|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
(A7) The number of civilians reported killed in the Gaza conflict has been exaggerated to depict Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people, according to a new report cited by The Telegraph on Saturday.
Researchers say the Gaza ministry of health inflated casualty figures by including natural deaths, failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties, and over-reporting fatalities among women and children.
According to the study by the Henry Jackson Society think tank, these figures have been manipulated by Hamas-run authorities in Gaza for propaganda purposes, with international media often repeating the claims without scrutiny.
The report highlights that, based on Israeli and US military and intelligence assessments, around 17,000 of those killed were Hamas terrorists—a fact it says has been largely overlooked in media coverage.
Its findings state: “The ministry of health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began. This has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.”
Critics of Israel argue that even after correcting for anomalies, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have still been killed in Gaza. Simple math shows the number is closer to ten thousand, and that Israel warned Gazans to leave terrorist areas it was targetting, but Hamas often prevented them from doing so.
The report uncovered numerous statistical discrepancies, including approximately 5,000 natural deaths being added to casualty lists, such as cancer patients who were later found listed among those still receiving hospital treatment. Other errors, some of which were subsequently corrected, involved misclassifications of adults as children and men as women, artificially increasing the reported number of women and children killed.
Researchers also found evidence of systematic adjustments to victims’ ages, where individuals’ ages were reduced by at least one year in comparison to Palestinian Population Register data, seemingly to inflate the number of children counted among the dead.
“This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing sentiment and media coverage,” said Andrew Fox, the report’s author, as quoted by The Telegraph.
The report also notes that casualty figures fail to account for Gazans killed by Hamas’ misfired rockets or incidents during humanitarian aid distribution. For example, it cites 17-year-old Ahmed Shdad Halmy Brika, who was reportedly shot by Hamas while attempting to secure food for his family from an aid shipment in December.
The Henry Jackson Society also criticizes several international media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times, and CNN, for uncritically adopting Hamas-provided casualty figures. It found that 98% of surveyed reports cited numbers from the Hamas-run health ministry, while only 5% referenced Israeli data.
Conducted by the Fifty Global Research group with support from the International Institute of Social and Legal Studies, the report also accuses the United Nations of conflating civilian and military casualties in its humanitarian appeals.
Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel told The Telegraph, “The manipulation of events and facts on the ground throughout this conflict confirms that a terrorist organization like Hamas will distort the truth to further their own aims. The media must be alert to this and report information and events taking place in a responsible and balanced way. War is a tragedy, but Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorists who are backed by the Iranian regime that also threatens our interests and efforts to bring peace and stability to the region.”
A BBC spokesperson claimed, “It is challenging to report accurately on the death toll in Gaza as Israel does not allow independent access to international journalists. BBC News is clear and transparent in sourcing the figures which are available and attributing them to the Hamas-run health authority. Beyond this, we use a range of sources to understand the impact of the war in Israel and Gaza on civilians, including the IDF, the health ministry in Gaza and the UN.” A recent report by British lawyer Trevor Asserson accused the BBC of violating its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the first four months of the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.
