Israel Releases New Figures on Hamas Casualties at Gaza School

Israel has been severely criticized for its strike on August 11 on what has been misleadingly described as a “school” or as a “school and a mosque” in Gaza. In fact, the IDF struck a building that had been a school, but was not being used as one (It’s summer, and school is out). Rather, it was, the Israelis maintained, a Hamas command-and-control center. That is why there were so many Hamas combatants at the site — the IDF first provided the names of 19 Hamas members who were killed. Now it has doubled the number of Hamas members killed whom it has positively identified, even providing their names. And it says that “more may be identified in the future.” More on this latest information from the IDF can be found here: “IDF names 12 more terrorists killed in Gaza school strike, no answer on civilians,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, August 12, 2024:

The IDF on Monday named 12 more terrorists who it says were killed in its airstrike on the Al-Taabin school complex in the Daraj-Tuffah area of northern Gaza on Saturday, increasing the total number of named terrorists to 31.

And later the same day, the IDF said it had identified seven more members of Hamas who were killed in the attack on the command-and-control center inside the school that had been struck by three Israeli missiles, bringing the total to 38.

Initially, the IDF said that it could name at least 19 of 24 terrorists that it said it had killed and had known were for sure on location from its intelligence collection sources.

Eventually, the IDF added that it had probably killed Islamic Jihad’s brigade commander for central Gaza and disputed Hamas’s claims that the airstrike had also killed over 90 civilians.

However, the IDF has not addressed how many civilians may have been killed, only saying that it was most unlikely that its three precise small missiles could have been able to kill that many people, whether civilians or terrorists.

At the same time, on Sunday, the Jerusalem Post confronted the IDF with specific claims from Palestinian West Bank parliament member Mustafa Barghouti, who said that two of the alleged terrorists whom the IDF said it had killed at the school had been killed elsewhere, and that other alleged terrorists listed were minors.

The IDF said it did not yet have information to address those claims while still maintaining a general denial of any wrongdoing.

Earlier, IDF Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani had also said that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were actively using the school and a nearby mosque to plan attacks against the IDF….

Why else would so many Hamas and PIJ members, nearly 40, have been at the school building and the nearby mosque, if not to hide themselves from Israeli attack while they planned, at their makeshift command-and-control center, their next attacks on the Zionist enemy?

The aerial before-and-after videos showed quite clearly that the school-and-mosque complex was still almost entirely intact. The three small missiles the IDF used were fired at only one part of the compound: that part of the prayer-hall where only men—never women and children — were allowed to pray.

As to those videos of wounded and dead women and children that Hamas has released, those might have been filmed any where, and at any time, in the last ten months, or even earlier. We know that Hamas is a past master of deception. Just because it claims those bodies wrapped in white shrouds, those children, splattered with blood, crying and wailing, were victims of the IDF’s “bombing of a school” in Gaza on August 10, we have no way of verifying this Hamas claim. The terror group has been known in the past to show photos and videos of wounded and dead women and children that were taken in other places and at other times. Some of those photographs and videos could have been taken in other conflicts, including some that did not even involve either Israel or Hamas. We have a right to be wary of the Hamas claims about 93 Gazans killed in this latest raid. We just don’t know. But we do know that Hamas takes its cue from Muhammad himself, when in a celebrated hadith he is reported to have said “War is deception.”

There may have been 93 people killed, or 73, or 53. We just don’t know, and it is monstrous for the world’s media to report a claim by Hamas as if it must surely be true, given the terror group’s long record of exaggerating the number of casualties on the Palestinian side. Let’s not forget the “500 civilians” who were supposedly killed by the IDF in what was labelled “the massacre at Jenin.” A subsequent investigation showed that not 500, but 52 Palestinians died, and at least 45 of them were members of Hamas, meaning that instead of “500 civilians” killed, there were — at most — seven. Then there was the claim by Hamas that an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Hospital had killed “500 civilians. ” It turned out that there had been no Israeli airstrike. Instead, a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad toward Israel had misfired, fallen short in Gaza, and landed in a parking lot next to the hospital, not on the hospital itself. And there were not 500, but 50 people killed in that strike.

We have no idea how many people actually died in the latest attack on August 10. Hamas says 93 were killed. They offer no proof. The one thing we can be certain of is that at least 38 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad were killed in that attack; their names have been released by the IDF. Let’s pretend to accept Hamas’ figure of a total of 93 deaths among the Palestinians. After we deduct 38 members of Hamas and the PIJ from that total of 93, we are left with a maximum number of 55 civilians killed. The civilian-to-combatant ratio can now be calculated as 55:38, or 1.5:1. That is a lower ratio than has been achieved by any other military, in any other conflict, in the history of warfare. That is what the media should be focusing on and explaining to their audiences. But they won’t say a word about it. Such information would make the Israelis look good. And that, of course, will never do.