The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.
AP even implies that the total number of reported deaths may be understated:
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, said his group has always found the Health Ministry’s numbers to be “generally reliable” because it has direct access to hospitals and morgues.Whatever the reason for fewer women and child being killed, Shakir said, in the grand scheme, the trend pales when compared with the war’s overall devastation. “The death toll may be an undercount,” he added, because many bodies are still under rubble and the war has made it difficult for the Health Ministry to comprehensively gather data.
AP then claims that the differences between the detailed health ministry numbers and the total amount is from bodies that have not been identified:
The ministry said publicly on April 30 that 34,622 had died in the war. The AP analysis was based on the 22,961 individuals fully identified at the time by the Health Ministry with names, genders, ages, and Israeli-issued identification numbers.The ministry says 9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data because they remain “unidentified.” These include bodies not claimed by families, decomposed beyond recognition or whose records were lost in Israeli raids on hospitals.
Perhaps there are a couple of hundred such bodies, but the vast majority of the difference in the two counts is that most of the 10,000 without complete data are made up.
We saw the Hamas "Gaza Media Office" make up statistics on Saturday. Its Telegram channel claimed 210 dead in the Israeli rescue operation in Nusseirat, but the health ministry did not as of this writing make that claim, only saying 55 at a press conference on Saturday afternoon. The 210 figure was made up by the Hamas media office, and wasn't based on anything the health ministry had released.
Just as the media office had been making up fake "women and children" casualties, it has also been making up fake total numbers of casualties. AP recognizes the inconsistencies in one - knowing that Hamas is lying - but still believes the other claims even with tons of evidence that these claims are wholly fictional.
Anyone who covered the Al Ahli hospital incident, where Hamas immediately claimed 471 victims while no Western source believed it, knows that Hamas has been lying since the beginning of the war. It is unconscionable and immoral for the media to keep reporting the Hamas lies when they know they are lies themselves.
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