Who is telling the truth?
Let's look at the full Reuters quote in context:
Furthermore, according to Hamas, the total victory promised by Netanyahu won't be quick or easy.A Hamas official based in Qatar told Reuters that the group estimated it had lost 6,000 fighters during the four-month-old conflict, half the 12,000 Israel says it has killed.Gaza's ruling group can keep fighting and is prepared for a long war in Rafah and Gaza, said the official, who requested anonymity."Netanyahu's options are difficult and ours are too. He can occupy Gaza but Hamas is still standing and fighting. He hasn't achieved his goals to kill the Hamas leadership or annihilate Hamas," he added.
The context around the quote is that this official is trying to get the world to pressure Israel not to fight in Rafah. If the fighting is going to be protracted and impossible to achieve its goals, then no one would support it.
Israel has already shown that predictions of how the war would go were all wrong. We can objectively see that the number of rockets fired from Gaza has gone down to close to zero, that Israeli forces have control over most of the sector, and that Hamas is disorganized and has little in the way of a command structure.
As we've noted from the start, Hamas' strategy is based on lying. It knows that whatever it says is assumed true even by the media that knows it is being lied to. This is partially a cognitive war and Hamas is fighting that part very well.
Now, realistically, how can an anonymous Hamas official in Qatar have any idea of what the real casualty count is? It appears that communication between Gaza and Hamas leaders outside have been sporadic at best. And Hamas in Rafah probably has no ability to even know how many of its members have been killed or captured elsewhere in Gaza.
The "6,000" figure is indeed the first admission by any Hamas official that any terrorists have been killed since the first week of the war. It is high enough to be believable, low enough to convince Western nations that this war will go on for another year with tens of thousands of additional civilian casualties (based, again, on Hamas numbers.)
But it isn't an admission. It is a number made up by Hamas propagandists, just as they decided that a figure of "70% women and children" sounded realistic enough not to check and the daily statistics sent out adjusted to bring the "official" tally in sync with the diktat. It should be looked upon as a bare minimum number that even Hamas cannot deny, not an actual estimate. It is quite realistic to assume that the real numbers are double that figure.
Oh, and another Hamas official denied the figure.
Everything Hamas says is a lie meant to get military advantage by portraying Gaza as being victim of a genocide and Hamas as a ghostlike, unbeatable fighting force that has destroyed a significant number of Israel's tanks.
Here's yet more proof.
The official Hamas ministry of health wrote about Nasser Medical Center yesterday: "The electricity is still cut off at Nasser Medical Complex for 3 days, which has led to the shortage of oxygen from patients." And today they added, "25 medical teams and 136 patients in Nasser Medical Complex without electricity, water, food, oxygen and treatment capabilities for difficult cases"
Now, here are screenshots from a video in Sky News Arabia showing Nasser Medical Center yesterday, after three days of "no electricity:"
It sure looks like the lights - and medical equipment in the middle photo - are on. Which means they are also lying about patients dying because of no oxygen due to the power shortage. If they only have a limited amount of electricity, perhaps from solar panels, real doctors would direct all the electricity towards the ICUs and dim the lights in the hallways, removing 2 out of every 3 light panels in the ceiling. They clearly have not done that.
So who are you going to believe, the Hamas health ministry that also claims 29,000 dead, or your own eyes?
For some reason, reporters simply cannot believe that a smiling terrorist would lie to their faces. And this has been a problem for many years.
