Salo Aizenberg
reported this week that he compared the newest Hamas health ministry list of Gaza casualties with older one - and found that thousands of names from the older lists, including many children disappeared.
At least 3,400 previously reported deaths that had been claimed as "identified" and verified, including more than 1,000 children Hamas had claimed were killed by Israeli airstrikes, have been deleted.
Everyone from the UN to the media trusted the Hamas figures, especially the detailed lists of names, since the beginning of the war. At the time, the media and even President Biden had publicly questioned Hamas' numbers, and the first list that appeared to show thousands of names, ID numbers, and ages tamped down the public debate.
Now we know they were lies.
The problem goes beyond Aizenberg's reporting. Unlike previous lists, Hamas' March list was seemingly comprehensive - there was no longer a discrepancy of thousands of people between the lists and the claims by the Hamas media office and health ministry itself.
That was suspicious enough. But now that we know that Hamas erased thousands from previous lists, but it didn't affect the total number of names, we cannot trust this list of the 50,000 names at all.
It is all lies on top of lies, probably prompted by the initial skepticism of casualty claims. The "72% women and children" - a lie. The health ministry claim that they didn't include natural deaths - a lie. All those highly complex statistical arguments published in the Lancet to estimate the "real" higher death toll were based on these health ministry lists that we now know are lies.