The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, incessantly repeated by our media, are fake.
Anyone with an ounce of sense or basic comprehension of the situation knows they’re fake. They have always been fake. So, we must assume one of three things about people who spread Hamas’ claims: They are 1) irredeemably stupid, 2) propagandists for terrorists, or 3) both.
Make what you will of the president, but in a speech celebrating Ramadan, Biden repeated the claim that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” The president of the United States now not only rejects the claims of our allies in Israel but accepts the declarations of a group that is not only on the Justice Department’s terror list — one that recently murdered, raped, and kidnapped American citizens.
A few weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, as Jeryl Bier reminds us, Biden admitted Hamas casualty numbers were fake, saying he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” (Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed not long that the number of dead women and children was “over 25,000” — perhaps still under the residual effects of his post-surgery morphine drip.)
In Tablet, Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, lays out the case that the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers are an “obvious fake.” The near-perfect incremental daily uptick, despite the vagaries of battle, is the big giveaway — though there are other aspects that make
