1 week ago
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I mean no disrespect to Andrew Fox and the team of researchers behind a report published this week, entitled Questionable Counting: Analysing the death toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, when I say that there is nothing even remotely surprising in it.
Great respect, in fact: retired major Andrew Fox has produced a vital, compelling and necessary report that should be studied by every journalist and commentator writing or speaking about the Gaza war.
The substance of the report – that the Hamas-run health ministry has deliberately misrepresented Gaza casualty figures to portray Israel as having targeted civilian populations – may be old news to anyone who has come to the story without an axe to grind against Israel, but the report’s forensic analysis of every aspect of the figures makes it impossible for anyone to continue citing them in good faith.
But therein lies the problem. Because good faith, and a desire to be objective and report the facts rather than to proselytise for a cause, are in short supply when it comes to coverage of Israel.
More than that: with its use of clear, objective analysis the report exposes how we are in the midst of one of the worst journalistic scandals in memory.
To understand the scale of the scandal we need first to appreciate the scale of Hamas’ deception, and the (at its most innocent) willing credulousness of journalists in reporting Hamas’ lies by citing the Gaza Ministry of Health’s figures (at the moment claiming that 44,000 have been killed by Israel) as if they are somehow independent and reliable when, as JC readers will know, the Ministry of Health is entirely controlled by Hamas.
The report shows that some 17,000 of those who have been killed were, in fact, Hamas fighters. And of the stories examined by the team of researchers behind the report, just 3 per cent referenced the number of combatant deaths. Let that sink in: only 3 per cent of reports mentioned the number of terrorists killed, leaving the impression that Israel has either deliberately or indiscriminately killed 44,000 civilians.
As the report puts it: “The ministry of health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began.”
In a normal year before the war around 5,000 people would die in Gaza from natural causes. Yet in the Ministry of Health’s figures not a single such death has been recorded during the war.
If Hamas is to be believed – as it has by most of the world’s media – not one person has died of natural causes in Gaza over the past year.
A team of international scholars examined 1,378 articles published between February 2024 and May 2024 by major English-language newspapers and media outlets, including the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, Reuters, and Associated Press. They found that 84 per cent of those publications made no distinction between combatant deaths and civilian deaths.
There are two explanations for this. Either the journalists were simply reckless and cavalier as to the truth and swallowed unquestioningly the Hamas-produced fake casualty figures whole; or they were not so much reckless as complicit in reporting wholly unreliable, fake figures because to them Israel is, by definition, monstrous in its behaviour. In other words, these journalists have been acting not as seekers of truth but as propagandists in a cause – that cause being to ensure that Israel is seen as the villain of the piece.
I have been a journalist for more than 30 years. I will let you into a secret: some of my fellow journalists are lazy.
If handed a story, especially a sexy story that will garner attention, they may not bother digging too hard. I am sure much of the reporting of Hamas’ figures is driven not by malice but by this laziness. But much of it, clearly, is indeed driven by malice. You don’t need me to name names. We all see, hear and read examples every day in which the hostility to Israel and the determination to portray Israel as a murderous, villainous state is palpable.
There is, rightly, much focus on the BBC’s appalling coverage – understandable since it is our national broadcaster and we are forced to pay for it under threat of prison. But reporters for other broadcasters have come across as if they are being fed lines to take by a Hamas stooge.
This matters not just because the truth matters, and not just because journalism matters. It matters because this is about life and death, both in Gaza and Israel.
And here, too, as British Jews know all too well – along with the rest of the diaspora – the lies propagated about Israel and Gaza have a direct impact on our lives. In a rational world, this report would transform how Gaza is being reported. Facts would count. But we do not live in that world. And so on it goes…
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