Western media continues to report false death tolls given by Hamas in Gaza

On Saturday, I woke up to some of the best news to come out of Israel in months: a joint operation conducted by the Israel Defence Forces, the Shin Bet intelligence agency and Israel Police successfully rescued four hostages from Hamas captivity.

The initial reports I read in Israeli media suggested that around 50 Palestinians had been killed in the raid. The IDF later revised that number to “under 100.” But it didn’t take long for much of the media to start citing wildly higher figures given by Gazan health officials and characterizing the rescue op as some sort of a mass slaughter.

The Qatari state broadcaster Al-Jazeera tweeted a breaking news story about the rescue at 6:48 a.m. ET. Not long after, it posted another story citing “dozens” killed in Israeli raids that didn’t even mention the hostages. By Sunday, the headline on the story was changed to, ‘Bodies Scattered on Streets’: Israel Kills 226 in Central Gaza Attacks.

Western media also reported Hamas’s casualty figures uncritically. The Washington Post buried the lede, when it wrote, “Israel’s military launched one of the bloodiest raids of the war Saturday, killing more than 200 Palestinians in a brazen operation,” before mentioning the perfectly legitimate rationale for the mission: liberating civilians who had been illegally held for 246 days.

And this isn’t the first time that Hamas’s numbers have been called into question. In early March, Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, published the results of his study of health ministry reports in Tablet magazine, which uncovered anecdotal evidence that Hamas had been cooking the books.

This includes a daily death toll that increased “with almost metronomical linearity,” female casualties that did not correlate with those of children, as would be expected, and an adult male death toll that made no sense whatsoever.

“Here’s the problem with this data: the numbers are not real,” wrote Wyner. “

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