For months, the headlines have been saturated with harrowing casualty figures from Gaza.
A chorus of media outlets near and far have decried the “genocide” unfolding before their eyes, relying on casualty reports issued almost exclusively by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
The numbers are shocking, the language incendiary, and the implications clear: Israel is the worst of all villains, and any context or nuance was irrelevant.
But now, as the fog of war begins to clear, the purported casualty statistics are unraveling entirely, exposing a web of deception that is as insidious as it is effective. Consider the brazen falsehoods embedded in these statistics:
Adult men falsely counted as women
“Dead women” named Mohammed
Natural deaths misreported as war casualties
It turns out the tragedy in Gaza is not just the human toll but the corruption of truth itself. The real question isn’t merely about the lies — egregious as they are. It is about how so many “reputable” media outlets became so deeply compromised by anti-Zionist bias that they uncritically parroted terrorist propaganda. When did journalistic standards die? And who buried them?
According to a new report by Andrew Fox, a former British Army officer, a staggering 98 percent of reporters cited fabricated Hamas casualty figures, while only five percent mentioned Israeli data.1 That’s right: Jihadist propaganda has gone global, entering the mainstream with a speed and efficiency that should alarm anyone with a half-working brain.
Take the claim that Gaza’s health authorities distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. They don’t. The resulting implication — that all 44,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza were innocent civilians — is a deliberate obfuscation, designed to inflame global outrage.
Meanwhile, about 5,000 naturally occurring deaths, including cancer fatalities, have been opportunistically added to the tally of “victims.” The ages of the casualties have been systematically revised downwards to inflate the number of “children” killed. If you think that’s just sloppy record-keeping, you haven’t been paying attention.
This deliberate manipulation of data confirms and enhances the seminal work first conducted by Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone, and Gregory Rose. Their meticulous analysis revealed that the numbers coming out of Gaza were not merely unreliable, but systematically engineered to serve a propaganda narrative.
And it worked.
In October 2023, Britons were nearly twice as likely to hold Hamas most responsible for the war than the Israeli government. Fast forward a year, after relentless media misinformation, and 60 percent of Britons believed Israel’s military actions had gone “too far,” while only 12 percent thought they were “about right.”
Public opinion, shaped by the steady drumbeat of distorted casualty figures, has placed the Jewish state under enormous international pressure to relent, effectively granting Hamas a lifeline to regroup and rearm.
The complicity of the media in amplifying Hamas’ propaganda is not just a journalistic failure — it’s a moral one. Reporting casualties is not inherently biased, but choosing to rely on unverified figures from a terrorist organization, while sidelining credible alternative sources, is an act of editorial malpractice.
And the consequences are dire. The perpetuation of the “genocide” libel isolates Israel diplomatically, bolsters antisemitic narratives, and ultimately emboldens terrorist organizations worldwide by showing them that the global information war can be won with lies.
The question now is whether any lessons will be learned. Will the media finally recognize the corrosive effects of their credulity and ideological leanings? Or will the next conflict see another round of unquestioning regurgitation of propaganda, another cycle of skewed public opinion, and another erosion of the standards that underpin responsible journalism?
One thing is clear: The casualty figures from Gaza are not just numbers. They are weapons. And the media, knowingly or not, became their willing accomplices.
If anything, the Israelis should be given a standing ovation for the humanitarian measures they have implemented in Gaza, such as:
Assisting Gazans with evacuations and protecting humanitarian corridors with tanks and soldiers
Delivering tons of aid to the Strip
Agreeing to inspect more aid and opening an additional border crossing for it
Taking a plethora of precautions before and during airstrikes
There was a remarkable report in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, which said that, just days after the October 7th attacks, American three-star Marine Lieutenant General James Glynn showed up in Israel to advise the Jewish state on its strategy.
A ground operation in Gaza, the Americans said, was too costly and not worth the squeeze. They predicted a dire 20 Israeli deaths each day. As of today, the actual number is less than two per day. Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side, Israel has achieved an unworldly Palestinian combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio, which is believed to be approximately one-to-one.
“Even if we were to take Hamas’ statistics as accurate — and there is no reason why we should, because we don’t do that with Putin or ISIS — war is hell and every individual civilian death is a tragedy,” said Andrew Roberts, a British member of parliament. “But speaking as a military historian, less than two-to-one is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare, where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields. And it’s a testament to the professionalism, ethics, and values of the Israel Defense Forces.”
John Spencer, who served for more than 25 years in the U.S. military, reaching the rank of major, asserted that “Israel has taken more steps to avoid harming civilians than any other military in history,” adding that such lengths would set a new standard that other Western militaries would struggle to follow in the future.2
Amid a myriad of other baseless accusations, people have claimed that Israel cut the water supply to Gaza. In reality, the Israelis simply redirected the water they provide to Gaza (despite having no international obligation to do so) to the southern part of the strip because it became more crowded with evacuees.
If you want to know why some Gazans lack access to good water, a Hamas propaganda video shows the terror group bragging about their “ingenuity” by literally cutting water pipes, donated by Europe, out of the ground. Why? You know, to manufacture more rockets.
There are also the multitude of United Nations agencies and bureaucrats who continue to fault Israel for the lack of humanitarian aid entering Gaza. For months now, COGAT (Israel’s liaison for civilians in the Palestinian territories) has been documenting that various humanitarian agencies continue to demonstrate an inability, incompetence, or unwillingness to distribute the aid throughout Gaza. Seemingly endless amounts of it are sitting in parking lots in the strip, already checked by Israel, waiting to be brought to Gazan civilians.
Of course, this is just the tip of the embarrassing iceberg for the UN. Israel’s Ministry of Defense, citing intelligence, recently said that more than 30 staffers from the notorious UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) participated in the October 7th terror attacks, that 185 UNRWA employees are known to be active in Hamas’ military wing, and that more than a thousand UNRWA workers are connected to Palestinian terror groups.
But hey, that is not even the worst of it. During this war, the IDF found a Hamas data center directly under UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza, yet UNRWA claimed it knew nothing about it. Really? How stupid do they think the world is to believe that you do not know what the hell is happening right under one of your billion-dollar organization’s most important buildings?
“UNRWA paid the electric bills for Hamas’ cyber command,” one Twitter user joked.3
Furthermore, UNRWA insisted that they rigorously vet Gazan staff according to the UN list of terrorist groups. There is just one totally insignificant minor detail: The UN does not classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. In the gracious words of Martin Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course as you know. It is a political movement.”
Much of this lunacy is fueled by the media, which wants us to naively think that they are a responsible, non-biased, well-intentioned group of people who uphold only the most sincerest values of “the Fourth Estate.”
In reality, the media is mostly a group that I call “the scribes.” It is just a lot of people who, frankly, do not have a clue about what they do and say.
For example, the media keeps telling us about the number of innocent Palestinian deaths, which is fine, but why don’t they also mention the scores of Palestinians who have survived because Israel has taken extraordinary measures to protect them? Could it be that much of the media ranges from inept to unmindful? Or could it be that they are covertly rooting for one of the sides?
Finally, there are the Palestinians themselves. I am not victim-blaming and I have no doubt that there are thousands of them who are truly innocent, uninvolved, and helpless.
But there is also a weighty group of them who have helped turned Gaza into an Islamic jihadist fortress predominantly using civilian infrastructure. And we know that Gazans are dying, at least in part, because Palestinian terrorists use their own people as human shields, and because their launched rockets indiscriminately intended for Israel oftentimes don’t make it out of Gaza.
Yet so many people are acting (implicitly or explicitly) like every single death is Israel’s fault. When civilians volunteer to be human shields, they automatically become legitimate military targets according to international law. In many cases, they are used as human shields against their own will, which is a gross violation of international law. (But it was Israel, not Hamas, that was brought in front of the World Court.)
Patients at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, for instance, reportedly died due to a power outage that began as the IDF entered the complex, which was being used to host hostages and for Palestinian terrorists to seek shelter. The IDF has routinely offered humanitarian aid to each hospital it is forced to raid and orders evacuations to protect innocents. Hamas, meanwhile, relies on civilian casualties for Western sympathy. Who do you think cut the power?
And yet, so many people are not accusing Hamas of attempting to commit genocide, when it is in the terror group’s public charter that they desire to deliberately kill as many Israelis and Jews as possible.
“We don’t even need to accuse Hamas because they admit that they are a genocidal enterprise. They admit that their October 7th attacks were motivated by genocidal aims. They are backed by the Iranian government, which seeks to annihilate the entire Jewish People,” said Pierre Poilievre, a Canadian politician.
There is another way to think about all of this, as Dr. Barry Tigay (a retired psychologist and entrepreneur) so eloquently put it:
“If Hamas had not perpetrated the worst atrocities imaginable against Israel; if Egypt and other countries had opened their borders to allow displaced Gazans a place of refuge; if UNRWA, the UN, and human rights organizations had stood up to genocidal Hamas instead of supporting them; if Gazans had refused to be subjugated by radical Islamists; if world leaders actually led in support of human rights and humane values, things could have been different.”
“But we live in a world of corruption, weakness, antisemitism, tribalism, and failures. Of all the malign, compromised forces operating in the Middle East, Israel is the most true, brave, and right.”4
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