National Post (National Edition)
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.