It’s wild when you think about it: news organizations were taking Hamas propaganda as if it were verified and accurate information. No one learned from the Gaza hospital fiasco, the first wall the media crashed into when they erroneously said that an Israeli airstrike hit this facility. The reality was it was the terrorists’ own rocket salvo, fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The New York Times had to print a retraction, but the damage was done. Now, Hamas has openly admitted they inflated the death toll in Gaza, and the media is AWOL (via 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.
[…]
On October 16, the health ministry told global media that an Israeli airstrike was responsible for an explosion that killed 500 Palestinians at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza. U.S. media quickly reported the story even though it became clear within hours there was no evidence to support claims of an airstrike or a death toll close to 500. Soon, evidence emerged showing that a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists was nearly certain to have caused a blast in the hospital’s parking lot. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report on October 18 said the blast likely caused between 100 to 300 deaths, and it leaned towards casualty estimates at “the low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum.”
Nevertheless, the health ministry does not identify the individuals who died as a result of errant Palestinian fire, even though the Israel Defense Forces reported that 12 percent of rockets fired during the first month of the war fell inside Gaza — more than 1,000 total misfires.
FDD’s David Adesnik added, “The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work…Now we’re seeing that a third or more of the ministry’s data may be incomplete at best — and fictional at worst.”
We shouldn’t be shocked by this—they’re figures cobbled together by terrorists, though that’s never mattered with liberal outlets.
Newsrooms are filled to the brim with anti-Israel and antisemitic reporters who do their best to make Hamas seem like a Muslim version of the Red Cross. They probably can’t write this due to being terminated, but no doubt that a healthy share support what Hamas did on October 7 and think it was an act of resistance, not rape and murder on a genocidal scale. The weekly special served by this crew is that Israel is committing genocide, which is being propped up by this fantastical figure of over 30,000 dead.
People die in war, and Israel has done a remarkable job in ensuring civilian casualties are at a minimum. Even those who aren’t hardcore conservatives, like Coleman Hughes, have torched the genocide narrative, citing how the ratio here for civilian and combatant deaths is on par with modern urban warfare, especially in the Middle East:
Hamas lied—not a shocking news development, but curious to see how many news outlets make corrections. I doubt many will since it chips away mightily at their ‘IDF killers’ narrative.
