The head of the polling institute says it is "highly unlikely" that this happened, since he trusts his Gaza team, but he will investigate.
The IDF published two translated documents from Hamas. (The translations appear accurate from the Arabic.) One of them is a three page general description by Hamas of its influence operations including survey manipulation, and the other was specifically about how they changed the poll numbers from Gaza for the PCPSR March survey.
The first document also detailed other influence operations. And that is the real story that everyone is missing.
Hamas' influence operations are much more sophisticated than one would expect. They have control of social media accounts with over a million followers, they claim to have been able to take down pages and accounts of anti-Hamas and pro-Fatah activists, they have contacts at Al Jazeera who do what they ask (they mention Tamer Almisshal specifically,) they silence opponents by "canceling" them and getting others to threaten them.
There is no published date on the first document. The second one, about the March poll, was certainly recent.
Analyzing the poll data and comparing them to the published PCPSR poll from March, they are claiming to only influence the Gaza numbers of the survey, not the West Bank stats.
Corroborating evidence for the manipulation comes from comparing a similar question between the PCPSR poll and an AWRAD poll, asking Gaza residents who they want to control the Gaza Strip after the war. PCPSR says 52% want Hamas. the leaked document claims the real number was 32%, while AWRAD a couple of months later says only 6% of Gazans prefer a Hamas led government.
If we accept that these are legitimate documents and that Hamas has a massive influence operation with hundreds of employees (they claim 160 employee on Internet operations alone), then what other information is Hamas manipulating?
Let's review the claims of famine in Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says that as of June, 342,000 Gazans were in Phase 5 famine conditions, and they predicted that nearly half a million would be there in September. They base these definitions on measuring households with an extreme lack of food, percentage of children facing acute malnutrition and mortality rates.
That is a huge disconnect between the three, and it indicates that the other statistics that IPC is basing its analysis on are flawed.
If Hamas manipulates surveys of public opinion, wouldn't they also manipulate surveys of household access to food? The only way to measure that is ...surveys! And wouldn't they try to manipulate the reported numbers of children with malnutrition and even the results of upper arm circumference tests?
Qualitatively speaking, there are very few photos of starving children in Gaza. The media publishes the same couple of children over and over again while their parents and siblings appear well fed. We are not seeing photos that resemble those of famine stricken areas elsewhere worldwide. But according to IPC, the only place in the world with more people in Phase 5 than Gaza is Sudan.
Does this make any sense?
Given that the charge of "famine" generates headlines worldwide, wouldn't there be a huge effort by Hamas to threaten, cajole, or bribe the people gathering data, or those reporting data? And many of them might be Hamas members already, since no one gets a public health job in Gaza without Hamas approval.
We've already seen how much Hamas is willing to lie on casualty counts. This document indicates that their propaganda operations are far more extensive than anyone has reported. If the document is real, and nothing indicates it is not, then it is entirely possible that even the statistics gathered by third parties which rely on Gaza residents for accuracy are in fact not real to begin with.
I'm not saying PCPSR is corrupt or that IPC is corrupt. I'm saying that they all assume a level of trustworthiness from those that they must rely on to gather their data, and that model of trust completely falls apart when dealing with a genocidal terror group that controls the government and the population.
We are being lied to at a scale that no one has even imagined.
