The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, incessantly repeated by our media, are fake.
Anyone with an ounce of sense or basic comprehension of the situation knows they’re fake. They have always been fake. So, we must assume one of three things about people who spread Hamas’ claims: They are 1) irredeemably stupid, 2) propagandists for terrorists, or 3) both.
Make what you will of the president, but in a speech celebrating Ramadan, Biden repeated the claim that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” The president of the United States now not only rejects the claims of our allies in Israel but accepts the declarations of a group that is not only on the Justice Department’s terror list — one that recently murdered, raped, and kidnapped American citizens.
A few weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, as Jeryl Bier reminds us, Biden admitted Hamas casualty numbers were fake, saying he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” (Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed not long that the number of dead women and children was “over 25,000” — perhaps still under the residual effects of his post-surgery morphine drip.)
In Tablet, Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, lays out the case that the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers are an “obvious fake.” The near-perfect incremental daily uptick, despite the vagaries of battle, is the big giveaway — though there are other aspects that make zero sense. Wyner theorizes that the fake daily numbers vary too little because Hamas does “not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.” Indeed, while Islamists excel at sexual torture and theocratic repression, they are less proficient at math. That does not stop pro-Hamas Westerners from pushing the “genocide” blood libel.
It took Israel, a sophisticated nation with many genuine experts, weeks to wade through the sinister wreckage of the Oct. 7 attack to get a proper tally of the dead. And yet, miraculously, whenever an Israeli attack is carried out, within hours — sometimes within the hour — Hamas can pinpoint not only the number of people who have died in wreckages but their ages and sex.
It should also be remembered that Hamas makes no distinction between civilian deaths and its terrorists. When Biden laments death using these statistics, he is lamenting the death of Hamas.
Israel contends that it has killed approximately 12,000 Hamas members. “If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low,” Wyner notes, “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.” Historically speaking, those numbers are remarkable for wars fought in dense urban quarters, which is where Hamas hides (or is aided by) civilians. Certainly, it is better than how Americans have fared in similar situations trying to ferret out terrorists.
What’s changed with Biden? His administration was already teeming with Obama-era pro-Iranian voices. Now, Biden is apparently convinced that his 2024 electoral fortunes are bound up in appeasing the hard-left activist class and pro-Hamas faction in Michigan and Minnesota. Knowing that spineless Jewish elected officials in the Democratic Party value partisanship over Israel, Biden, whose appeasement of Iran did much to set the groundwork for Oct. 7, is largely freed from worrying about moderates.
Biden has tried to create the impression that there is a problem with Netanyahu, not the people of Israel, engaging in fabricated hot-mic moments and leaks to bash Israel’s prime minister, who he says is “hurting Israel more than helping.” I suspect the president has had harsher words for Netanyahu than he has ever had for the Iranian mullahs or corrupt authoritarians of the Palestinian Authority. Nevertheless, Netanyahu is not a dictator; he is the elected leader of a democratic nation. It’s highly improbable that any person capable of being elected in Israel, on the left or right, would let Hamas off the hook, either.
And make no mistake, anyone who is calling for a “ceasefire” — by which they mean unilateral Israeli ceasefire, as the other side doesn’t abide by agreements — is calling for Gaza to remain a terror state. That includes the president. And he knows it. When Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC asked him this weekend which side really wanted a ceasefire, Biden correctly answered that it was Hamas, which saw it as the only way to “survive” and “rebuild” — before realizing his mistake and wandering off into gibberishland.
None of this is to say that civilians aren’t dying or that war isn’t gruesome. It is a tragedy what Palestinian leaders, who have refused to make peace with Jews for over a century, have brought on their own people. The operative difference is that Hamas (and PLO and Islamic Jihad, etc.) targets civilians, and Israel targets terrorists. No amount of propaganda can change that reality.
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