It is now far past time to stop paying attention to the lies of Hamas

Yahoo

05-04-2025

Ask anybody how many Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the number will be at their fingertips. It now stands at more than 50,000; they heard as much on the BBC.
Ask them how many of those sorry souls happened to be fighting Israel at the time, however, and you'll find that they soon draw a blank.
Three weeks after October 7, 2023, I wrote a column in this paper under the headline 'The gullible West is falling for Hamas's fictitious death figures'. It is a theme to which I and others have returned on many occasions.
A year ago, for instance, I wrote about 'the devastating proof that Hamas is faking its death figures,' when the American data scientist Professor Abraham Wyner became the first of several analysts to comprehensively debunk them.
'By rights,' I argued, 'if the central pillar of the anti-Israel edifice has been discredited, the whole structure should come tumbling down.' Fat lot of good that did.
This week, it emerged that Hamas had quietly dropped 3,400 fully 'identified' deaths from its casualty figures, including 1,080 children. 'These 'deaths' never happened,' wrote Salo Aizenberg, a board member at Honest Reporting, the NGO which made the discovery. 'The numbers were falsified. Again.' But not before they had been verified by the United Nations and parroted by a gullible — or ideologically blinkered — media.
Further analysis of the data showed that among those old enough to be fighting for Hamas, 72 per cent of the dead were male, a testament to the care and precision of the IDF on a battlefield often crowded with human shields. By contrast, in the most tragic statistic of all, the balance of child casualties was 50-50 between boys and girls. This builds up a picture of the way Israel is fighting this war, confirming that they are targeting belligerents, the very opposite of a 'genocide'.
Moreover, Honest Reporting found that Hamas had unscrupulously included natural deaths in the list of supposed victims of the IDF, including infant mortality rates of around 780 each year. This amounted to about 8,300 fatalities that any reporter acting in good faith would remove from the total. But the media has shown a singular lack of curiosity about that.
If we take into account Israel's figures, which state that about 20,000 of the dead were combatants, that means that about one civilian is killed for every fighter. This is a humanitarian feat that has never been equalled by any other army, in spite of the fact that Hamas herds its own people into the firing line to produce the footage we see on the BBC.
That is the true story of this war. But according to research by the Henry Jackson Society, extenuating Israeli data is cited in just 5 per cent of news reports (which is why most people are unaware of it), whereas 98 per cent repeat numbers provided by Hamas.
Soberingly, while thousands of despairing Palestinians are rising up against their jihadi overlords in Gaza, the West continues to do all it can to foist their propaganda agenda upon the public.
Every human life is sacred and it is macabre to talk in such terms about the grim arithmetic of death. But those on my side of the argument have no choice but to respond in such terms to the obsession with casualty numbers that has characterised coverage of this war since the start.
Put it this way: do you have any idea how many civilians were killed when we destroyed Islamic State, or waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq? No? That tells you something.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.