In late February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message to superiors shacked up in ritzy Qatari hotels, reminding them that “high civilian casualties [in Gaza] would add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war.”
Indeed, starting wars and then cowering behind civilians, churning out martyrs, lying about death tolls, and putting on low-budget Pallywood productions for credulous Western audiences is almost as old as Palestinian nationalism itself.
And for over seven months now, world leaders, American politicians, “experts,” and many establishment media figures have regurgitated the wholly unverified casualty numbers provided to them by a terror organization. It is a detestable abdication of duty that feeds the delusions of the far-left/Islamist alliance that’s infected college campuses, media organizations, and the U.S. government. Namely, it gives credibility to the “genocide” myth.
There are the usual offenders — United Nations, The Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, and other organs of the left — but perhaps for the first time in history, the White House has also given these lies credence. In a Ramadan message to the Islamic world, Joe Biden repeated the fantastical claim that “[m]ore than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children” by Israelis. Samantha Power, now administrator of USAID, made the same claim during National Arab American Heritage Month.
This is roughly the equivalent of using al-Qaeda propaganda in the middle of the invasion of Afghanistan or repeating Russian information in a Christmas message to Europe.
Last week, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs dramatically revised casualties, halving its child fatality numbers from an imaginary 14,500 deaths to an imaginary 7,797 and its women fatalities from 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths. These seem like pretty big discrepancies.
You know why that happens? Because it is all just made up.
Yet, in February, when anti-Israel Rep. Ro Khanna asked Lloyd Austin, “How many Palestinian women and children have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7?” the secretary of defense answered, “It’s over 25,000.”
The Pentagon later walked back that insane number, claiming Austin had inadvertently spread unverified stats. Why would one of the most powerful men in the United States government reflexively give an imaginary death toll as an answer? Why did the president? Why did others in the administration? Because they are trying to create a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel to placate the left flank for 2024.
Let’s set aside the fact that Palestinian casualty numbers include not only apparitions but anyone who perishes from natural causes, misfired rockets, old age, or executions and murder. More pertinently, Hamas doesn’t distinguish between civilians and armed terrorists. The IDF estimates it has killed around 15,000 terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad — some of them, believe it or not, are “women and children” — which is a better civilian-to-combatant ratio in an urban warfare setting than perhaps any in history.
Now, you have no reason to be un-skeptical about Israel’s contentions. All governments will lie. You will notice, however, that only one entity in this conflict is the go-to source for most of the media — and it is not our allies.
If you’re going to argue that the administration and media were merely relying on statistics that were available, they should have known better. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a report back in January debunking the “Gaza Health Ministry numbers” the UN relies on. Another study by three professors concluded that the oft-repeated 70 percent civilian casualty rate was statistically impossible.
Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, also debunked the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, which were a near-perfect incremental daily uptick, despite the vagaries of battle and numerous other factors. Wyner theorizes that the fake daily numbers vary so little because Hamas does “not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.”
Everyone knows the claims are fake.
Remember that it took Israel, a sophisticated nation, weeks to sift through the carnage of Oct. 7 to get a proper tally of the dead. And yet, miraculously, whenever an Israeli attack is carried out, within hours — sometimes minutes — Hamas determines not only the number of dead but often their ages and sex and whether or not they were civilians.
Don’t get me wrong, Hamas wants more dead women and children. If it didn’t, the group would unconditionally surrender and return the men they kidnapped and women they sexually tortured. That would lead to an immediate cessation of violence. If Israel were in the business of “genocide,” as so many ignoramuses contend, it could have carpet-bombed the place rather than providing it water, electricity, and agricultural equipment for many years.
But, tragically, it is impossible to upend the terror apparatus without some civilian casualties. Hamas is counting on it. And it’s also counting on Westerners, now including the administration, to help it spread its lies.
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