OCHA claims the 33,797 figure comes from the ministry of health. The MoH does parrot the Hamas figures every day. But it also releases detailed reports every few days of deaths they consider to be verified, which include breakdowns of women, children and elderly,
It is literally impossible for both sets of numbers reported by OCHA to be correct.
The detailed MoH reports say that they have verified 22,397 deaths, of which 11,847 are women and children (4,642+7,205.) According to Hamas and the UN, there are a total of 24,000 women and children killed.
The difference between the number of women and children counted between the two sources (12,153) is higher than the total difference of all deaths between the two sources (11,400.)
Hamas is provably lying - and the UN happily repeats their lies and gives them credibility. The UN reports then get repeated by other UN agencies, media and NGOs as authoritative, notwithstanding the small text on the bottom of the OCHA reports saying "The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures; the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and await further verification." That isn't good enough: once we know the Hamas GMO is lying, it is irresponsible and libelous to give them any further credibility.
And this has been going on for a long time. The MoH had divided up its "martyrs" into two categories for months - the ones it could confirm and the ones it repeated from Hamas. Both sets have been inconsistent with each other and with Hamas claims of total women and children casualties, but OCHA still always used to unreliable numbers in their headlines.
But, hey, this is the UN we are talking about, where the most outlandish anti-Israel lies are treated as gospel.
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Hezbollah has congratulated Tehran on its attack on Israel, saying it "achieved" its military objectives.
"Hezbollah presents its congratulations... to the leadership" of Iran and its people for the "unprecedented" attack on Israel, the powerful Lebanese group said in a statement.
Hezbollah also praised Tehran's "brave and wise decision to respond firmly to the Zionist attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus".
The Islamic republic launched more than 300 drones and missiles towards Israel from late Saturday, Israel's military said.
At first glance reported Iranian attacks on Israel violate Napoleon's dictum "Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake." This will change the narrative and create new support for Israel. All of which raises the question: Why did Iran widen the war at this moment?
People, even supposed "experts," still think that Middle Easterners think like Westerners. They project their own logic onto people whom they have little in common with.
Iran's objective wasn't military. It was psychic. It needed to restore its "honor."
Just reading Iranian media shows this. They are congratulating themselves on the few missiles that made it through Israel's defenses. And now they are bragging that Israel's defenses are not "impenetrable," which no one ever said.
Honor is the coin of the realm in the Middle East. And honor, almost by definition, includes lying in order to avoid shame.
Iran has to claim victory. Even if Israel has stopped 100% of the projectiles, today's headlines in Iranian media would be about the amount of effort and time and money Israel spent, how it relied on other allies and couldn't defend itself alone, how this was one of the biggest attacks in history. They would be trying to ascribe honor to themselves and shame to Israel.
Facts don't matter. The results were of little importance, as long as Iran can twist facts to claim victory.
Just like Egypt in 1973. Just like Hamas in all previous Gaza wars. The facts don't matter because honor is the point, military victory is secondary.
The entire Middle East conflict is an attempt by Middle Eastern Muslims to erase the shame of a small number of weak, dhimmi Jews defeating them in 1948 and 1967. If you want a root cause, that's it.
People who do not understand the importance of honor and shame to Israel's enemies cannot possibly be Middle East experts.
Once you understand the honor/shame dynamic, you realize that the only real solution is Israeli victory that cannot be denied. This is why Muslims are deferential to Christian-majority Europe - because they lost to them, definitively. That is the reason Bahrain and the UAE wanted peace - they realized Israel isn't going anywhere.
Undisputed Israeli strength is the only peace plan that makes sense. Unless you want another Holocaust.
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The Telegram channel of the Gaza health ministry releases a detailed, 40+ page document every few days to describe in detail all of their statistics.
As we've been reporting, they have kept three tallies of the deceased: the ones that they count directly who have been brought to hospitals they can verify, the ones that "trusted media sources" (meaning Hamas) tells them to count (which are over 90% women and children,) and the ones that they have received from relatives filling in an online form. Over the last few reports, they have been downplaying the Hamas numbers and giving detailed reports only of the other two categories, which add up to some 21,000 people.
That document no longer claims that 72% of the dead are women and children. Of the ones they count, about 54% are women and children.
Something interesting happened between the April 4 and April 7 reports: hundreds of supposedly verified "martyrs" from the online forms miraculously came back to life.
The total number of verified deceased went from 21,720 on Thursday to 21,317 on Sunday - 403 people were no longer dead.
The ministry claims to go through a verification process of the online forms, and they don't count any that do not have complete information including identity number, full name, gender, date of birth and date of death. The number that they counted from those forms went down from 2,786 to 2,367 - meaning they disqualified 419 of the forms that had been "verified" three days before.
Also significantly, the number of those they count in hospitals only went up by only 16 in those three days - from 18,934 to 18,950. That's a lot less than the increase in numbers they issue every day in their press releases. In those three days, they added 138 total dead, meaning that while they reduced the numbers they could count, they added 541 new dead from the unverifiable Hamas sources.
I am willing to be charitable and say that the people who work on these detailed reports are conscientious and really trying to do their jobs. It clearly take many hours to compile those reports. They researched more about those who were input by relatives and found duplicates or bogus entries and removed them.
Yet at the same time, their bosses at the ministry highlight the larger, unverified numbers that include the nearly 12,000 that only came from Hamas.
Significantly, even their daily totals no longer claim 72% of the "martyrs" are women and children, although various UN agencies still repeat those as if they are accurate.
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The Israel Defense Forces believes at least four Palestinians killed during the latest round of fighting in the Gaza Strip, including children, died as a result of explosions caused by failed rocket launches by Palestinian terror operatives and not due to Israeli strikes.
According to military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, of the 507 rockets launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad at Israel as of Thursday morning, around 110 fell short in the Gaza Strip.
In one of the incidents, on Wednesday evening, 16-year-old Rami Shadi Hamdan and 51-year-old Ahmed Muhammad a-Shabaki were killed when a failed rocket slammed into a residential area of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to IDF estimates.
In another case late Wednesday, 10-year-old Layan Bilal Mohammad Abdullah Mdoukh and 16-year-old Yazan Jawdat Fathi Elayyan were killed in Gaza City in a similarly failed rocket launch, according to military assessments.
IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichai Adraee made a video recently that shows that recovered documents in Gaza show that Hamas knows the truth.
Here's another case.
Adraee notes that in 2022, 15-year old Fatima Obeid was killed by an Islamic Jihad rocket that Gaza authorities blamed on Israel.
We have video of the rocket as it exploded. You can see it somersaulting in freefall.
An internal Hamas document found by Israel recently lists the people killed in the 2022 conflict in northern Gaza by terror rockets. Fatima is #11.
But Fatima was listed by the Gaza Health Ministry, subject of so many academic papers saying it is trustworthy, as being killed by Israel - #49 here.
Mondoweiss still says that these 12 people in the north that even Hamas admits were killed by Islamic Jihad were killed by Israel. They published this weeks after I and others put together evidence that many of the dead from that mini-war were killed by terror rockets.
Another Hamas document was uncovered that showed that Islamic Jihad was quite aware that its own rockets killed those 12 people in August 2022, but they deliberately chose to hide the truth "to support the resistance" and claim that the civilian deaths came from Israel, not them.
This isn't merely knee--jerk denial. This is a planned policy of deception, to lie to the world to make them blame Israel for people killed by Islamic Jihad. And the Gaza Health Ministry was complicit.
(h/t Yoel)
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I mentioned that the Gaza health ministry has been keeping track of the people who die in hospitals, or who arrive after they have already died. The demographics of those people are way different from the other set that come from "trusted media sources' - meaning Hamas itself, where nearly all the supposed deceased are said to be women and children, which is impossible.
But as I've noted, recently the health ministry has started asking families to register any deceased relatives who did not get registered in hospitals for whatever reason. They do some level of cross-checking against their citizen ID.
The demographics of the 2,367 who have been counted by this separate registration form are also wildly different from those that died in hospitals.
While 37% of the MoH casualties are military age males, over 56% of those listed on the forms are males between 18-65.
That is a significant difference.
This may indicate that Hamas has not been sending its dead fighters to hospitals at all, and just bury them (or leave them under collapsed tunnels.) Their relatives want them to be counted.
I have no evidence of this right now, but the fact that three data sets show such huge differences in the demographics of those killed makes it appear that none of them are truly accurate samples of the numbers of civilians killed in Gaza.
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The hypocrisy of so-called human rights groups is more apparent every day of this war.
In 2017, five of those NGOs released yet another statement condemning Israel for denying or delaying medical treatment for many Gazans.
The record-low rate of permits issued by Israel for Palestinians seeking vital medical treatment outside Gaza underlines the urgent need for Israel to end its decade-long closure of the Gaza Strip, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) said today in a joint statement.
Israeli authorities approved permits for medical appointments for only 54 percent of those who applied in 2017, the lowest rate since the World Health Organization (WHO) began collecting figures in 2008. WHO reported that 54 Palestinians, 46 of whom had cancer, died in 2017 following denial or delay of their permits.
Now, when Gaza's health crisis is far more acute, how many medical permits are being approved by Egypt for travel and treatment?
According to the latest Gaza health ministry report, Egypt has a far worse approval rate than Israel ever had. (They don't say "Egypt" - only "abroad.")
They count 8,120 patients applying to be treated abroad (most of them multiple times) but only 3,283 have been approved to travel.
That is a 40% approval rate - far lower than Israel even did in 2017, and half of the 80% Israel was approving every month of 2023 before the October 7 massacre.
The Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights issued a report yesterday about how kidney dialysis patients in Gaza are having a difficult time getting treatment. Not one of its recommendations mentioned urging Egypt to allow more dialysis patients to travel there to be treated. As with the MoH, the word "Egypt" is not even mentioned in their report. But according to the ministry of health, only 20% of the applications for kidney patients have been approved by Egypt for travel and treatment.
The "human rights organizations" refusal to say anything negative about Egypt's denial of Gazans to take refuge even extends to not saying a word when Egypt refuses most Gazans who need lifesaving medical help!
The conclusion is inescapable: all these NGOs that issue report after report on Palestinian suffering lose all interest in the topic if someone besides Israel is to blame. They don't care about Palestinians - they only want to do their part to deny the human rights of Jews.
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The Israel Defense Forces withdrew early Monday from the Gaza City complex housing the Shifa Hospital, after a two-week raid in which the military said it detained or killed hundreds of terror suspects.
During the raid, which began March 18, the IDF said troops captured some 900 suspects, of whom more than 500 were confirmed to be terror operatives, and killed more than 200 gunmen. Among those killed and detained were top commanders in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Valuable intelligence was also seized, the IDF said.
Top officers do not even refer to Shifa as “Shifa Hospital” but as “the Shifa compound” to reflect their belief that it was not so much an abused hospital as a command center with some hospital camouflage built around it.
The three centers of gravity for the terrorists were the Qatar facility, the emergency room, and the childbirth center – though there were terrorists in every single one of the sprawling hospital’s buildings.
According to the IDF, they gave the mostly 6,200 civilians and terrorists at least two separate opportunities to surrender.
Hamas not only fired mortars at the IDF, in disregard of the harm to the hospital buildings, but also used patients and doctors as human shields.
The IDF said that Shayetet 13’s special training could be credited for the successful evacuation of the patients and doctors without them being harmed, even as they fought off the Hamas terrorists.
These patients and doctors were moved to a pre-setup field hospital.
Moreover, the IDF said that those terrorists who did not surrender fought very hard, and several of them exploded themselves with grenades to try to kill nearby IDF troops.
Hamas's Media Office, which the Health Ministry uses as a trusted source, gives a completely different picture. From their Telegram channel:
⭕ *The “Israeli” occupation commits a shocking crime against humanity by destroying, burning and bulldozing the Shifa Medical Complex and killing and arresting more than 700 Palestinian civilians and we demand the introduction of field hospitals to save the health situation
◼️ The “Israeli” occupation army withdrew from Al-Shifa Medical Complex at dawn today, two weeks after storming and occupying it completely, leaving widespread destruction and a terrible crime against humanity and against international law, as this destruction affected all aspects of the complex and the occupation deliberately destroyed, burned and demolished all buildings and departments without exception. In a clear crime that shames humanity.
◼️ The occupation army killed more than 400 martyrs inside and around the complex, and tried to hide its heinous crime by executing hundreds of civilians, the wounded, and the sick inside the walls of the Shifa Medical Complex by covering the bodies with piles of sand, bulldozing them, burying them, and mixing them with the floor of the complex. It also arrested more than 300 prisoners. 100 Palestinian civilians are missing as a result of the shocking crime of the occupation.
And most of the world believes the terrorists over Israel.
Including, apparently, the media.
By every possible measure the Shifa hospital operation has been a huge success. The two weeks of battles is testimony to the fact that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had returned there and fought hard.
And the world media is doing everything it can to not report that to you.
Hundreds of reporters all trying to find angles to make Israel look bad and Hamas look good. They ignore that terrorists turned the hospital into a major terror hub. They downplay that hundreds of terrorists were killed or captured in a hospital, in maternity wards and surgery centers. I don't think one major international media outlet has mentioned that using a hospital for military purposes is not only a war crime but also makes the hospital lose protection under international law.
It is perhaps the most egregious misreporting from a war that already has the Al Ahli debacle.
Until this Jerusalem Post article I wasn't aware that Israel set up a field hospital ahead of time just for the patients. (The Gaza Health Ministry mentions that the IDF evacuated many patients and doctors to an administrative building on the hospital campus, and claims that conditions there were horrific. My guess is that this is the field hospital that Israel set up for the enemy, which is pretty much unheard of in urban warfare history.)
Where are the journalists with any integrity?
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Oxford's Dictionary of Law Enforcement says "Perfidious killing or wounding is a war crime under the Statute of the International Criminal Court whereby the perpetrator kills or wounds the victim by taking advantage of the victim's belief that he is in a state of protection under international law....Guerrilla fighters dressed in civilian clothes would always be guilty of perfidious killing or wounding by pretending to have civilian status, but they are not guilty if they carry their weapons openly."
Throughout the war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists have been wearing civilian clothing and almost never carry their weapons openly. Instead, they have pre-positioned weapons throughout the Gaza Strip in civilian areas and use these caches as necessary, and then pretending to be civilians after they put the weapons back away.
Hamas videos consistently show that their members are exclusively wearing civilian clothing.
Today, Hamas released a video of terrorists shooting mortars. They hide the mortars underground and bring them out when they want to fire them.
Every single shooter is in civilian clothing.
Here's the full video.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad's videos of them shooting at Israeli tanks also invariably show their members wearing civilian clothes. When they are killed, "human rights" groups consider them civilians unless the weapons are right next to them.
Another recent video shows additional crimes: the mortar is being shot from an urban area, and it had been hidden by a blanket so it wasn't carried there openly as per international law.
Now, try to find a single mention, let alone condemnation, of these war crimes by any NGO or mainstream media outlet.
Israeli actions are put under a microscope and things that are absolutely legal under international law are elevated to crimes against humanity, while recognized terrorist groups get a pass when the evidence is in their own videos.
All it would take would be a single report by Human Rights Watch or Amnesty to point these things out and Hamas would be shamed into changing its tactics. They know all of this. And they deliberately decide not to write about it.
Because they are on Hamas' side.
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So far, Israel's surprise raid at Shifa Hospital has been an amazing success. Hundreds of terrorists killed, hundreds more detained, few if any patients hurt by the IDF, incredible intelligence gathered, and caches of weapons found all that prove that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had turned the hospital into a command and control center again. Israel provided photos of the weapons, videos of the battles, even videos of terrorists admitting the hospital was used as their military hub.
CNN's Nadeen Ebrahim, Sana Noor Haq, Khader Al Za'anoun and Abeer Salman reported about Shifa last Thursday. The article does not even mention the IDF videos, the interrogations or other proofs for its statements, and it gives Palestinian denials of the undeniable equal weight to the IDF statements:
Israeli forces began their most recent operation there on March 18, saying they are conducting “precise operational activities against terrorists” located at Al-Shifa – a statement also echoed in November’s raid.
The IDF had returned in force to Al-Shifa despite Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in January announcing that the most intensive phase of operations in northern Gaza was complete.
Speaking to his troops in a video shared by the Defense Ministry, Gallant on March 26 hailed the operation, saying the hospital was reached “in a flash” and that Hamas operatives still holed up at the hospital “are considering their future: surrender or death.”
Throughout its 11-day operation, the Israeli military this month said it had detained hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in and around the hospital, killing dozens of others.
Around Al-Shifa, the IDF said in an update Wednesday, “approximately 200 terrorists have been eliminated in the area of the hospital since the beginning of the activity.” The IDF also claimed that “terrorists fired at IDF troops from within and outside of the ER (emergency room) building at the Shifa Hospital.”
CNN is unable to verify these numbers.
Israel has for years claimed that Hamas fighters are sheltering in mosques, hospitals and other civilian places to avoid Israeli attacks. Hamas has repeatedly denied the claims.
Israeli officials have echoed the accusations since October 7, and following their first raid in November escorted CNN into Gaza to see a newly exposed tunnel shaft discovered at the compound of Al-Shifa Hospital.
The evidence did not establish without a doubt that there was a Hamas command center underneath the hospital as Israel had claimed.
Of course, since CNN's tour, more evidence has been uncovered - US intelligence confirmed that the hospital was used by Hamas and the New York Times reported that the tunnels underneath were much more extensive than what CNN has reported in November.
The CNN article, by contrast, emphasizes the false ideas that Israel's November raid was a failure, that it nearly destroyed the hospital's infrastructure then, that no evidence was found in November that Shifa was an important terror hub. It ignores the videos of terrorists admitting that everything Israel says about Shifa is true.
CNN takes pains to cast doubt on literally everything the IDF says. Yet it expresses no such reservations on Hamas claims or any Palestinian claims of torture, patients dying, and other allegations of war crimes by the IDF:
Residents of the area around Al-Shifa told CNN there was heavy firing in the vicinity. One family said their home was shelled, and that children – some still alive – were buried under the rubble.
Unlike IDF statements, those claims are quoted without any caveats or mentions that CNN cannot verify them.
There is only one Palestinian witness who CNN does express doubt about. Buried in the middle of the many paragraphs accusing Israel of war crimes, the article says:
Targeting hospitals in wartime is prohibited under international law, but those standards change if enemy combatants are using the facility to attack an enemy.
One eyewitness said that, on the eve of the raid, they spotted hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members inside the hospital.
The eyewitness, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, estimated about 400 to 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members and their families arrived at the hospital in mid-March. Some of them appeared to be members of Hamas’ political branch, while others were armed militants.
The eyewitness said some of the militants were carrying guns inside the hospital.
CNN is unable to independently verify the numbers due to lack of reporting access to the strip, and has asked the Gaza health ministry for comment.
Immediately afterwards, the article reverts to quoting Palestinians at length about alleged torture of innocent civilians, doctors who fear for the health of patients still in the hospital without any evidence that they have been affected by the raid, and international condemnation by the World Health Organization.
The extended time that Israel is taking at Shifa is not evidence that the IDF is trying to keep patients safe while rooting out hundreds of armed terrorists hiding inside the hospital itself but instead as evidence that the IDF doesn't know what it's doing.
Compare this with how France 24 covered the raid. While the article also denigrates the IDF as well, it quoted experts that confirmed the IDF claims that the raid was a tactical success and that Hamas was using the hospital as a major military hub:
"The actual operation was a tactical success," confirms Veronika Poniscjakova, a specialist in international security issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. The Israeli army “let Hamas think that they would attack elsewhere – in the central refugee camps of the Strip – and when Hamas returned to Shifa, the Israelis closed in on them", and took many prisoners, according to Ahron Bregman, a specialist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at King's College London.
The Israeli action enabled Israel to recover “extremely valuable intelligence” about their enemy, as suggested by the images and videos of the interrogations that the Israeli army has made public, notes Omri Brinner, an analyst and specialist in Middle East geopolitics at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) in Verona, Italy.
[I]n the current offensive, "the Israelis have been far more sophisticated in the way they are presenting this operation" and "they are using a much more precise way to message to the world that the threat inside the complex is real and credible," says Clive Jones, a specialist in Israel and the Middle East at Durham University in the UK. The army is using drone footage of gun battles and photos of the discovery of weapons caches to "try to convince international opinion that they had legitimate reasons for returning to fight in this hospital", adds Jones.
Israel also needs to prove it has the ability to carry out this type of highly sensitive operation with as few civilian casualties as possible. The precedent of the US-Iraq war in 2003 shows that “as soon as an army leaves an area, insurgents seek to return", says Bregman. This view is shared by other analysts. "We can expect Hamas to do the same thing in other hospitals, but also in schools or refugee camps where there are civilian populations", notes Shahin Modarres, an independent expert on international security and the Middle East.
By taking its time in the Al Shifa operation, the Israeli army is “signaling to Hamas that it will target it even if it harbours in places considered safe havens, such as hospitals, UNRWA compounds, mosques and schools”, says Brinner. At the same time, it's trying to prove to the international community that it knows how to do it” with a level of restraint.
This level of analysis - albeit superficial - is completely lacking in the CNN piece.
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health publishes a weekly document that goes into details of the casualty statistics in Gaza. And buried in that document is proof that - if you believe the ministry - Hamas must be lying.
The Ministry breaks down its statistics on the number of dead people they counted in Gaza hospitals and those they did not. According to the latest report from March 3, 30,228 people had died, of which they counted 17,348 in hospitals, and the other 13,186 they counted from "trusted media sources."
Meaning, the Hamas media office.
43% of all Gaza deaths and demographic breakdowns come not from the doctors in the health ministry but from the masked terrorists of Hamas.
Let's assume that the Gaza health ministry is telling the truth about the people it counted in its hospitals, which they break down per hospital. For the ones that they count themselves, 42% are men and 58% are women and children. (English from Google Translate)
Somehow the demographics they see in their hospitals are way, way different from the ones that their "trusted media sources" claim.
To make the numbers work, the "trusted media sources" of the Hamas media office must be claiming an amazing 90% of their otherwise unreported casualties by MoH to be women and children. - roughly 12,000 women and children compared to 1,300 men.
Needless to say, this is virtually statistically impossible.
So even if one believes the health ministry on the numbers its hospitals counted, it is still reporting Hamas media office numbers - and vouching for their accuracy in their own summary reports. Which makes it just as unreliable as everyone else in Hamas.
During President Biden's State of the Union address last night, he said:
This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas.
Biden just confirmed and validated the biggest Hamas lie about the war.
There is no source for the "30,000" number besides Hamas. None whatsoever. And we know Hamas lied about the death tolls of various specific events during the war, especially those that were blamed on Israel but were actually done by terrorists.
Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in Tablet this week that showed how unlikely the casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry are from a statistical viewpoint, looking at the first weeks of the war when the ministry broke down the alleged women and children casualties.
On the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.
This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.
...Another red flag... is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked.
Biden's speech was vetted by layers of staffers. Not one of them had a problem with Biden's statement. This shows how insidious propaganda is.
Biden has validated Hamas lies. Newspapers will no longer feel compelled to add "according to Hamas' health ministry" when they quote statistics - the President of the United States accepts them as true, so who will argue?
The speech was a huge win for Hamas. And the sad part is that no one is overly concerned about that fact that the leader of the free world accepts and parrots the words of a terrorist organization.
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The New York Times has a large feature article about the victims in Gaza - just like they seem to have every week.
Lives Ended in Gaza
Since the war started, more than 30,000 people have been killed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion. Here are some of their stories.
Yes, the "newspaper of record" is now saying, as fact, that 30,000 people have been killed.
Their source? Hamas!
The thing is that reporters and editors know damned well that Hamas is lying about Gaza casualties.
Look at their reporting for alleged mass casualty events in Gaza since October.
After the Al Ahli hospital fiasco they admitted that there was no way 471 people were killed. The NYT reported a week later, "The death toll, initially put at 500 by Hamas and then lowered to 471, is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be considerably lower — but no number has been verified. The hospital itself was not directly struck; whatever caused the explosion actually hit the hospital courtyard, where people had gathered for safety, and a handful of parked cars."
Hamas claimed the October 13 Salah-al-Deen road explosion, also falsely blamed on Israel, killed 70 people but respected news media did not parrot those figures; some counted about 12.
They all know Hamas lies about numbers. But they never report any doubts about them, even when they themselves show they aren't buying it in their reporting.
The fact is that in the past there were independent sources in Gaza (like PCHR and the UN-OCHA) that could do their own counts and keep Hamas honest. Today there is nobody. So Hamas lies with impunity, since they see that the media doesn't publicly doubt those accusations the way they do with Israeli statements. The "118" that Hamas claimed were killed by the IDF last Thursday during thee aid truck stampede includes absurd claims by the Gaza health ministry like there are still bodies being found at the scene two days later. (It isn't like they were hidden under rubble.)
This is a major media fail, happening in real time, in front of our eyes. And sometime in 2025 some researcher will spend the time to count all the deaths and discover that these are all lies, but it will be too late.
It already is.
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Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of
the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Israel left Gaza in 2005, and now Israel has returned. Not
to grow peppers and tomatoes, but to obliterate monsters. Many want to know
what will happen the day after, when the war is over. Some hope and pray that Israel can once again
make Gush Katif area bloom and grow, and that beautiful Jewish children can be
born to live there in peace, without fear of sirens and explosions, or having
their heads cut off. Is this a realistic scenario?
Probably not. Objectively speaking, it seems unlikely that
the Israeli government will allow the Jews to return to Gaza. Also, the
majority of Israelis may not be in favor of such a move, believing that there
will be some sort of creative solution that will allow the Arab refugees to
return home. Others even call into question whether the Jews have a right to this
territory. Not because they want to give Gaza away to the Arabs, but because some
question whether Gaza is really Jewish land: whether this territory was part of
the original Land of Israel, as described in the bible.
In the months and days leading up to Disengagement, or as those
of us on the right call it, “The Expulsion,” we needed a way to express our
distress over this traumatic event. Orange was the color chosen to symbolize
Gush Katif. You’d see orange ribbons tied to car antennae and side view
mirrors, and people wearing orange t-shirts, wristbands, and other assorted
orange apparel. In addition to the color orange, a slogan was adopted, “Lo
nishkach, v’lo nislach.” We will not forget, and we will not forgive.
I recall a bar mitzvah I attended not long after the Expulsion.
The celebrants were twins. Their mother had crocheted yarmulkes for them in
Gush Katif orange, with the “we won’t forget or forgive” slogan winding its way
around the border. I said something to the mother of the boys, along the lines
of, “Ha ha ha. Even their ‘kippot’ are patriotic.”
The mother did not find this at all funny. She said, “Yes. We
feel very strongly about this,” with a serious expression on her face.
I had made a faux pas. And I should have known better. My
entire community, including me, felt very strongly about the Expulsion, and until today, pray
and hope and dream to return. We don’t forget and don’t forgive. But
what constitutes the Jewish right to inherit this particular territory, Gaza?
In the real estate world, it’s all about location, location,
location. One could make the case that the same is true of Gaza. If it’s part
of the biblical land of Israel, then it’s Jewish land, if not, not. Perhaps
that why author Toby Klein Greenwald begins The
Significance of Gaza in Jewish History, with an indisputable fact: “Gaza is
located within the boundaries of Shevet Yehuda,” or the land belonging to the
tribe of Judah.
Then, and only then, does Klein Greenwald begin to detail
for the reader the marvelous history and presence of the Jews in Gaza:
Avraham and Yitzchak lived in Gerar, located near Gaza. In
the fourth century, Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Eretz Yisrael for
international trade and commerce. Yonatan the Hasmonean (the brother of Yehuda
HaMaccabi) conquered Gaza and settled there in 145 BCE. At various times
throughout the centuries, Gaza was a center of Jewish learning (a yeshivah in
Gaza is mentioned in the Talmud), life and commerce. King David is featured
with his harp in an elaborate mosaic in an ancient synagogue in Gaza
Rabbi Yisrael
Najara, author of “Kah Ribon Olam,” served as Gaza’s chief rabbi in the
middle of the seventeenth century. Rabbi Avraham Azoulay of Fez wrote his
mystical work “Chesed l’Avraham” in Gaza. Other well-known scholars
and mystics lived there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Sadly, this glory period was not to last:
The Jewish presence in Gaza was cut short in 1929, when Jews
were forced to leave the area due to Arab riots, after which the British
prohibited them from living in Gaza. Some Jews returned, however, and, in 1946,
established the religious kibbutz Kfar Darom. A Jewish village by the same name
existed there in the times of the Mishnah.
The Jewish Virtual Library entry on Gaza
tells us that originally, Gaza belonged to the Philistines:
Gaza first appears in the Tanach as a Philistine city, the
site of Samson's dramatic death. Jews finally conquered it in the Hasmonean
era, and continued to live there. Notable residents include Dunash Ibn Labrat,*
and Nathan of Gaza, advisor to false messiah Shabtai Zvi. Gaza is within the
boundaries of Shevet Yehuda in Biblical Israel (see Genesis 15, Joshua 15:47,
Kings 15:47 and Judges 1:18) and therefore some have argued that there is a
Halachic requirement to live in this land. The earliest settlement of the area
is by Avraham and Yitzhak, both of whom lived in the Gerar area of Gaza. In the
fourth century Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Israel for international
trade and commerce.
We also learn that even the “glory period” of the Jewish presence in Gaza, was
not so glorious or uninterrupted as one might have hoped. Over the centuries,
various occupying powers found they liked nothing better than to expel Jews—just
as today’s Arab occupiers of Jewish land hope to push the Jews into the sea.
But just as many Jews hope to return to Gaza after the war on Hamas is ended,
so too, the Jews returned to Gaza, again and again:
The periodic removal of Jews from Gaza goes back at least to
the Romans in 61 CE, followed much later by the Crusaders, Napoleon, the
Ottoman Turks, the British and the contemporary Egyptians. However, Jews
definitely lived in Gaza throughout the centuries, with a stronger presence in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And now we learn the bitter history of what happened next:
Jews were present in Gaza until 1929, when they were forced
to leave the area due to violent riots against them by the Arabs. Following
these riots, and the death of nearly 135 Jews in all, the British prohibited
Jews from living in Gaza to quell tension and appease the Arabs. Some Jews
returned, however, and, in 1946, kibbutz Kfar Darom was established to prevent
the British from separating the Negev from the Jewish state.
The United Nations 1947 partition plan allotted the coastal
strip from Yavneh to [Rafah] on the Egyptian border to be an Arab state. In
Israel's war for independence, most Arab inhabitants in this region fled or
were expelled, settling around Gaza City. Israeli forces conquered Gaza, and
proceeded south to El-Arish, but subsequently gave control of the area to Egypt
in negotiations, keeping Ashdod and Ashkelon. In 1956, Israel went to war with
Egypt, conquered Gaza again, only to return it again.
With the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli forces reentered Gaza and
captured it. During the war, Israel had no idea what it would do with the
territory. [Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol called it “a bone stuck in our throats.”
There is a tendency to think of the Labor Party as the party of land giveaways,
but in actuality, it was a Labor government that built the first of the Gush
Katif settlements:
The initial settlements were established by the Labor
government in the early 1970s. The first was Kfar Darom, which was originally
established in 1946, and reformed in 1970. In 1981, as part of a peace treaty
with Egypt, the last settlements of the Sinai were destroyed, and some Jews moved
to the Gaza area . . .
. . . There were
twenty-one settlements in Gaza. The most populated Gush Katif area contained
some thirty synagogues plus Yeshivat Torat Hachim with 200 students, the Hesder
Yeshiva with 150 students, the Mechina in Atzmona with 200 students, Yeshivot
in Netzarim and Kfar Darom, 6 Kollelim, a Medrasha for girls in Neve Dekalim
and more. All of the settlements had their own schools, seminaries, stores, and
doctors.
All of this was destroyed in 2005. The vibrant communities of Gush Katif are no
more. We even dug up our dead—many of them Holocaust survivors—to move them out
of Gaza.
From then until now with this war, the only Jews present in
Gaza were captives, some of them alive, like Gilad Shalit, and some of them
almost certainly dead, like Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.
Will the Jews be allowed to reclaim and rebuild Gaza? Like
so many Israelis, I wish it with all my heart, but have little faith that this
will happen—even though it should. The centuries’ long Jewish presence and
history in Gaza is indisputable, and certainly long predates that of the Arab latecomers.
Jews lived in Gaza long before the Arab people ever existed. In
fact, the first reference to the Arabs as a distinct people comes only in 853 BCE, by
the hand of an Assyrian scribe as he recorded the details of a battle. How fitting
a beginning for a people who worship war and death.
Jews have more of a right to Gaza than any Arab ever did. And
if return should prove impossible in the days following this wretched war, forced
on us by cruel Arab two-legged beasts, I have faith that the return of the Jews to Gaza is
inevitable, if at some unknown point in the future.
***
*I see no evidence to support the idea that Dunash Ibn Labrat lived in Gaza. After looking at many sources, it seems clear he lived only in Spain and Morocco.
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Elder of Ziyon
