The Gaza health ministry keeps two sets of books. The media is only interested in one of them.

From the start of the war, the Gaza Ministry of Health has been maintaining two separate, contradictory sets of statistics on the "martyrs" of Gaza.

One started out as daily video briefings and then became press releases on their Facebook and other social media. Those statistics were identical to the ones released by the Gaza Media Office of Hamas.

The other one was a far more detailed report that had been issued every few days for months. The most recent one was 45 pages long. 

Those two sets of statistics contradict each other. 

The health ministry tried very hard to reconcile the two in the detailed report. During April, it divided up the "martyrs" into three categories: those who were counted directly from hospital visits, those who were reported by families of the victims that were deemed credible, and the amorphous category of "martyrs who do not have complete data." 

On the last detailed report, the ministry described these categories this way:

The cumulative number of martyrs since the beginning of the aggression has reached 34,654 martyrs, of whom 24,691 have complete data with the Ministry of Health (20,976 are listed in the Ministry of Health’s records and 3,715 have been reported by their families), in addition to 9,963 martyrs who do not have complete data.

The last category is largely fictional. On every report, the difference between the "complete data" and "incomplete data" deaths magically added up to exactly what the Hamas media office claimed that day. Yet the media office would also claim 72% of the victims were women and children, while the detailed MoH statistics showed that they only counted about 51% women and children - and even if every single one of the "martyrs who do not have complete data" were women and children, a statistical impossibility, it still wouldn't add up to 72%.  

In other words, the Hamas media office makes up numbers every day, and the health ministry has no choice but to report them so as not to call their bosses liars. 

That became increasingly impossible over time as independent researchers started pointing out that the two sets of books were irreconcilable and Hamas must be lying. This called into question the oft-cited total that Hamas made up of 10,000 more "martyrs" than had actually been counted. 

So the health ministry stopped reporting the detailed statistics publicly. Their last report was released on May 3. They now only parrot the Hamas media office numbers and no longer embarrass Hamas with their other report that contradicts Hamas numbers. 

Like crooked accountants, the health ministry maintains two sets of books, and one of them is now secret. 

The media has never been interested in the the "verified" MoH statistics. They have only reported on the higher media office number repeated by the MoH, thereby  giving it more authority, even though the MoH knows it is lying when it parrots the Hamas numbers.  For example, today's New York Times repeats its boilerplate statement, "The situation in Gaza remains dire. More than 34,000 people have died and more than 77,000 have been wounded, according to health authorities in the territory."

The existence of two sets of books is public knowledge. The old detailed reports are still available for any news organization to read for themselves and see for themselves that the two sets of numbers are irreconcilable. 

Yet, for all the thousands of articles on the Gaza war, no major media organization is interested in this clear case of how Hamas is manipulating them with false statistics. They simply ascribe the highest casualty counts to "health authorities" who are knowingly, provably lying.  

Reuters recently looked at the issue, and only briefly alluded to the inconsistencies, falsely claiming the "incomplete data" 10,000 were actual bodies that had been counted, based on a PA health ministry statement. Instead of looking at the actual numbers to see the contradictions, it airly reported:

In May the ministry updated its breakdown of the fatalities to be based only on the 24,686 bodies it said had been fully identified, and not on the more-than 10,000 bodies it said have not yet been identified.

When it made this change, the numbers appeared significantly less, prompting Israel to raise further questions over the figures.

This didn't happen in May - they had been keeping this other set of books for months. The Gaza MoH never claimed it had 10,000 bodies, or else it would have broken down them by gender and age

Reuters is not interested in the truth. 

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 I am not even discussing the thousands of alleged "martyrs" whose names the MoH released with missing or impossible IDs. Which means that even the 24,000 number is exaggerated, by as many as 4,000 people.

If Israel's estimate of killing 14,000 militants is accurate, that means one of two things:

1. The 14,000 dead are included in the 20,000 - which would make civilians only 30% of the total casualties, which would be astonishing.

2. As in previous wars, Hamas is not admitting its own dead during the war, which would mean that there are indeed 34,000 killed of whom 14,000 are jihadists, which is still a very low civilian to militant ration for any urban war. 

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