired, and landed short, on the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Hospital, but not on the hospital itself. And instead of 500 people killed, there were between 10 and 50 deaths. We can’t be sure of how many civilians died in Gaza, but we can be sure that whatever figure Hamas gives out, it is certain to be greatly exaggerated. We may never know the real figures.