Here is 100% proof that the Gaza Ministry of Health lies to the media about Gaza deaths, and the @NYTimes believes their lies ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, January 03, 2025

Here is 100% proof that the Gaza Ministry of Health lies to the media about Gaza deaths, and the @NYTimes believes their lies

An op-ed in the New York Times by Khaled Elgindy states, as fact, that the Gaza war "has killed more than 17,000 children." The statistic links to a recent article that quotes the Gaza health ministry as saying that "At least 17,492 of those killed were children."

As I have noted previously, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has been publishing two sets of numbers. One comes from a list that they say is of verified deaths (a combination of hospital records and self-reported forms people can fill out) and the other source is not described, although it tracks closely with the statistics issued by the Hamas media office.

The last time the ministry published an infographic breaking down the statistics from the verified list was on October 7 2024, where they said the total number of those killed at the time was 42,010 but the number of verified victims for which they had names and other information was 40,717. For months, the gap between those two figures had been in the range of 10,000 but over time, apparently, the names people added from the online form has gotten the two figures relatively close, a difference of only 3%.

Here's their infographic from October 7 showing the detailed breakdown of women, children and elderly from their database of victims.

But these aren't the numbers that the ministry is telling the media every day. Those numbers can be seen in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Here are their numbers from October 9 via the Internet Archive:

Comparing the two sets of figures, we see that the PCBS numbers quoting the Ministry of Health show 1,192 more total victims compared to the MoH verified list.

But the difference of the number of children is 3,608; the difference of women killed is 4,271 between the two sets of statistics. In total, the number of deceased women and children is nearly 8,000 higher than those counted on the verified list when the total difference of deaths is less than 1,200.

This is obviously impossible.

The verified list includes names, genders, ages, and ID numbers. While its own methodology is suspect, it at least has some data backing it up. The other statistics with the inflated women and children numbers cannot possibly be reconciled with the verified list.

Since the same Ministry of Health publishes both sets of irreconcilable statistics, we can confidently call them liars.

The New York Times is getting its numbers from the inflated list, not the verified list. In fact, the Ministry of Health has not updated the verified list in the intervening three months while it updates the inflated list regularly, making it sound legitimate since it is seemingly up to date.

As mentioned, the source for the inflated numbers is never discussed. It cannot be from hospitals and it cannot be from the user online forms, since they publish those names, their ages and genders on the verified list.

The real source is that Hamas makes them up, and issues its own statistics nearly every day that have nothing to do with bodies found or names counted. The MoH doesn't want to contradict their bosses, so they repeat Hamas statistics as if they counted the numbers themselves.

The New York Times and other media (and the UN, and NGOs) are not getting their numbers from the Ministry of Health counts of victims but from Hamas propagandists in the Gaza Media Office being laundered through the MoH.