Paging the Media: You Might Want to Check What Hamas Just Admitted About Those Gaza Death Numbers

The media seems to regularly just accept data put out by the Gaza Health Ministry when it comes to things like death counts in the conflict with Israel. But it's under the thumb of Hamas, so how reliable can such assessments be?

Now there's new information that shows Hamas admitting that the data hasn't been accurate, that indeed, it was inflated, as our sister site Townhall reported, quoting the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records.
Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry, asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.

.@adesnik: "The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. For months, U.S. media have taken for granted that the ministry’s top-line figure for casualties was reliable enough to include in daily updates on… https://t.co/qwZQ1joizL
— FDD (@FDD) April 9, 2024

Incomplete data on a third of the people claimed dead? So they can't even be sure that's true, and they're getting it from non-independent media.

FDD pointed to one example of the bombing at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital, that immediately, right after the bombing, there was the claim by the Ministry that 500 people had been killed. But then when the evidence came out, it showed the bomb hit a parking lot and that number didn't make a lot of sense. A U.S. intel assessment placed it much lower, more in the neighborhood of 100.

FDD also makes another important point that's often left out: there's a lot of errant fire from Hamas that falls in Gaza. How much is that impacting numbers as well as deaths? The health ministry isn't talking.

Joe Truzman, Senior Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal also noted the other thing left out here is how many Hamas terrorists are also being taken out here, he said, potentially 10,000. But that is also not fully addressed by the health ministry.

Translation? Just exactly what are these numbers worth? Not a lot. So why doesn't the liberal media seem to care about this? Why do they -- and Joe Biden -- just parrot the Hamas propaganda? That doesn't exactly say you have "ironclad" support for Israel, Joe -- or for the truth.