Hamas’ list of 38,000 fatalities in Gaza is an absolute lie. Here’s the proof. I’ve dug into them in detail. These are the results of my findings: Firstly, they do not quite support the claim made by i24 NEWS this week that 60% of Hamas fighters have been killed. This is misreporting that I have erroneously quoted on here. To clarify: the correct statistic is that 60% have been either killed or injured. So how many fighters have been killed exactly? On the best estimates we have to date, 17,480 Hamas fighters can be accounted for as killed. Estimates of the strength of Hamas’ Al-Qassam brigades before the war were 40,000-50,000. Therefore we can state that between 35-44% of Hamas’ initial fighting strength has been killed. Some of them will have been replaced by new recruits, but these recruits will be largely untrained—and we have seen numerous recent reports of Gazans turning against Hamas, rather than joining them. But what does this mean for the Gaza Ministry of Health death statistics? If we are interested in the numbers of civilians killed, immediately we can remove 17,480 from the 38,000 total cited by Mr Corbyn et al. This leaves us with 20,520. However, for a population the size of Gaza, we can also expect 575 natural deaths per month. Since October 2023, this gives us an expected total of 5,750 who have died of non-violent causes since the start of the war. Remove 5,750 from the total of 20,520 civilians who have died since October, and we are left with 14,770. Of these 14,770, there is documented evidence of double accounting, fake deaths, artificially inflated numbers of women and children and numerous other obvious lies. We can say with relative certainty that this number will be lower, especially if we take into account those killed by Hamas’ own actions. However, that 14,770 is deeply problematic in other ways. In May 2024, the UN took the decision to lower the reporting of deaths, because 38,000 is the latest update from not only the Gaza Ministry of Health, but also from the Hamas-run Government Media Office. The Ministry of Health admitted in May 2024 that they could not provide names for 10,000 of that total figure. Of course, it is unquestionable that some bodies will be unfound or buried under rubble. However, the Ministry of Health recording of the dead through unverified media reports is deeply problematic. This is why the UN has revised the death toll downwards. If we disregard these arbitrary and unevidenced 10,000 deaths, the civilian death toll drops to 4,770 even before we take into account Hamas’ documented accounting ‘errors’. Even if we are being kind and acknowledge this figure that the UN do not, the civilian death toll in Gaza remains in the 10,000-15,000 range: vastly lower than the 38,000 cited by Mr Corbyn and friends. As @SpencerGuard (chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point) has covered extensively, a 1:1.5 ratio of combatant to civilian fatalities would be unprecedented in modern urban warfare, where ratios of 1:9 are not uncommon. I would go further than John. At the absolute most generous position to Hamas, the ratio is lower than 1:1, giving us 17,480 Hamas fighters killed compared to a maximum of 14,700 civilian casualties. From my analysis I’m certain this figure is too high. It’s almost certainly below 10,000. These paragraphs are from my free S*bstack article. I’ll post the link in the first reply but I think it’s important the truth is spread as widely as possible.
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