Friday, May 31, 2024
Elder of ZiyonIt shows both the number of fatalities that it "verifies" as well as the number with "incomplete data" that is issued by Hamas.
Comparing this report with the one from a month ago, it counted 656 deaths in Gaza this month. But the Hamas figures show 1,517 - more than double the number with documentation, and 861 deaths that have no documentation at all.
It isn't like there were any major airstrikes this month with hundreds of people under the rubble who cannot be identified. It is just that Hamas routinely makes up numbers and the ministry of health dutifully publishes them as fact.
Currently, 10,824 of the 36,171 deaths Hamas claims - 30% of them - do not have documentation. And this is after the health ministry has been trying to get Gazans to upload casualty information online, so if anything, the number of undocumented deaths should be decreasing, not increasing.
Unlike previous reports, it does not break down the statistics of women, children and elderly, so we cannot know how much Hamas exaggerated those numbers this month.
The report, which used to be 45 pages long, is only 8 pages long now.
We have been seeing reports of particularly heavy fighting this month. From news reports, one would think that the number of casualties in May have been higher than we've seen in months. Yet even according to the inflated Hamas numbers, fewer Gazans have been killed this month than for any month since the war started, and those numbers have been steadily decreasing.
If the fighting is heavier and the death toll is going down, that means that Israel is getting better every month at reducing the number of civilians killed in the most difficult type of urban warfare where the enemy deliberately places civilians in harm's way.
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