Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Elder of ZiyonA key defense of Hamas statistics comes from Human Rights Watch:
Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements.“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”Shakir said Human Rights Watch would not use figures provided by parties with “a propensity to misrepresent information.”“We know that a health ministry is going to base [death tolls] on assessments coming from hospitals, morgues, etc.,” he said. “They have an ability to collect that in a way that other sources not there can’t do.”
HRW's Shakir is somewhat correct - about the past. The Gaza Health Ministry numbers were generally within perhaps 10-15% of the estimates given by others in previous Gaza conflicts.
This war is not at all like the other wars.
In all the previous Gaza wars, there were independent organizations on the round that could do their own reporting. In all the previous Gaza wars, the Gaza Health Ministry issued lists of the names of the dead where the lists could be checked against the names listed by NGOs like Al Mezan and PCHR and the UN-OCHA.
In other words, in previous wars, there were mechanisms to keep Gaza's Health Ministry honest. As someone who has spent hours checking the names myself, I can say that this time Hamas has kept a tight lid on information on casualties. (And Hams is also ensuring that it doesn't publish the names of of its own "martyrs," similar to previous wars, to make it appear that a higher percentage of the dead were civilian. Hamas has instructed Gazans for years to only refer to all the dead as "innocent civilians." )
This time, there are no lists of "martyrs." PCHR stopped its own reporting of the names of those killed after the second day of the war. And even then, it was careful to not report the names of those it knew were terrorists:
At 11:00 (October 7): Ameer ‘Abdullah Mohammed al-Khour (19) was killed when he was coincidingly passing by an area, where IOF’s warplanes were targeting Palestinian armed groups in southern Gaza City.
The names of the members of "armed groups" killed are carefully not reported - because Hamas doesn't want them to be.
This time, Hamas has ensured that it controls all the information coming out of Gaza. And once it has that control, it can exaggerate the casualty count at will, knowing that no one in Gaza would dare contradict it.
The most obvious example is the Al Ahli hospital bombing, where absolutely no analyst agrees that 471 people were killed. It is clear proof that the Ministry of Health has no compunction about lying to the world.
The hospital incident proves beyond any doubt that the health ministry lies and makes up casualty numbers out of thin air. And yet the Washington Post and HRW defend it.
The incident of the explosion at the convoy of cars heading south on Salah al-Deen Street on October 13 is similar. Israel is blamed for an airstrike even though it confirmed that it did not operate in the area at that time, and the explosion appears to be from an IED beneath the truck - meaning that Hamas evidently mined the road specifically to keep Gazans from fleeing. But beyond that extraordinary example of Hamas willingness to murder its own people that has been ignored in the media, the Hamas health ministry claimed 70 people were killed when video taken immediately afterwards showed no more than 12 bodies.
In a way, the Salah al Deen incident was a dress rehearsal for the Al Ahli hospital incident. Hamas saw that it could make up numbers with impunity and that the media will report them uncritically.
The ministry, of course, counts their inflated casualty figures at l Ahli and Salah al Deen in their authoritative sounding press releases.
In previous wars, never has the health ministry been so brazen in lying about incidents and in issuing obviously faked casualty statistics. That is quite enough for any real reporter to call out their track record of lies every time they mention them.
Beyond that, has any reporter actually read the ministry's Facebook page? There is nothing objective about it. Its language is the language of propaganda, not sober reporting. It even publishes obviously staged photos, complete with makeup:
In short, there is no reason to trust the health ministry, and every reason to assume that their statistics are lies.
There is another factor here: Hamas' unprecedented sadism and cruelty on October 7 should prompt every single reporter to question everything they have ever assumed about Gaza. Why would someone assume good faith from a group that wantonly murders children and rapes women? Would they trust ISIS press releases?
Which brings up the real question: how can the Washington Post write an article defending a ministry that has been proven to lie, that is part of the most vicious terror group on the planet today?
