Casualty reports from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry are being taken at face value by most of the media. That’s shocking.
Commentary
While Israel is exclusively targeting military targets, the
terrorists of Hamas are using civilians as human shields, basing military equipment and personnel in schools and hospitals, and reportedly
shooting Gazan civilians trying to flee areas that Israel has warned will see combat.
A typical example of how Hamas operates is its decision to base a Hamas command-and-control complex in the center of the densely populated Jabalia camp. Hence, when Israel used precision-guided missiles to
kill a senior Hamas commander in the control complex, other people were killed in the strike.
How many of those killed or injured were civilians and how many were Hamas combatants and support staff isn’t really known, as only Hamas sources potentially have such information. What we do know is that any actual civilian casualties are the direct result of Hamas’s decision to violate the laws of decency and the
Geneva Convention by using the refugees as shields. True to form, the Gaza Health Ministry identified all the casualties as civilians and denied any Hamas presence.
That casualty reports from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by the terrorists who committed the Oct. 7 atrocities, are being taken at face value by most of the media is shocking.
That the Gaza Health Ministry provides detailed lists of names of casualties does nothing to ensure the veracity of those names, as there is no independent way to verify those casualties, and whether or not those being reported as civilians were actually civilians. And the fact that any Gazan resident contradicting Hamas propaganda risks retribution from one of the most brutal organizations the world has ever seen makes getting to the truth on casualty breakouts well-nigh impossible.
That various left-leaning organizations such as
Amnesty International and the
United Nations, which have a history of being anti-Israel, testify to its reliability
shouldn’t lessen our skepticism. And after the events of Oct. 7, news organizations should view any casualty statistics coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry with even more skepticism.
However, for those who need more recent evidence to doubt the veracity of casualty reports, one only has to look at the
information that came out of the Gaza Health Ministry on Oct. 17, when it reported that “at least 500” were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Al-Ahli Hospital. It turned out that
Israel didn’t attack the hospital. Further, the Gaza Health Ministry reporting was so far removed from reality that it can’t be construed as an honest mistake, but must be viewed as intentional lying.
“The explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital left gruesome scenes. Video that The Associated Press confirmed was from the hospital showed fire engulfing the building and the hospital grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. The grass around them was strewn with blankets, school backpacks and other belongings.”
It turned out that the “confirmed” video scenes had nothing whatsoever to do with the hospital, which was not engulfed in flames, yet AP, as did
other respected news organizations, reported that Israeli air strikes on the Al-Ahli Hospital had killed many hundreds of hospital patients, doctors, and staff.
Hence, because of a willing media eager to put Israel in the worst possible light, the lies told by the Gaza Health Ministry were uncritically reported as gospel.
Another obvious reason to reject the credibility of the Gaza Health Ministry is that it doesn’t report on the Gazan civilian casualties that result from the
10 to 20 percent misfire rate of rockets targeting Israeli civilians that crash into the densely populated Gaza Strip where they blow up and cause fires. Since the beginning of the war, about 550 rockets launched toward Israel have reportedly fallen within Gaza.
And when you consider the
tens of thousands of rockets that have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip over the past couple of decades, even conservative estimates must put the number of Gazan civilian casualties due to misfire in the thousands. This is just another example of Hamas’s disdain for the lives of Gazan civilians. Unsurprisingly, the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t report those casualties, as doing so would damage the Hamas propaganda narrative.
When news organizations report casualties in Gaza as coming from “health authorities” or the Gaza Health Ministry, they’re committing lies of omission by not reminding readers that the so-called health authorities are controlled by the same people who committed
the Oct. 7 atrocities and thus can’t be relied upon.
The sad fact is that there’s no reliable way to document the actual civilian casualties that the Hamas terrorists’ actions have produced and will continue to produce. But we can be sure that we will not get an accurate accounting from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which plays a critical role in Hamas’s ongoing propaganda operations.
We can also be sure that Hamas terrorists won’t hesitate to sacrifice Gazan civilians as long as Western media is willing to partner with Hamas by blaming those civilian deaths on Israel.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
