Hamas-UN Bullshit Blood Libel
The United Nations casually concedes the falsity of its incendiary Gaza casualty data
Hamas can’t or won’t produce water, electricity, food, jobs, or prosperity, but the terrorist organization is adept at producing bullshit statistics and contorted logic for antisemitic, gullible, and/or servile Westerners. In fact, Hamas propagandists aren’t very competent with statistical science, but the United Nations has always been happy to validate the output and share it with earth’s least discriminating audience.
Sometimes, however, the burden of complicity becomes a bit much, so on May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) acknowledged without adornment, apology, or explanation that their casualty statistics since October 7 have been grossly exaggerated. OCHA revised the number of children killed to less than half the numbers previously circulated. UN spokesman Farhan Haq offered a breezy, oops-a-daisy, coulda-happened-to-anyone non-explanation:
“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers … We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
In fact, OCHA obtains its data primarily from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas and from the Government Media Office, which is run by Hamas. The Ministry, in turn, obtains its data from “independent media sources” in Gaza, which are run by Hamas. From there, OCHA acts as wholesale distributor to retail outlets like UNICEF, whose director, Catherine Russell (a former advisor to Presidents Obama and Biden) made the now-discredited numbers a centerpiece of her public analysis:
“We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.”
THE PROBLEM, UP CLOSE
On May 1, a Bastiat’s Window reader/commenter cited the since-discredited numbers to suggest that Israel is engaged in “ethnic cleansing”:
“The IDF has now killed 1.5% of the population of Gaza, a majority of whom were women and children.”
I replied, that same day:
“The 1.5% figure sounds plausible. The ‘majority women and children’ figure is possible, but is more likely to be Hamas bullshit numbers. Hamas (i.e., ‘Ministry of Health’) numbers have been systematically and convincingly debunked.”
I’m gratified that the UN confirmed my suspicions a week later. Search the web for accusations that Israel is engaged in “genocide,” “apartheid,” “war crimes,” or “ethnic cleansing,” and most often, the accusations begin with bogus Hamas/UN numbers.
THE FABRICATIONS SHOULDN’T BE NEWS
One of best debunkers of Hamas/UN data since October 7 has been Salo Aizenberg, who writes for fact-checker site HonestReporting.com. On December 4, Aizenberg posted a thread on X/Twitter, beginning with:
“Close review of Gaza casualty figures reported by UN OCHA based on daily Hamas “Ministry of Health” numbers proves they are FALSIFIED. Women & children are grossly inflated. This is easily proven but media ignores. See detailed expose below:”
On December 11, he posted another thread showing the extraordinary lengths to which the Israel Defense Forces had gone to avoid harming civilians in Gaza:
“Claims that Israel is ‘indiscriminately’ bombing or causing disproportionate civilian deaths in Gaza can be easily proven false based on actions & statistics.”
In an X/Twitter thread on May 15, Aizenberg reported another curious Hamas/UN datum. The UN reports that 34,000 Gazans have died, of which 10,000 “still have to be fully identified.” (See the two snippets below.) In fact, Aizenberg notes, no one claims to know the whereabouts of those 10,000 bodies; for now, the UN and credulous journalists rely entirely upon the claims of Hamas.
Aizenberg used basic statistical tools to spot the frauds in the Hamas/UN data—and on May 8, OCHA apparently bowed to that same logic, but not before five seven months of numeric defamation aimed at Israel.
FAKE NUMBERS
On March 6, Abraham Wyner (professor of statistics and data science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) penned “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers: The evidence is in their own poorly fabricated figures.” Here are a couple of choice examples from Wyner’s article:
The leftmost diagram shows cumulative daily casualty figures from Hamas and the UN OCHA. The numbers show virtually identical numbers killed each day—a ridiculous degree of statistical regularity never found in war or nature. The center diagram suggests virtually zero correlation between the numbers of women and children killed on given days—a nonsensical result in a situation of urban warfare. The rightmost diagram shows a negative correlation between the numbers of men and women killed on given days. Gabriel Epstein produced a 20-page report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on “How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers.”
For those interested in power of good data analysis, there’s much more to read in the works of Wyner, Epstein, and Aizenberg.
PROPORTIONALITY IS JUST FOR JEWS
In ginning up their accusations of “genocide,” Israel’s critics often claim that Israel’s response to October 7 lacks “proportionality.” Proportionality, though, is a principle of war that only seems to matter if Israel is a combatant. No matter how vicious, depraved, or menacing its attackers may be, Israel is expected to respond only with some unspecified “proportional” response and then leave its attackers to regroup and rearm for further attacks on Israeli civilians.
Consider the Bastiat’s Window reader’s claim that, “The IDF has now killed 1.5% of the population of Gaza … .” The population of Gaza is around 2.5 million, and that would would indicate 37,500 Gazans killed since October 7. While the number could prove to be another example of inflated Hamas fabrications, let’s suppose not, for the sake of argument.
On October 7, Hamas launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Israel, killing perhaps 1,400 people—including some of the hostages. By Hamas’s numbers, Israel’s retaliation has killed 37,500 Gazans—27 Gazans killed for every Israeli killed in the initial attack (but not including IDF forces killed since then). Now consider a parallel situation. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. Retaliation by America and its allies resulted in the deaths of perhaps 3,000,000 Japanese citizens—1,248 Japanese killed for every American killed at Pearl Harbor. By this crude measure, then, America’s post-December 7 response was 46 times as “disproportionate” as Israel’s post-October 7 response. Even more telling, America contributed mightily to millions of German deaths, even though Nazi Germany had not even attacked the U.S. when America declared war.
In the 1940s, the singular goal of the Allies was to crush the capacity of Japan’s and Germany’s murderous regimes to make war. Israel’s sole purpose in Gaza is to similarly neuter Hamas. Israel’s campaign is as morally upright as America’s efforts against the Axis Powers, and Israel has a long way to go before its response is more lethal than America’s response between 1941 and 1945.
When I offered this Israel-in-2024-to-America-in-1941 comparison, the Bastiat’s Window reader/commenter said:
“You compare the Gaza war to WWII. I don’t think the comparison is on point …”
I said he was absolutely right in that respect:
“You are correct in arguing that Imperial Japan’s December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor is not directly comparable to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. [As a proportion of population], Hamas killed seven times as many Israelis as Japan did Americans. Hamas has always promised to murder every Jew on earth, whereas Japan never made any such threat against Americans. Japan attacked a military target, whereas Hamas attacked only defenseless civilians—raping young girls and old women, slaughtering babies in front of their parents, kidnapping small children, engaging in necrophilia, sending photos and films of their depravities to the victims’ loved ones—and promising endless future rounds of the same. Imperial Japan could only attack a small, remote outpost of the U.S. and posed little or no physical threat to the vast majority of Americans; in contrast, Hamas and its fellow Iranian puppets stand within tactical range of every Israeli.”
SUMMING UP
On May 13, Seth Mandel at Commentary magazine offered an overview of the UN’s May 8 data correction. Here’s the core of his argument:
“Now the UN says about half of its original estimate of women and of children can be disregarded, bringing those totals to about 7,800 and 5,000 respectively. That brings the total number of Palestinian fatalities down by over 11,000, nearly a third of the commonly reported total.
And that’s not all. The Palestinian statistical agencies are famous for using ‘under 20’ as their marker for separating children and adults. That means among the ‘children’ are likely a number of 18- and 19-year-olds (i.e. not children). Additionally, we know the IDF encounters 16- and 17-year-old militants in the field, meaning a chunk of the ‘children’ are actually combatants. And of course Hamas makes no distinction between combatants and civilians when counting the casualties.
Mandel adds:
“It’s possible, then—perhaps even likely—that the IDF has achieved a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of around 1.5-1, an unheard-of level of precision and civilian protection in urban warfare. … If that’s the case, it should cause the Biden administration to rethink its hypercritical posture toward Israel. Except—and here’s the bad news—the Biden administration already knew this information.”
From David Adesnick at National Review:
“for months the U.N. put its trust in numbers generated by Hamas-controlled sources, and the Biden administration put its trust in the U.N. These numbers have served as the basis for relentless criticism of Israel, with Joe Biden accusing it of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ and deciding, ultimately, to withhold shipments of weapons. In his State of the Union address in March, Biden told Congress that 30,000 Palestinians had died in the war, without giving any indication that this number came from a Hamas-run ministry. If 11,000 fewer women and children than previously reported have died, it becomes difficult to portray the Israeli armed forces as an out-of-control war machine.”
By the way, on May 14, the IDF released drone videos showing black-clad Hamas terrorists using UN vehicles as cover and UN facilities as a base of operations.
“I AM A WHITE COLONIZER”
For Muffie, Kayden, Brett, Paisley, McKenzie and all the other oppressed encampment-dwellers, the following video (from an Instagram page called IsraelSoWhite) shows a collection of Israel’s extraordinarily pale, blonde, blue-eyed citizenry, exhibiting their gleaming white privilege.
> In ginning up their accusations of “genocide,” Israel’s critics often claim that Israel’s response to October 7 lacks “proportionality.” Proportionality, though, is a principle of war that only seems to matter if Israel is a combatant. No matter how vicious, depraved, or menacing its attackers may be, Israel is expected to respond only with some unspecified “proportional” response and then leave its attackers to regroup and rearm for further attacks on Israeli civilians.
Like so many other terms, Leftists are redefining "proportionality" here for self-serving purposes. Proportionality does not mean "the response must be proportional to the provocation," and no amount of pointing out how disproportionate to what happened on October 7 Israel's actions allegedly are will make it mean that.
Proportionality means that the army's actions must be proportional to *their stated goals in the war.* If your goal is to capture a certain city, for example, and you're coming in from the east, there's something wrong going on if you're indiscriminately hitting targets 200 miles northwest of that city.
Israel's goal here is the extermination of Hamas. And so far, they've done an admirable job of staying on-target.
Thank you, I truly feel incomprehensibly frustrated when in dialogue with most anyone on these issues. The alacrity with which they absorb numbers without a moment of reflection, and then amplify it on social media as if it's a fundamental physical truth such as gravity or particle-wave duality is just mind-boggling to me. Erstwhile "scholars" and people of letters show themselves to be little more than sequacious consensus lemmings.
Not seeing obvious manipulations and lies for what they are at an individual level is one thing, but when this is being "put into the groundwater" so to speak, and coloring nearly every daily interaction, it becomes a tidal wave of BS that one can't navigate, swim through, or avoid. The little Hamas-nics on my nearby campus are eagerly stopping normal traffic, blocking pedestrian foot traffic, tying up police resources that are better allocated to violent crime, etc. It shouldn't be this easy for propaganda to thrive. But perhaps there is an aside there on the degradation of our national educational apparatus which privileges "activism" and "simplicity" over the "pursuit of truth" and "complexity".
I read broadly, but critically, and it didn't take me very long to arrive at many of the same conclusions you have. To observe the mental laziness, or lack of curiosity in nuance or depth, or historical context, has me screaming into the void at times. Sadly I see many of the same echoes in virtually any topic these days - "race", climate change, school curricula. Thank you for also void-screaming with such a critical eye and fluid prose.