Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Gaza Health Ministry

Showing posts with label Gaza Health Ministry. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

The @UN @OCHAOPT knows Hamas is lying - but repeats their Gaza statistics anyway

This is from the latest daily UN-OCHA report on Gaza casualties:

"GMO" is the Gaza Media Office, meaning Hamas.

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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The Gaza health ministry statistics show that hundreds of "martyrs" came back to life over the past weekend

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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More proof Israel tells the truth and Hamas, and NGOs, and Gaza Health Ministry all lie

Last year, Defense for Children International/Palestine reported:

The IDF disputed the accusation:

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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Potential evidence that Hamas doesn't register terrorist casualties

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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Hamas makes up lots of lies for Shifa Hospital, and media believes them

Times of Israel says:

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.

The Jerusalem Post adds:

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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CNN's coverage of Shifa Hospital is abysmal. Every IDF claim is doubted, and none of the Palestinian claims - unless they support the IDF statements

Weapons recovered from Shifa's maternity ward

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.

This is just one example of how CNN's coverage of the war is undeniably biased against Israel.

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"Trusted media sources:" More proof that Hamas lies in its Gaza casualty statistics

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)

Yet they also say that 72% of the total deaths in Gaza are women and children, not 58%.

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.

(h/t Mark Zlochin)

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Biden parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech

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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Journalists know Hamas lies about casualty figures. They don't care.

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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UNRWA death statistics over the past two months strongly indicate that Hamas casualty figures are lies

A month ago, we looked at a Lancet article that used statistics from the first month of the October 7 war to shore up the idea that the Hamas ministry of health statistics were accurate.

Briefly, they compared the number of UNRWA deaths per thousand employees (about 7.5) with the number of total Gaza deaths per thousand residents according to the MoH (about 5) during the first month of the war. Based on that, they decided that the Ministry of Health statistics were largely accurate.

I pointed out the methodological flaws. As I noted,

It makes an assumption that everyone in Gaza has an equal chance of being killed, meaning that Israel is killing people randomly and indiscriminately. This is not only a false assumption, but an antisemitic one.

Indeed, one reason UNRWA workers could have been killed at a higher rate is because none of them are children - and more than half of them are males of fighting age. About two thirds of the first 101 killed were men, a higher percentage than the percentage of male employees at UNRWA (about 54% across UNRWA, not sure about Gaza itself.) Chances are that at least some of the UNRWA casualties were also legal combatants, either actively participating or acting as "spotters" or other support.

In other words, one would expect a much higher percentage of UNRWA employees, especially males, to be killed than the general population if you don't accept the antisemitic assumption that Israel is killing indiscriminately.

Which means that if UNRWA death figures are to be statistically meaningful, we must assume that they represent a higher death-per-thousand rate than the general population.

However, since that first month, the rate of UNRWA workers killed has dropped dramatically - far more than the drop in deaths published by the Hamas authorities.

If the Lancet felt that UNRWA's figures support the MoH figures in the first month, then why have they diverged so dramatically since then? Doesn't that indicate that the MoH figures have become increasingly unreliable?

If the UNRWA deaths can be used as a sample of total Gaza deaths, which the Lancet peer-reviewed claimed, that would mean that the true number of deaths over the past month in Gaza is about 1,100, not the 5,095 the MoH claimed.

I don't think the UNRWA numbers are a proper proxy for calculating deaths either way. My theory is that the Gaza health ministry statistics on total casualties (not women and children) were roughly accurate for the first month or so, but as communications broke down in Gaza they (and the Hamas media office) just started making things up. There is simply no infrastructure in Gaza to provide anything close to accurate casualty statistics but Hamas relies on these numbers being reported daily to pressure Israel to cease fire. Since the world believes them, so why not continue to lie?

A group of supposed experts are projecting the number of Gaza deaths if there is a ceasefire orif Israel presses into Rafah. Their entire analysis is based on accepting the casualty figures from Hamas as being 100% accurate. And while they don't say exactly how they use the UNRWA figures, they seem to be accepting the Lancet methodology in their report: " We estimated the proportion and number of unreported (e.g. those killed that may be under rubble and have not been reported) traumatic injury deaths by comparing the ratio of mortality among United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff (for whom 100% detection was assumed) to that among the general population, including uncertainty ranges, to estimate a confidence interval."

One of the authors of this report was also a co-author of the Lancet report.

At any rate, even if you completely trust The Lancet methodology of using UNRWA casualties as an accurate sample of Gaza total death rates, you have to admit that their evidence supporting Hamas casualty figures has been thoroughly debunked. Science depends on consistency, and the data from the past two months contradict the Lancet's conclusion from one mere month.

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The Lancet casualty methodology helps prove that Gaza deaths have been greatly exaggerated over the past month

In early December, The Lancet published a peer-reviewed study that sought to prove that the Gaza Ministry of Health casualty counts were largely accurate.

Their methodology was to compare the number of deaths per thousand reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health with the number of deaths per thousand of UNRWA employees, which were counted independently by UNRWA and not the Hamas ministry.

They found that the two death rates were roughly the same (actually, UNRWA's was higher), indicating that the health ministry was not exaggerating the total number of deaths.

The methodology is flawed. It makes an assumption that everyone in Gaza has an equal chance of being killed, meaning that Israel is killing people randomly and indiscriminately. This is not only a false assumption, but an antisemitic one.

Indeed, one reason UNRWA workers could have been killed at a higher rate is because none of them are children - and more than half of them are males of fighting age. About two thirds of the first 101 killed were men, a higher percentage than the percentage of male employees at UNRWA (about 54% across UNRWA, not sure about Gaza itself.) Chances are that at least some of the UNRWA casualties were also legal combatants, either actively participating or acting as "spotters" or other support.

But there's another problem with this. If the Lancet methodology is correct, then it should be correct for every month of the war, not just the first month.

But over the past month, from December 15 to January 15, Hamas claims 5200 people were killed - 2.4 per thousand. But only 15 UNRWA employees were killed in that same timeframe - only 1.1 per thousand! (I'm assuming 13,500 UNRWA employees and 2.2 million total population of Gaza, which seems to be The Lancet's numbers.)

Using the Lancet's own methodology, even assuming the false assumption that UNRWA employees represent the entire population of Gaza rather than only adults and primarily males, the number of deaths claimed by Hamas is over double what their methodology would predict!

That's thousands of false Gaza deaths - using the methodology of this peer-reviewed paper.

Even if we accept that the Gaza health ministry had accurate information for the first month of the war, logic indicates that as Gaza infrastructure has deteriorated, the reliability of their figures has gone down as well. As we showed earlier, even the UN no longer parrots the Hamas claims that 70% of the deaths are women and children. There is no reason to believe the ministry of health figures over the past two months given that we know their "70% women and children" number is pure propaganda.

Which strongly indicates that Hamas is mandating how many deaths to claim, and the relationship with reality is increasingly tenuous as the war goes on and as Hamas sees its figures accepted as truth worldwide.

Beyond that, would the Lancet even consider publishing a paper using the exact same methodology for the time period of December 15-January 15 as I've shown here? I highly doubt it. Which shows how even "peer reviewed" papers can be biased, even when their numbers are accurate - the researchers and editors are looking only to publish papers that confirm their biases, and they won't even bother to look at anything that shows that disproves their biases.

But if any doctors and statisticians want to take this data and submit it to this formerly prestigious journal - data that thoroughly rebuts the first paper - it would be instructive to see whether they are honest enough to publish it.

(If you are wondering, the data for November 10-December 15 shows a 2.5/1000 death rate for UNRWA employees and 3.5/1000 for Hamas figures of Gaza' general population - also a significant difference, but not as striking as the most recent month.)

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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My most popular posts of 2023

Not surprisingly, 8 out of these top ten were written after October 7.

1. Israeli legal scholar icon discusses where NGOs and media get international law wrong

2. Israel didn't murder the Christian mother and daughter in Gaza. Hamas did.

3. Did the UN Human Rights Council just admit Hamas steals civilian aid? Plus, the dumbest argument yet against flooding tunnels

4. Map of Israeli attacks closely tracks with tunnel locations in northern Gaza

5. My Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator can predict how news articles are written

6. 67% of Democrats think there was once an independent Arab state called "Palestine." The more people know, the more they support Israel.

7. This two year old Palestinian boy was brutally murdered. There will be no mention of it in the NYT or by NGOs.

8. Proof that Gaza Health Ministry just makes casualty statistics up

9. My viral cartoon, Amy Schumer, 10/7 rape denial and other antisemitic lies

10. Poll shows yet again: Palestinians across the board overwhelmingly support the most heinous terror attacks

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Gaza health ministry claims hospital director was tortured - but sort of admits he's right

The Hamas ministry of health released a statement this morning in response to the video of Kamal Adwan Hospital director, Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot admitting that Hamas militants control the hospital, uses their ambulances and offices for military activity.

They claim that Kahlot's statement was given after he was tortured, writing on Facebook:

In the face of a new chapter of ongoing crimes targeting the health sector, the occupation forces destroyed large parts of Kamal Adwan Hospital and arrested the hospital director, intimidating and coercing him to give the story of the occupation under the force of beating and torture, we would like to clarify the following:

Their explanation pretty much admits a great deal that Kahlot said!

1. Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot works within the cadres of the Military Medical Services, which is an official body affiliated with the Palestinian Ministry of Interior and within the approved components of the Palestinian National Authority.

So the hospital is run by the Hamas military.

2. The rank of brigadier general is a job rank in the medical services apparatus affiliated with the Ministry of Interior, and it is a known and applicable rank throughout the world.

They admit giving Al-Kahlot a military rank within Hamas.

3. The presence of official components and bodies inside the hospital, such as medical investigations and official agencies affiliated with the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, came as a result of the destruction of the infrastructure of these agencies and the search for a place that provides the necessary work requirements, and they are approved agencies within the structure of the Ministry of Interior.

So the Hamas Ministry of Interior - which is responsible for police and other security services - really did have offices in the hospital. (They don't say what everyone knows: the Hamas police are also largely members of the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades.)

4. What was stated by Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot was under the force of oppression, torture and intimidation, and we call on all human rights institutions to denounce this criminal behavior practiced by the occupation against our people in general and against health work crews in particular to extract a story consistent with the occupation’s demand, and to extract this testimony under threat. Publishing it in audio and video is a war crime in itself.

There you have it. Using hospitals as military sites isn't the war crime - posting video of the hospital director admitting it is the real war crime!

We call on human rights institutions to open an urgent investigation into the Kamal Adwan Hospital massacre, where children were besieged without water, without food, without electricity, and without water for extended days, which ended with the bombing of the hospital, the killing of two women and two children among the patients, and the injury of dozens. This was followed by storming the hospital and arresting dozens. Of the displaced, the sick, the health personnel, the brutal assault against them, the digging up of graves, the demolition of the hospital, the crushing of bodies under the tracks of tanks, and other horrific details.

Translation: We have to get the narrative back!

The problem is, they probably will. The media is always willing to give Hamas the benefit of the doubt while casting aspersions on everything the IDF says. Which is, really, a form of antisemitism, to say that Jews are suspected of lying with everything they say, even when compared to terrorists who celebrate murdering women and children.

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Proof that Gaza Health Ministry just makes casualty statistics up

Here is a table of the number of Palestinians killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (as reported by UN-OCHA), on these days in mid-October.

Date	Number claimed killed	Cumulative number
13-Oct		1900
14-Oct	328	2228
15-Oct	442	2670
16-Oct	138	2808
17-Oct	192	3000
18-Oct	478	3478
19-Oct	307	3785
20-Oct	352	4137
21-Oct	248	4385
22-Oct	266	4651
23-Oct	436	5087

According to the ministry, Israel killed several hundred people on most days.

Now, look at the figures from October 18, covering the alleged deaths from October 17.

The ministry claimed that 471 people were killed at the Al Ahli Hospital on October 17, but for the entire day they only counted 478 dead.

The ministry swears that Israel bombed that hospital. Which means that outside that one explosion, only 7 additional people were killed! Suddenly, the death toll went to practically zero on that one day.

Of course, every observer of the aftermath of the rocket explosion believes that the 471 figure was grossly exaggerated to begin with.

But that is hardly the only bizarre anomaly in the Hamas health ministry numbers.

Here are their numbers from October 28 and 29 in the UN report:

On October 29, the ministry said the total number killed in the previous 24 hours was 302 (8005-7703.) But the number of women and children killed in the same 24 hours was 328! (2062-1863=199, 3324-3195=129, 199+129=328.)

Yes, more of the deaths were women and children than...the total. 109% of those killed in that day were women and children.

Sure it's impossible, but why let that dissuade you from believing their statistics?

Similarly, the November 6-7 reports indicate 306 killed, yet they claim 337 - over 110% - were supposedly women, children and elderly.

Almost as unlikely is the October 29-30 reports, which indicate that 210 out of 216 killed - over 97%! - were women and children (They didn't count elderly until October 30th, if we had those alleged numbers, almost certainly the count would go above 100% as well.)

And somehow, we never see women and children looking at damage after an airstrike. They all seem to be men of fighting age.

These numbers are all randomly made up. There is no other explanation. The news media has no independent source for casualties, as they did in previous wars, so Hamas can issue whatever numbers it wants without fear of anyone calling them out on it.

Even though their numbers literally don't add up.

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