The BBC should not trust Hamas’s death figures

Posted 2024-08-19 04:07:40

I had a moving conversation on Friday with my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a political analyst from Gaza who had lost 31 members of his family in the war. This was for the Jewish Chronicle podcast, so there was a certain formality, but at the end I found myself blurting out that I wanted to give him a hug.

Ahmed and I have some differences, but we agree profoundly on the fundamentals. All human lives are precious, all death is tragic and peace is the only goal worth pursuing. This dovetails with the desire not to allow the jihadis of Hamas to manipulate public opinion in the West.

This week, it was reported that 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The coverage was filled with the sleight-of-hand with which we have become familiar, insinuating that the Israelis are the liars and butchers, not Hamas. Yolande Knell, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, opened her story by attributing the 40,000 figure to the “Hamas-run health ministry”. Fine. But she didn’t report the reason this mattered: these figures are deeply unreliable.

There was some discussion of this buried further down, but how hard would it have been to write at the start, “some analysts have doubted the veracity of figures produced by Hamas”? The atmosphere of any story is created by what reporters omit or relegate, as well as what they include.

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Take these two lines from the BBC: “The ministry’s figures for the number of people killed do not differentiate between civilians and fighters. However, its breakdown of identified reported fatalities say a majority are children, women or elderly people.”

For one thing, analysis of the Hamas “women and children” statistics by the data scientist Professor Abraham Wyner and multidisciplinary academics Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose exposed them as laughably implausible.

Their findings received much coverage at the time. This would have been relevant, no?

Moreover, did it not occur to the BBC to wonder how “a majority” of the dead could be “children, women or elderly people”?

Where were all the men? Or was the Mossad singling out the frail and infirm for assassination?

There is an obvious answer.

Most of the male casualties were Hamas terrorists because they are who Israel has been targeting. Which brings me to a further point. The BBC built the story around Hamas’s figures while ignoring Israel’s announcement that at least 17,000 jihadis have been killed in Gaza.

Even taking the most cynical estimate of Israel’s figures and the most generous approach to Hamas, the two combine to produce a combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio of 1:2. The true figure is likely to be closer to 1:1. Remarkably, this was achieved on a battlefield that was designed to provoke civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. Or have we forgotten that one side in this war tries to protect innocent life, while the other side sacrifices it?

When the RAF joined the Americans, Kurds and Iraqis to destroy Islamic State in Mosul, 2.5 civilians were killed for every combatant. The UN’s global average is nine civilian deaths to every fighter.

Israel, therefore, is protecting the innocent better than any other country. Even a single death is a matter of anguish. My friend Ahmed knows this better than most.

Yet this is war and it flows from the depravity of Hamas.

So much of the reporting paints a picture that avoids overt lies but allows a cloud of bloodthirstiness to settle over the democracy while the terrorists are portrayed as the victims. This is why many people are turning away from “mainstream media”.

That is dangerous.