WHY HAMAS CASUALTY DATA CAN’T BE TRUSTED
ANALYSIS POINTS OUT INCONGRUITIES IN DAILY DEATH NUMBERS FROM GAZA
Alot of numbers were thrown around last week as members of the House of Commons debated an NDP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza — even as several of these numbers look increasingly to be totally disconnected from the reality on the ground.
The motion’s sponsor, NDP MP Heather Mcpherson, for example, stated on the floor of the House that “more than 30,000 innocent civilians” had been killed since the onset of fighting between Israel and terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, “including more than 13,000 children.”
Mcpherson failed to mention, of course, that these figures include at least 13,000 Hamas fighters, and were taken verbatim from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry (GMH), an entity whose reporting has been called into question from the earliest days of fighting.
A new analysis, published earlier this month in The Tablet, in fact presents what may well be the strongest statistical evidence to date that the Gaza Health Ministry has been fabricating casualty data to fit Hamas’s preferred narrative.
The analysis, conducted by Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, identifies a number of glaring incongruities in daily casualty data released by the ministry between late October and mid-november of last year.
“Hamas hasn’t provided detailed data since early in the war. And why should it?” Wyner told me via email last Wednesday. “You use what you can.”
The most glaring of these red flags is what Wyner calls in his piece an “almost metronomical linearity,” or maintaining a steady rhythm, in daily reports of the total number of deaths in Gaza, which averaged “270 (deaths) per day plus or minus about 15 per cent” through an entire 16-day sample. For this trendline to be accurate, Israeli forces would have had to kill a near-identical number of Gazans each day for over two straight weeks, notwithstanding the inevitable variations in the day-to-day frequency of bombings and density of sites bombed.
THE QUALIFIER ‘HAMAS-CONTROLLED’ IS NOT ENOUGH.
— MOHAMED
The far more likely case, writes Wyner, is that “the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behaviour of naturally occurring numbers.”
Irregularities in the ministry-reported data also call into question the oft-repeated claim the 70 per cent of the dead in Gaza are women and children; again, Wyner argues, because reported daily death counts increase too consistently to be plausible — this time across age and sex demographics.
“Hamas casualty figures mirror the population figures almost exactly,” Wyner told me (adult males make up about 25 per cent of Gaza’s population). Accounting for the fact that at least a third of the dead are Hamas combatants, “this implies that either all Gaza men are fighters — obviously false — or that many, if not the majority, of the reported child casualties are actually fighters.”
While Hamas has been known to deploy child combatants as young as 12, meaning that the latter possibility can’t be ruled out entirely, Occam’s razor points to the likely case scenario that the ministry, from the conflict’s outset, assigned 70 per cent of total casualties to be women and children, extrapolating this trend over the past five-anda-half months, though some of the children reported killed are likely to have been Hamas fighters.
Wyner conceded to me that, historically, Gaza Health Ministry fatality counts have been reasonably consistent with corresponding figures reported by Israel but also stressed that this has not always been the case. For instance, following 2009’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, Hamas initially claimed it lost only 49 of its fighters, before admitting almost two years later this number was between 600 and 700.
More recently, Hamas reported erroneously that 500 were killed in a blast near Gaza City’s Al-ahli Arab Hospital — a figure that American intelligence estimate as between 100-300. The carnage, it turns out, was not even caused by Israel, but by a misfired Gazan rocket.
Addressing a December study published in the Lancet finding no evidence of inflated mortality reporting over the first month of fighting in Gaza (Oct. 7 to Nov. 10), Wyner noted that the study, which cross-referenced ministry totals with reported staff member deaths from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), “Relied on a crucial and unverified assumption (that) UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population.”
“That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas,” wrote Wyner.
Wyner freely admits that the evidence he’s marshalled does not, in itself, prove that the Hamas-reported numbers are bogus. “For some, no circumstantial evidence will ever be enough,” he told me, adding that he’s holding off submitting his statistical findings for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal for the time being, as he is currently looking for “difficult to find” control data from other wars.
When asked to offer guidance on how public officials and members of the media should preface Gaza Health Ministry-reported data, Wyner says that the qualifier “Hamas-controlled” is “not enough.”
He suggests “they add also that ‘the GHM’S numbers are often contradicted by its own media office … and that it has historically over-counted civilians and undercounted fighters.’ I would also report (them alongside) Israel’s estimates of the number of Hamas fighters killed.”
This may be a mouthful, but it underscores just how irresponsible so many have been in repeating the Hamas-reported death count verbatim. Wyner’s statistical analysis gives us yet another reason to treat this number with skepticism.